Worth the Candle

Worth the Candle is another loooong webfic, adjacent to several rationalist stories, but much less in-your-face about it.

It chronicles the main character, a teenage GM whose best friend has just died, thrust into a secondary world that seems inspired by a giant mash-up of all his different roleplaying campaigns.

It covers the basic ground of levelling up and dealing with immediate quests in a fun way, but I love the way the various characters grow and become much more complicated.

It wins the Anton Macgyver award for the "most surprisingly beneficial potential use of an apparently useless special power" :)

And the as-yet-unnamed award for portraying a realistic, relevant therapy session, not just someone shouting at the protagonist what's obvious they're fucking up but it was glossed over, but verbalising the realistic and difficult details of the relationship between the main character and the character he's dating, which should have been obvious but weren't, and don't immediately go to "fixed" or "fixed, backsliding, fixed, backsliding", but are clear they're things they can work on, but it will be difficult.

Thanks to DRM for making me aware of it.

Seveneves

So. Neal Stephenson's recent-ish doorstop about the moon blowing up and the earth becoming uninhabitable, and humanity jump-starting a space settlement to continue the race until the earth's surface recovers. He did write short books once, but not for decades now IIRC :)

The near-future space stuff is all interesting. Sometimes it feels a bit on-the-nose, "I learned about this interesting thing, now I'll force it into my book", but as a look at what humanity could potentially build if countries threw ALL their resources at it, and what an ongoing settlement in space might realistically look like, it's very interesting.

The politics references are a bit tedious. Both the "oh look, geeks resent politics, yes, politics even of a few hundred people is a giant sewer" is probably... plausible, but feels over-done. And the references to earth politics, we get another big dump of libertarians-aren't-exactly-right-but-don't-we-empathise-with-them-lots, which I sympathise with a little bit, but am also massively critical of. And the female US president is an interesting character, and god knows I don't expect us presidents to automatically be nice people, but her naked ambition and cynical manipulation feel like they came out as criticism of a female president *at all*.

He does successfully introduce many female characters -- I haven't counted, but the titular Seven Eves are seven of the most major characters, who all happen to be female.

The post-timeskip "what space settlements look like after 5000 years" was interesting, but felt much less likely. And a bunch of other stuff that happened felt MUCH less likely.

Can you really produce a closed underground system recycling oxygen and carbon dioxide, growing plants under electric lights, all powered solely by geothermal power?

I think epigenetics means "magic ways experiences an organism has as an adult can affect what their children inherit, i.e. basically all hereditary biology that's additional to DNA". But Neal Stephenson seems to think it means "magic ways an organism can suddenly change as an adult and become a significantly different organism". Is that right??

I'm annoyed by, AFTER the seven eves, we revert to current-stereotypical-gender-roles at least somewhat. I do suspect there are SOME inbuilt reasons for that. But after that cultural bottleneck, you didn't think it might be interesting if we DIDN'T have those assumptions?

And I'm annoyed by "oh no, the last seven members of the human race disagree what children to engineer -- lets all just do our own thing and create seven eternally distinct tribes." They couldn't find ANY more compromise than that? Stuck in a small habitat, all the different offspring didn't immediately interbreed?