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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

It's not a novel in any sort of modern sense. The different sections are barely even stories themselves, just dry descriptions of imagined worlds.

It's an interesting book for sure.

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Honestly, that sounds great to me. I often feel as though a lot of SF forces some sort of human-interest piece into what the author really wants to do, which is world building. Skipping the love story sounds appealing, like skipping the opening vinette that every journalist thinks is necessary before daring to mention a statistic.

I collect role-playing campaign settings for this very reason. I love just reading through long geographies of made up worlds. Pouring over the maps. Imagining the geopolitical landscapes or how the alternative histories or technologies might function in that world.

I don't actually play role-playing games at all anymore. But it's an entire genre of work (made up geographies, bestiaries, etc.) that isn't really served outside of games very much.

There's a niche for a completely new type of fiction on the Internet. Creating a world through a wiki style website. Readers explore by searching for phrases or following hyperlinks instead of going linearly from start to beginning. I've spent hours at a time reading things like the star wars wiki, Depp diving to solve my own questions like "where did the sith originally come from?" or "can you have a black lightsaber?"

For me, the SCP Foundation (http://www.scp-wiki.net) gives that kind of feel, with different cases linking to one another. (SCP Foundation is a collective storytelling wiki about an organization that deals with the strange, mysterious, and horrifying.)

One of the hallmarks of science fiction is building metaphors about the human condition and cultural phenomena in the world that the author creates.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244017723690 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/215824401772369... https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/1339122 https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss1/5/

That doesn't make it a good idea.

It's not a lot of material, check it out.

Characters add quite a bit to world building though.

"a lot of SF forces some sort of human-interest piece into what the author really wants to do"

I think many authors want the world to serve the perspectives they want to communicate and examine, so if it doesn't work, they just aren't accomplishing that.

You might like "The Wandering Earth" by Cixin Liu. Very little "story", but a fast paced, coherent sci-fi trip!

Agree. It’s all telling, no showing, which violates a basic rule of good fiction writing. There’s close to zero dialogue. No characters or their development. So applying the expectations of a traditional novel will leave a reader very dissatisfied. But it’s compelling. One of my favorite books (whether we’re calling it a novel or not).

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