Isaac Young is a fantastic writer and the Last Human is a great work of literature, and I'm happy to see that you've enjoyed it too. Just a very important correction: the audiobook is definitely NOT AI narrated, the narrator is the very talented Son of Sonnet ( https://www.sonofsonnet.com/ ), that also narrated Domes of Calrathia and is now narrating Dead Men Running too. Alongside many other indie books.
>Even the great victory of humanity in the Fifth Aberrant War means nothing to him: his species sacrificed itself to make the Galaxy safe for its uplifted children, aliens who turned on humanity with unbridled ferocity the moment they had the chance, and have since turned the Galaxy into an abomination.
There were predictions. Some people understood the implications.
Edgar Rice Burroughs' Beyond Thirty, in which Europe has a Mutually Destructive peer power war which inflicts enough economic and infrastructural damage that the resulting post-apocalyptic wasteland is vengefully reverse-colonized by the Global South.
Written immediately before the outbreak of WWI.
Also there are tigers because of feral breeding populations escaped from zoos and this is Edgar Rice Burroughs we're talking about, he's gonna write swashbuckling adventure fiction.
>“No one living, you know, knew what war was; no one could imagine, with all these new inventions, what horror war might bring. I believe most people still believed it would be a matter of bright uniforms and shouting charges and triumphs and flags and bands--in a time when half the world drew its food supply from regions ten thousand miles away--”
Point is, the futurist authors were predicting great power wars were a suicidally bad idea long before they got proven right.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I kinda disagree with JC's take on colonialism, since I think the effects there were genuinely mixed and varied enormously from region to region (I think it was probably a net negative for China, for example, and the Irish aren't exactly steeped in gratitude for their experiences.)
It's true that western science and technology, particularly when it comes to medicine and agriculture, has saved/enabled literally billions of lives in the global south, but most of those technologies were not developed or deployed for altruistic reasons (except maybe for Norman Borlaug.) On paper economic relations with the global south are actually still net extractive, if you tot up the effects of capital flight and debt repayments and subtract the effects of aid transfers and remittances, although the benefits of global trade access (primarily enabled by the GAE) outweigh this substantially.
What an excellent review. I will definitely take a look.
Are you familiar with Cordwainer Smith? I think he was the first writer to propose uplifted animals. Long ago. I forget the term he uses. In Smith there is also the strong sense that the uplifted animals are an analogy for something much closer to home.
Yep. By the same team that did Mass Effect. It looks pretty good, though I've got too old for games that large. Loved Mass Effect back in the day though.
This sounds great. I agree about not reading books on screens. I just can’t do it. I bought the Amazon paperback. No idea when I’ll get to it, but I want to have this available when the opportunity arises!
Your description reminded me of some older science fiction, the impoverish background and adoption by a crew of sounds like the beginning of Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy. The business of uplifted animal species probably originated with Cordwainer Smith’s stories about underpeople.
The constant reviving and reworking of themes in science fiction is characteristic of genre writing, but I think it’s a strength rather than a weakness. We see a new author playing the same themes but adding his own interpretation. The entire body of literature develops over time.
I cannot emphasize enough how good this series has been. The symbolism and lore crafting Isaac Young has gotten up to is truly remarkable, especially in a book as fast paced and attention grabbing as this one. Top tier. Isaac Young is going to go down in history as one of the greatest, in my opinion.
I had given up on modern fiction since quality & interest were washed away in the deluge of wokeness. But I took your suggestion on reading "Once Upon A Time in Argentina", and loved it. I trust your judgement and will buy "The Last Human".
Incidentally, the "corpse armor" reminds me of a worthwhile 2021 Chinese movie, "A Writer's Odyssey" in which a key part is played by a sentient (and violent) suit of body armor which imposes itself on the writer's character. The story is about a father's long search for his abducted young daughter, told partly in real life and partly through a fantasy novel being written by an author whose life becomes intertwined with the father's.
What always shocks me most about your reviews is finding out how expansive the community of quality fiction writers is here on Substack. You’d just never know it from the algo. Thanks for spreading the good word.
I’ve been in a book hangover since I finished Once upon a time in Argentina. I’ll get right on this.
I want to add that the “galactic emperor responsible for the deaths of billions writing the story as his memoirs” has been done a few times before. Long ago by Gene Wolfe in book of the new Sun, and more recently by Christopher Rucco in Sun Eater.
