fellow #009 (ssrin)

I read Exordia by Seth Dickinson last month. It’s good. You should read it too.

So I just watched the Gameoverse pilot and immediately began thinking about Exordia by Seth Dickinson, inexplicably. For the maybe five people who are fans of both, here's what the pilot made me think of: In the book Exordia (which I recommend to everybody), there are these aliens called like khai, who run an evil empire that has almost enslaved the entire known galaxy. But the reason the khai are doing this is because they are damned from birth. That is, no matter how good or evil they are, every last one of them is going to Hell after a brief life. And worse yet, whenever anyone sees them, they see the worst, most horrible creature they've ever met. Something that axiomatically needs to die. The way they reason it out, what's the life of their slaves? Some hard living for a while, in exchange for an eternity of paradise in all probability? They tried to be so good at one point that it would fix it, but it didn't change a goddamn thing. Unless they find a way to rewrite the rules entirely. Anyway, my point is that the position of the khai is actually functionally identical to that of a villain in a story, especially if they become self-aware of their own condition. Always-dying-never-dying. Trapped forever in a state of being unable to learn from their mistakes, hateful and angry and bitter and sad. To become aware that you were a character in a story under these conditions is… basically Hell. The heroes of Gameoverse are filled with profound guilt at what they'd done, horrified by the unfairness of the universe. To a Syntax, however, the universe is already unfair. It's just now everyone can see it.