jansenist_drugstore posted:

how about heretic crew

"that campanella, what a fighter..." - real quote by my high school history teacher (who is also cathleft)

ialdabaoth posted:

i just started to listen to an audiobook of the three-body problem courtesy of a v kind poster, and i already feel less like driving into a ditch

It’s interesting if you ignore the Cultural Revolution parts

Lysenko posted:

this is the real page 420 shit i signed up for

Lysenko posted:

They remember last August's riot as an outburst, a seizure. Yet what, from the realistic viewpoint of Watts, was so abnormal? "Man's got his foot on your neck," said one guy who was there, "sooner or later you going to stop asking him to take it off." The violence it took to get that foot to ease up even the little it did was no surprise. Many had predicted it. Once it got going, its basic objective--to beat the Black and White police--seemed a reasonable one, and was gained the minute The Man had to send troops in. Everybody seems to have known it. There is hardly a person in watts now who finds it painful to talk about, or who regrets that it happened--unless he lost somebody.

But in the white culture outside, in that creepy world full of pre-cardiac Mustang drivers who scream insults at one another only when the windows are up; of large corporations where Niceguymanship is the standing order regardless of whose executive back one may be endeavoring to stab; of an enormous priest caste of shrinks who counsel moderation and compromise as the answer to all forms of hassle; among so much well-behaved unreality, it is next to impossible to understand how Watts may truly feel about violence. In terms of strict reality, violence may be a means to getting money, for example, no more dishonest than collecting exorbitant carrying charges from a customer on relief, as white merchants here still do. Far from a sickness, violence may be an attempt to communicate, or to be who you really are.

thirdplace posted:

dimashq posted:

ialdabaoth posted:

i just started to listen to an audiobook of the three-body problem courtesy of a v kind poster, and i already feel less like driving into a ditch

It’s interesting if you ignore the Cultural Revolution parts

this is a spoiler for the entire damn trilogy but

Spoiler!

for all the gory detail of the CR parts, the way it ultimately turns out is that a character identified as a dangerous counter-revolutionary during the CR subsequently chose to ally herself with a hostile extraterrestrial power in a fit of ignorant pique, thereby setting into motion a chain of events that would cause humanity to be enslaved and the solar system pretty much completely annihilated--thus proving the Red Guards to have been right all along

Oh that’s right haha, that became apparent by the end of the first novel and it made me mad lol

I remember scavenging on the beach of a sludgy river called the Tajo Luz, me and my cousins. My brother was too young, still slung across my mother’s back. She walked ahead of us, scraping at the beach with a homemade rake, uncovering bits of discarded junk.

Farther up the beach, where the sand turned to scrub, a flash of movement caught my eye. I climbed the shallow dunes. Nestled at the top was a twisted mat of plastic ties, broken twigs, aluminum shavings, and synthetic fibers. A baby pigeon rested there, half in and half out of the nest. One wing lay outstretched, flapping uselessly. I took the poor little creature into my hands.

“It’s all right,” I murmured. I ran my finger over its quivering head. Its heart fluttered against my palm.

I slid down the dune and ran to catch up with my mother. I was barefoot, but the rough ruins of the beach hardly bothered me anymore. My feet were dirty, calloused things, hunks of sturdy meat.

“Mama!” I called. She turned, her dark hair blowing back over her shoulder. The sun rose behind her, thick and runny as fresh egg yolk.

“Mama,” I said, holding up the injured bird. “It’s hurt. Can we help it?”

“Let’s get that home,” she said, and she smoothed the hair from my face. It reminded me of how I had stroked the bird’s tiny head.

I beamed at her.

We took the baby bird home along with six mollusks, some copper wire, and a meter-long metal hunk that bore the faded gray circles of the NorRus logo.

I slept that night next to the baby bird. In the morning, my mother boiled off the bird’s feathers and cooked it whole. I’d like to tell you I had no stomach for it. But if you think for a minute I didn’t want to shove that weary bird down my gullet despite having sung it to sleep the night before, then you have never been hungry.

My mother ate the bird herself, to ensure she made enough milk for my brother. I sat across from her on the floor and watched her consume the entire fledgling in three crunchy bites.

I didn’t cry until she left to greet my father, just home from an expedition to the dumps of medical waste outside the nearby military training academy. Until Teni needed more pilots for the war with Mars, years later, we were nobodies. Ghouls. Just like everyone else there.

I clutched my knees to my chest and cried because I was so hungry. I cried because I wanted the pain to end.

thirdplace posted:

also a couple months back I recommended The Stars Are Legion by K Hurley because it was really good, even if none of you so much as upvoted me for it because you are all swine, ignorant of the pearls I cast upon you.

i did not like the title but now i am reading it and it's good.

red_dread posted:

chemically pure socialism