Haven't read it (I simply cannot read fiction on a screen for some silly reason) but this review reminded me of the setting in Traveller (the p&p rpg that's almost 50 years old by now), although Young's galaxy is a bleaker place than the Third Imperium.
Since I cannot comment on Young's novel, which I am sure is a quality work given your review, I'll peel off on a tangent:
---
"The most extreme example of this is Warhammer 40k, in which the lore far eclipses the importance of any given story that has been told within the setting."
Games Workshop did something very clever and nifty, right out of the gate when they had deals with writers and musicians (1980s, can you believe it!):
Anything and everything officially published by them (and by the Black Library and by any franchisees making games for them) is "canon".
[Oh, how I detest that that term made its way into discussions about fiction, games, art! It has absolutely no place in any serious talk about such things but has become a commonplace *thing* in the vulgar vernacular about works of fiction - possibly because it is the only way autistics and those borderline autistic can understand conflicting sources and paradox.]
Anyway, ranting aside - anything published counts, was a very clever way of quieting neckbeards, anoraks, windowlickers and gluesniffers, and is a key point in letting the setting maintain its unique blend of humour and seriousness, drama and patheticism, and plain bonkers weirdness.
PS: Loved the very well-deserved jab at Robert Jordan and RRMartin; esp. the latter. His work of attempted fantasy put me to sleep after the first fifty pages due how torpid his style is. Perhaps the people online, like Vara Dark, who speculate that he had a ghostwriter helping him or even writing for him, who passed away during Covid, has some kernel of truth to them?
I've actually never read either Jordan or Martin. Took one look at the massive unfinished fantasy epics and noped out before I even started. In Jordan's case the middle novels are reputedly mostly filler. In Martin's case he just never finished them. You could really see the drop in writing quality in Game of Thrones once they ran out of novels to adapt, too.
Jordan had, from what I heard (unsourced rumours from over a decade ago) a plot that would have covered two, maybe three, volumes of 300-400 pages each, but the success made the publisher prod him into stretch it for as much as he could to milk&bilk the nerds reading it.
From a games master-pov WoT offers a lot of good stuff, but as entertainment it is lacking. About 75% of the actual text is repetition and pure filler.
As for GoT I annoyed the merry Hell out of a friend who rates it higher than LotR (obvious heresy!) by asking what the foundation for that silly ice-wall is, since even an ice-wall made by magic exerts pressure on the ground beneath it. A shit-ton of pressure: Sweden rises 1-3cm higher per year on average and has been doing so since the ice sheet melted some 10 000 years ago or so. So a humungous ice-wall (700' tall and wide enough to not fall over) that's been standing for 8 000 years would have sunk into the ground, even if the ground was bedrock.
And peeking at the wiki, the wall is hundreds of miles long and when (1) single breach is opened by magic, and undead start pouring through, the entire wall is abandoned because it now serves no purpose.
Martin, in my opinion, is a hack.
Traveller came out in 1977 and I think the first edition was indeed called GURPS Traveller. It is quite possible the first sci-fi rpg, and one with a very interesting solution to the problems relating to ftl travel & comms.
Yes, I'd heard the same thing about publisher pressure on Jordan. The tragedy is that he then died before finishing. I blame the publisher for that.
Westeros makes no sense at all. How do the seasons work? He never says or even gives a clue. How are people able to cross this world so quickly? Sometimes it is continents, other times it seems the whole world is no bigger than Belgium.
And Martin had the chutzpah to ask about Aragorn's tax policy.
The correct come-back to Marin's impotent unmanly bleating about the tax-policy of king Elessar is to bring up The Shire.
They have roads, sheriffs, order, and no real poverty to speak of, yet they have no real government beyond the elected Elder and his office is 99% symbolic anyway.
And no taxes - but as evidenced by the attention paid to the importance of testaments, they do have an extensive system for property law.
In fact, The Shire is quite likely a functioning fictional example of what a libertarian society requires.
Though explaining that to Martin is likely to giv him an ulcer of the brain.
The Shire only exists because the Dunedain and Eldar patrol the surrounding frontiers and slay the monsters that would otherwise ravage the territory, more-or-less entirely from the goodness of their hearts and without expecting any particular tribute from the hobbits, even for the basic maintenance of their equipment and outposts.
If you want to argue that Tolkien was depicting an idealised example of Kingly chivalry and that realism wasn't the point to the narrative, fine, but this is pretty clearly not how a realistic fictional monarchy could or would sustainably run itself.
That was not pertinent to the point of The Shire being a functional society sans taxation - RRM's snide remark about "What's Aragorn's tax policy?" was the starting point.
