Stats for nerds
0recommend
2mentions
2people
2023–2025years
50% neutral50% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- My biggest issue with most scifi now-a-days is it ignores the acceleration of tech. Of course there's "Accelerando" and "Marooned in Realtime" but lots of scifi has "race/society X has been doing Y for 1000s of years" and now I immediately tune out because no society is going to remain static enough to do Y for thousands of years unless there is some premise in the book preventing anyone from inventing anything new.
"Tales of Alvin Maker" had that. "Dune" did too but I didn't buy Dune's excuse because militaries always want new tech.
This is also one of the many reasons why I can't buy into Star Wars anymore because a society that can make droids can make droids that make droids which means they have the means make everything cheap and abundant. That they don't is just bad writing. The writers didn't think through the implications of their world building. Of course I get that Star Wars isn't hard sci-fi. It's fantasy sci-fi, hence we have droids that scream and get tortured ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On the other hand, my first ride in a Waymo reminded me of the optimisim I used to feel about the future like when the Jetsons promised us moving sidewalks, flying cars, robot maids, etc..
- > Black American slaves did not earn wages.
Not usually, no.
>Their sentence was indefinite.
Or even infinite, as far as they were concerned.
>As soon as they stopped working, they were executed.
Whoa, hang on. I'm not a slavery apologist, but... are you sure? As in, routinely, not as a bizarre, rare event? Not events like lynchings, but just "well Old Tom here ain't producing anymore, time to string him up"?
I have read some of the work of actual slavery apologists, and one of the points often made is that laws prohibiting manumission of slaves were originally written in response to owners who would free their slaves when they were too old to do the work - and promptly dump them out with no money, no education, no place to live, and no skills beyond basic agricultural labor, to die. I could imagine that was an issue.
The wrongness of slavery is often talked about strictly in terms out of Uncle Tom's Cabin, though a point often made in early abolitionism was that the creation of an entire inheritable status of sub-citizens was evil in itself, regardless of how well or poorly the sub-citizens were treated. Also treated interestingly in Orson Scott Card's Tales of Alvin Maker (which are not great books, but sure do give you some insight into Card's Mormonism), where the South remained royalist in the American Revolution. It certainly could have, if George III had better positioned his treatment of the colonies. The basic organization of the early South as an agricultural region centered on individual properties owned by some noble (who might or might not live there) and organized like medieval village life. Roads to get to neighbors were relatively unimportant, as water transport was the norm for both people and cargo. The entire coastal and tidewater area from the Sea Islands of Georgia to the Chesapeake worked like that, at least until colonists started trying to push past the limit of navigation (which made large plantations more difficult until you got south of the foothills of the Appalachians).
