25 years ago it was fun and cool to write SF novels about this kind of stuff.
It is much less cool that crackbrained capitalists are using these ideas to drive a market frenzy and corresponding push for regulatory legislation based on libertarian misconceptions about human well-being and how to protect it. (Because libertarians are wrong about, well, pretty much everything.)
@cstross
Don't build the Torment Nexus...
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]
John Rogers
@wa7iut @cstross
For me it was a steady diet of Perry Rhodan and other SciFi. It helps that I had a TV and could catch the original German airing of TNG.
I'm a simple girl. I want to go where noone has gone before and have gigantic space battles with tens of thousands of ships shooting fusion bombs at each other that are individually rated in the thousands of gigatonnes... 
You probably read these but the David Weber "Mutineer's Moon" series checks the following boxes for my mindless enjoyment of "gratuitous space battles in novels"
Great Literature [ ]
Giant Space battles with thousands of ships and multi-gigaton yield anti-matter warheads [ x ]
(Optional) Deeply questionable authoritarian/imperial politics [ x ]
Feel the need for a spreadsheet to track how many planetary accretion disks worth of material got blown up in any particular chapter [ x ]
@wa7iut
I remember standing in line before the polls had opened in southern California in a majority-Latino area (Escondido) behind a well dressed young white guy (he looked like a door-to-door missionary Mormon) in the 2016 presidential election. I chatted with him and he turned out to be a hardcore Ayn Rand devotee, which at the time really confused me. Considering everything that happened since then, now I'm not so surprised...
@MeiLin @cstross
@wa7iut@mastodon.radio @MeiLin@rubber.social @cstross@wandering.shop
I think mine was the second book in the Voidship series (which is probably better than had it been White Plague).
@wa7iut @MeiLin @cstross I've always loved this quote. I read LoTR at 12, and remained wrapped up in it for years. Like a Lothlorien cloak, it protected me from much evil and brought me safe through many perils.
As for Atlas Shrugged, even at 14 I had a rule: if you open a book at random and find yourself reading about a rape, close the book, especially if it goes on about how much a woman likes it. Hasn't failed me yet.
@Lirazel68 @wa7iut @MeiLin @cstross That's a good rule.