Not that peace exists in the center because others stand guard on the borders, doing violence to prospective ravagers and interlopers. That point is made several times in LotR.
In fairness, single-layer walls are a common strategy throughout history. There's nothing weird about a wall that fails when breached at one place, and it never caused me any suspension of disbelief problems.
Downward pressure on the ground, come now. The wall is magical. It keeps out zombies. WHY would anyone care about ground pressure in a story like that?
An important rule of storytelling is you set out any implausible or unrealistic elements up front, like in the first five minutes. At the start of a story people are willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoyment and you can craft a fantasy or sci-fi world in that time. But once the story really gets going, you're done: the world has to be coherent and make sense from that point on.
Martin does this correctly. The wall and the zombies are the first thing we see in Game of Thrones (I've not read the books but assume it's the same). We accept a giant magical ice wall and undead ice zombies because that's telling us what sort of story this is going to be.
So the wall is fine. It's a magical wall. It magically doesn't exert ground pressure. That's A-OK by me.
The problems really start later on when time and space start collapsing because by then the scale and transport tech of Westeros are long since established and the story needs to be consistent with that. There is no magic travel tech in GoT, just writing that needs people to be certain places at certain times. That sort of problem is hard to avoid as a writer, but does kick people out of the story.
I think people in the DR sphere are way too hard on ASOIAF. The plot threads start to meander too much to be tied up neatly in the later books but there's a lot of excellent, poignant writing and well-rounded characters, particularly in the early installments. I didn't find the original GoT to be torpid at all.
(I don't know why you're bring up the Ice Wall's effect on subsidence as particularly jarring, since the whole thing would obviously melt if normal physics applied? It's magic.)
RRM's writing puts me to sleep, that's not even hyperbole on my part - I find his writing tedious, laborious and outright boring.
And "it's magic" only takes you so far as a storyteller. There's a line between Vingilot being able to fly (and we are told why) and an ice wall not metling because "it's magic" and RRM is consistently on the wrong side.
Or "somehow, Palpatine returned" to use a more contemporary example of where "it's magic" easily leads to. As mentioned, I have a friend who swears by ASoiaF et c - to him there are no problems with the wall to pick one example. To me, it's akin to someone loading an AK-47 with a AAA-battery and having bullets come out.
To fix the wall, you could have included some ritual that keeps the magic going or something making its creation a one-off (spending a unique and finite resource works fine), or even including something about the magic starting to wear off, with slow melting and settling starting to set in.
That's how easy it is for a storytelller to dodge "it's magic", by having the magic function within the internal logic of the story/setting itself.
I think the usual complaints with "it's magic" revolve more around the general weakness of any deus-ex-machina contrivance halfway through the story. The Wall is introduced very early in the series and taken as the product of a bygone and far more overtly magical age, so I don't think it has that specific problem.
Westeros has other problems as a setting- medieval-level technological stasis for unrealistic timeframes with no clear explanation, for example, which is common to a lot of other bargain-bin fantasy settings- but the Wall never really stuck out to me as especially contrived.
The book you wrote this article abou has really intrigued me. I'll definitely check it out. Do you have any other recommendations, I've really been into sci Fi latey.
Isaac Young is a fantastic writer and the Last Human is a great work of literature, and I'm happy to see that you've enjoyed it too. Just a very important correction: the audiobook is definitely NOT AI narrated, the narrator is the very talented Son of Sonnet ( https://www.sonofsonnet.com/ ), that also narrated Domes of Calrathia and is now narrating Dead Men Running too. Alongside many other indie books.
Oh! Thanks for catching that
>Even the great victory of humanity in the Fifth Aberrant War means nothing to him: his species sacrificed itself to make the Galaxy safe for its uplifted children, aliens who turned on humanity with unbridled ferocity the moment they had the chance, and have since turned the Galaxy into an abomination.
There were predictions. Some people understood the implications.
Edgar Rice Burroughs' Beyond Thirty, in which Europe has a Mutually Destructive peer power war which inflicts enough economic and infrastructural damage that the resulting post-apocalyptic wasteland is vengefully reverse-colonized by the Global South.
Written immediately before the outbreak of WWI.
Also there are tigers because of feral breeding populations escaped from zoos and this is Edgar Rice Burroughs we're talking about, he's gonna write swashbuckling adventure fiction.
https://x.com/ChristianHeiens/status/2026405000193146917
I've heard of that book, possibly via the very tweet you posted. Prescient stuff.
Also H G Wells.
https://www.online-literature.com/browse/6/
>“No one living, you know, knew what war was; no one could imagine, with all these new inventions, what horror war might bring. I believe most people still believed it would be a matter of bright uniforms and shouting charges and triumphs and flags and bands--in a time when half the world drew its food supply from regions ten thousand miles away--”
Point is, the futurist authors were predicting great power wars were a suicidally bad idea long before they got proven right.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I kinda disagree with JC's take on colonialism, since I think the effects there were genuinely mixed and varied enormously from region to region (I think it was probably a net negative for China, for example, and the Irish aren't exactly steeped in gratitude for their experiences.)
It's true that western science and technology, particularly when it comes to medicine and agriculture, has saved/enabled literally billions of lives in the global south, but most of those technologies were not developed or deployed for altruistic reasons (except maybe for Norman Borlaug.) On paper economic relations with the global south are actually still net extractive, if you tot up the effects of capital flight and debt repayments and subtract the effects of aid transfers and remittances, although the benefits of global trade access (primarily enabled by the GAE) outweigh this substantially.
What an excellent review. I will definitely take a look.
Are you familiar with Cordwainer Smith? I think he was the first writer to propose uplifted animals. Long ago. I forget the term he uses. In Smith there is also the strong sense that the uplifted animals are an analogy for something much closer to home.
I actually have never read Cordwainer Smith. Contarini mentioned him as well.
Definitely worth a read. He is creative and poetic and quite unlike any other author.
Ah he called them the Underpeople.
The concept is also found in the upcoming Exodus video game, based on books by Peter Hamilton.
Oh, a game based on a Hamilton novel?
Yep. By the same team that did Mass Effect. It looks pretty good, though I've got too old for games that large. Loved Mass Effect back in the day though.
Story trailer, awakened bears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJHC5JR8Rag
Ravens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5hS5zPJUp4&list=PLK9OQ-ELDh8M&index=3
Gameplay trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmJxSKn47EE
That looks great!
This sounds great. I agree about not reading books on screens. I just can’t do it. I bought the Amazon paperback. No idea when I’ll get to it, but I want to have this available when the opportunity arises!
Your description reminded me of some older science fiction, the impoverish background and adoption by a crew of sounds like the beginning of Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy. The business of uplifted animal species probably originated with Cordwainer Smith’s stories about underpeople.
The constant reviving and reworking of themes in science fiction is characteristic of genre writing, but I think it’s a strength rather than a weakness. We see a new author playing the same themes but adding his own interpretation. The entire body of literature develops over time.
There's a very old mythic element to the prince raised in poverty theme. As with the wild orphan raised by wolves.
I cannot emphasize enough how good this series has been. The symbolism and lore crafting Isaac Young has gotten up to is truly remarkable, especially in a book as fast paced and attention grabbing as this one. Top tier. Isaac Young is going to go down in history as one of the greatest, in my opinion.
Compelling premise and I trust your judgment on its quality. My copy is on the way
Excellent.
I had given up on modern fiction since quality & interest were washed away in the deluge of wokeness. But I took your suggestion on reading "Once Upon A Time in Argentina", and loved it. I trust your judgement and will buy "The Last Human".
Incidentally, the "corpse armor" reminds me of a worthwhile 2021 Chinese movie, "A Writer's Odyssey" in which a key part is played by a sentient (and violent) suit of body armor which imposes itself on the writer's character. The story is about a father's long search for his abducted young daughter, told partly in real life and partly through a fantasy novel being written by an author whose life becomes intertwined with the father's.
Glad you enjoyed that, and I hope your trust is validated in this case.
What always shocks me most about your reviews is finding out how expansive the community of quality fiction writers is here on Substack. You’d just never know it from the algo. Thanks for spreading the good word.
I’ve been in a book hangover since I finished Once upon a time in Argentina. I’ll get right on this.
There's a lot of talent out there for sure.
I read ‘The Mastrioshka Divide’ and absolutely loved it. I can’t wait until he writes a sequel. I need to know what Samir and Erika get up to.
I've got that, but still haven't read it. On the list.
Young needs to lock in and finish his series lol.
The antagonist is literally a female statistician. I have seen the enemy and it is me.
Sounds very interesting, you sold me on it.
I want to add that the “galactic emperor responsible for the deaths of billions writing the story as his memoirs” has been done a few times before. Long ago by Gene Wolfe in book of the new Sun, and more recently by Christopher Rucco in Sun Eater.
Yes, there's a clear influence from Wolfe, though actually it wasn't clear to me from BotNS that Severian was responsible for mass butchery.
Haven't read it (I simply cannot read fiction on a screen for some silly reason) but this review reminded me of the setting in Traveller (the p&p rpg that's almost 50 years old by now), although Young's galaxy is a bleaker place than the Third Imperium.
Since I cannot comment on Young's novel, which I am sure is a quality work given your review, I'll peel off on a tangent:
---
"The most extreme example of this is Warhammer 40k, in which the lore far eclipses the importance of any given story that has been told within the setting."
Games Workshop did something very clever and nifty, right out of the gate when they had deals with writers and musicians (1980s, can you believe it!):
Anything and everything officially published by them (and by the Black Library and by any franchisees making games for them) is "canon".
[Oh, how I detest that that term made its way into discussions about fiction, games, art! It has absolutely no place in any serious talk about such things but has become a commonplace *thing* in the vulgar vernacular about works of fiction - possibly because it is the only way autistics and those borderline autistic can understand conflicting sources and paradox.]
Anyway, ranting aside - anything published counts, was a very clever way of quieting neckbeards, anoraks, windowlickers and gluesniffers, and is a key point in letting the setting maintain its unique blend of humour and seriousness, drama and patheticism, and plain bonkers weirdness.
PS: Loved the very well-deserved jab at Robert Jordan and RRMartin; esp. the latter. His work of attempted fantasy put me to sleep after the first fifty pages due how torpid his style is. Perhaps the people online, like Vara Dark, who speculate that he had a ghostwriter helping him or even writing for him, who passed away during Covid, has some kernel of truth to them?
I've actually never read either Jordan or Martin. Took one look at the massive unfinished fantasy epics and noped out before I even started. In Jordan's case the middle novels are reputedly mostly filler. In Martin's case he just never finished them. You could really see the drop in writing quality in Game of Thrones once they ran out of novels to adapt, too.
Never played Traveller. That's a GURPS game, no?
Jordan had, from what I heard (unsourced rumours from over a decade ago) a plot that would have covered two, maybe three, volumes of 300-400 pages each, but the success made the publisher prod him into stretch it for as much as he could to milk&bilk the nerds reading it.
From a games master-pov WoT offers a lot of good stuff, but as entertainment it is lacking. About 75% of the actual text is repetition and pure filler.
As for GoT I annoyed the merry Hell out of a friend who rates it higher than LotR (obvious heresy!) by asking what the foundation for that silly ice-wall is, since even an ice-wall made by magic exerts pressure on the ground beneath it. A shit-ton of pressure: Sweden rises 1-3cm higher per year on average and has been doing so since the ice sheet melted some 10 000 years ago or so. So a humungous ice-wall (700' tall and wide enough to not fall over) that's been standing for 8 000 years would have sunk into the ground, even if the ground was bedrock.
And peeking at the wiki, the wall is hundreds of miles long and when (1) single breach is opened by magic, and undead start pouring through, the entire wall is abandoned because it now serves no purpose.
Martin, in my opinion, is a hack.
Traveller came out in 1977 and I think the first edition was indeed called GURPS Traveller. It is quite possible the first sci-fi rpg, and one with a very interesting solution to the problems relating to ftl travel & comms.
Yes, I'd heard the same thing about publisher pressure on Jordan. The tragedy is that he then died before finishing. I blame the publisher for that.
Westeros makes no sense at all. How do the seasons work? He never says or even gives a clue. How are people able to cross this world so quickly? Sometimes it is continents, other times it seems the whole world is no bigger than Belgium.
And Martin had the chutzpah to ask about Aragorn's tax policy.
The correct come-back to Marin's impotent unmanly bleating about the tax-policy of king Elessar is to bring up The Shire.
They have roads, sheriffs, order, and no real poverty to speak of, yet they have no real government beyond the elected Elder and his office is 99% symbolic anyway.
And no taxes - but as evidenced by the attention paid to the importance of testaments, they do have an extensive system for property law.
In fact, The Shire is quite likely a functioning fictional example of what a libertarian society requires.
Though explaining that to Martin is likely to giv him an ulcer of the brain.
And this is why Tolkien described himself as an Anarcho-Monarchist.
The Shire only exists because the Dunedain and Eldar patrol the surrounding frontiers and slay the monsters that would otherwise ravage the territory, more-or-less entirely from the goodness of their hearts and without expecting any particular tribute from the hobbits, even for the basic maintenance of their equipment and outposts.
If you want to argue that Tolkien was depicting an idealised example of Kingly chivalry and that realism wasn't the point to the narrative, fine, but this is pretty clearly not how a realistic fictional monarchy could or would sustainably run itself.
That was not pertinent to the point of The Shire being a functional society sans taxation - RRM's snide remark about "What's Aragorn's tax policy?" was the starting point.
Not that peace exists in the center because others stand guard on the borders, doing violence to prospective ravagers and interlopers. That point is made several times in LotR.
In fairness, single-layer walls are a common strategy throughout history. There's nothing weird about a wall that fails when breached at one place, and it never caused me any suspension of disbelief problems.
Downward pressure on the ground, come now. The wall is magical. It keeps out zombies. WHY would anyone care about ground pressure in a story like that?
Ground pressure makes the ground sink, which lowers the wall over time, making it easier to bypass.
An important rule of storytelling is you set out any implausible or unrealistic elements up front, like in the first five minutes. At the start of a story people are willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoyment and you can craft a fantasy or sci-fi world in that time. But once the story really gets going, you're done: the world has to be coherent and make sense from that point on.
Martin does this correctly. The wall and the zombies are the first thing we see in Game of Thrones (I've not read the books but assume it's the same). We accept a giant magical ice wall and undead ice zombies because that's telling us what sort of story this is going to be.
So the wall is fine. It's a magical wall. It magically doesn't exert ground pressure. That's A-OK by me.
The problems really start later on when time and space start collapsing because by then the scale and transport tech of Westeros are long since established and the story needs to be consistent with that. There is no magic travel tech in GoT, just writing that needs people to be certain places at certain times. That sort of problem is hard to avoid as a writer, but does kick people out of the story.
"You can accept a magical ice wall and seasons of random duration, but balk at the collapse of time and space and the presence of a Honda Civic."
I think Martin's thing is that he's just making it up and it's all in his head so who cares.
I think people in the DR sphere are way too hard on ASOIAF. The plot threads start to meander too much to be tied up neatly in the later books but there's a lot of excellent, poignant writing and well-rounded characters, particularly in the early installments. I didn't find the original GoT to be torpid at all.
(I don't know why you're bring up the Ice Wall's effect on subsidence as particularly jarring, since the whole thing would obviously melt if normal physics applied? It's magic.)
I don't know what "DR sphere" refers to.
RRM's writing puts me to sleep, that's not even hyperbole on my part - I find his writing tedious, laborious and outright boring.
And "it's magic" only takes you so far as a storyteller. There's a line between Vingilot being able to fly (and we are told why) and an ice wall not metling because "it's magic" and RRM is consistently on the wrong side.
Or "somehow, Palpatine returned" to use a more contemporary example of where "it's magic" easily leads to. As mentioned, I have a friend who swears by ASoiaF et c - to him there are no problems with the wall to pick one example. To me, it's akin to someone loading an AK-47 with a AAA-battery and having bullets come out.
To fix the wall, you could have included some ritual that keeps the magic going or something making its creation a one-off (spending a unique and finite resource works fine), or even including something about the magic starting to wear off, with slow melting and settling starting to set in.
That's how easy it is for a storytelller to dodge "it's magic", by having the magic function within the internal logic of the story/setting itself.
> "I don't know what "DR sphere" refers to"
Dissident Right.
I think the usual complaints with "it's magic" revolve more around the general weakness of any deus-ex-machina contrivance halfway through the story. The Wall is introduced very early in the series and taken as the product of a bygone and far more overtly magical age, so I don't think it has that specific problem.
Westeros has other problems as a setting- medieval-level technological stasis for unrealistic timeframes with no clear explanation, for example, which is common to a lot of other bargain-bin fantasy settings- but the Wall never really stuck out to me as especially contrived.
The voice of the audio book isn’t AI. It’s a payed voice actor.
Yes, I just deleted that part!
“Paid”. Not payed. I don’t know when people stopped caring about using the proper word for “paid”, but it’s a pet peeve of mine now.
The end of our era is closer than anyone dares to imagine.
The machine will stop.
Thanks for the recommendation. Just ordered it.
The book you wrote this article abou has really intrigued me. I'll definitely check it out. Do you have any other recommendations, I've really been into sci Fi latey.
Out of curiosity was some of the inspiration for the art design taken from a video game named Warframe? Seeing a lot of overlap
Couldn't tell you.