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[TheBiggerFish]

speaking of science fiction has anyone else read the followups to enders game? now that gets weird.

Yes.  It does.

[Frumple]

To be fair to it (though I don't really want to, tbh), there's quite a bit of sci-fi that gets just incredibly fucked up, and in all sorts of different ways. Lot of it you fortunately don't run into often, but there's stuff tucked away in the dark places of the genre that go places you may regret going. Seriously, try trawling through some of the voluminous short stories molding around, and see if you really still consider card's stuff all that odd. It probably is just odd, but there's few parts of the literary world that goes as far as sci-fi can and does.

[Flying Dice]

That's the usual problem with HFY, some neat ideas and a premise with potential overshadowed by the bad writing. Speaking of...

Spoiler: A lazy bit of a different sort of HFY that I shat out in an hour or so. (click to show/hide)

You ever ride the bus as a kid? Remember that first time when you were alone, momma couldn't come or something? That ride's fuckin' scary, you're all alone and don't have a clue what you're supposed to do, but the moment you get on the return trip it ain't even a thing. The shuttle hop back from Rigleth Anum was a little like that, 'cept the weirdos were bug-faced aliens from Tau Ceti. Well, actually they were mostly Formolai, since we were all riding from Rig-A to Exchange Five-Seven-One. If you never seen Forms, think about being on that bus with a whole lotta shy five-foot anteater-lizards.

Though if you know anything about 'em, you know they ain't really shy. They've got this stuff, electro-something, shit's like what sharks have, right? Except it's super strong and doesn't reach very far. So if one of them gets too close to a body, they feel all their nerves and shit going off. That's why they always do that thing where they act like the loser at a club, except that for them it's like not staring at you for creepy-long times from across the room.

Anyway, thing was, the shuttle was a dirt-old Kellerite heap of shit, the operator was the fiftieth owner or something, so you had twenty-odd Forms all trying to keep their two meter personal space clear, when we've got forty seats in a seven-by-four meter box. I'm just getting my groove on with some old school shit, all the pieces going along loud as hell, when I get a tap on my shoulder. This Form, big brass pair, right? Got close enough to touch me without getting the willies, and he's staring at my audio plugs with his ears cocked forward like a dog. Turns out, he could hear well enough to catch the tail end of Neilsen's Fifth.

Now, I ain't got a word of any of the Form languages, but that's no trouble-he didn't have a lick of English or Mandarin either, but the translator cut in right as the last refrain died. Nice model, too, barely any stuttering and the grammar was damn close. Lil' guy wanted to know what it was. This was the first of this I'd heard, the first time any of old Earth's daughters or sons found out, so far as I know. The Forms, they're different in a lotta ways, but sometimes they're just right on galactic average. Like with music.

See, that's what happens when you evolve on a nice, lazy garden world, you don't have to worry about much, so you never need to pull together. You just cruise along doing your thing, not bothering much 'cept when you want something from someone. Leastwise, that's what the bio-geeks say. I mean, they have music and shit, it's just all like that old folky stuff where you got someone with a guitar or shit maybe singing along to their playing, sometimes with the crowd doing whatever amounts to clapping along. Bands? They ain't got 'em. You start talking about an honest orchestra, and lord, their eyes bug right out-when they got eyes, anyways.

As I was saying, this Form wants to know what I was listening to, so I tell him. I mean, I didn't rattle off the name of the symphony or the group playing it, I just said it was orchestral. He sits there for a second or two, his head quivering a little, then admits that his translator didn't have that word. So I went simpler, told him that it was a bunch of people all playing at the same time, and he really freaks. The guy got the concept side of it, just didn't understand the practice-I quote, “How do they prevent discord generation? Absolutely improbable for so many sophonts to happen to overlap neatly for so long.”

That's the moment where I got where he was coming from. The hangup wasn't that he didn't get the idea of a bunch of people all playing at once, but that they'd do so as a group instead of sawing away at a hundred different tunes. Turns out he thought at first that it was just a really loud recording of four or five bards in the same room. Once I got the point across, I swear, that Form looked like he was about to drool on my damn lap. Never heard of an orchestra, never even seen two or three folks play together-the hell do you say to something like that?

I'll tell you what, you offer to pull up another one, this time with video. So I popped the screen up and flicked my datstick to some old footage, a real famous performance, and held it out so's he could tap his own audio plugs into the feed-and talk about guts, he had some shit that cut through my security, didn't even wait for me to unlock the signal. I can't say I've ever seen an alien orgasm in public, but that poor boy came close.

I get where he was coming from, too. You live your whole life, your entire history, nothing but single artists doing what they could on their own, then you see ten thousand people singing and playing one of the finest tunes anyone ever put to paper? Shit'd be like living your whole life on brown rice and lukewarm water, then someone comes along and hands you a big ol' slab of chocolate and a bottle of French red.

He didn't say nothing for a while, just breathed in and out. I can't really be sure, but if he'd been human I'd say it was his voice cracking as he asked my name. I gave it, asked his-the translator spat out one of those crappy equivalencies, [Crux of Springtime Vigor]. Forms aren't much for touching strangers, remember, but honest truth, he knew a bit about xenos body language and offered a handshake, ears and nose fluttering. Shit's like kissing a stranger with tongue while sobbing for Forms, except less messy. Next question was whether he could buy a copy of the recording.

Lemme lay this out first. I was on that shuttle 'cause I was coming back from Rig-A on business for Samsung. They were looking to get a deal on a license and tooling to make holo-tanks, enter the market early, since Sony was still fucking around trying to make 'em from scratch. I got paid five figures to ride a space-bus there and back with the hard copy of the contract.

I was gonna give Crux the song and footage gratis-shit's just a copy of a copy, so who cares? He jumps in before I can get a word out and offers up a deed to some building, fuck me if I knew where. Whatever, he's falling over himself, ain't no skin off my nose, he just asked for another arrangement as part of the deal. Started out all complex alien business doublespeak, we talked around in circles until I figured out that he just wanted exclusivity and more business. Basically I didn't sell or give anything like that to any other non-humans and we set up a meet for me to bring a proper archive of “throng-song gatherings”.

That's when he quoted the per-song fee and the bonus for visual footage to go with. That crazy Form was offering five grand in Orion-arm credchits for every grainy concert tape I could dig up, or a forty percent share in profits after royalties held for the artists-and fuck the ones who wanted the whole pie after the fact, artist's cuts are legal standard across the whole Milky Way and they've been like that since we were hairy all over. I'm no idiot neither, that was about a hundred grand US each, and if someone with high-grade electronics was offering bank like that, it meant he saw a hell of a lot more coming down the line. I took the forty. Fair's fair, it was his contacts, I just picked and carried the selection.

Once I made it back to terra firma I ran a search on the deed, found out it was an honest to god self-contained luxury module on Helalei Station, practically sharing bulkheads with the embassy segment. That thing was worth more than half the orbitals in Sol put together, barring the Jovian refineries, I shit you not.

Anyway, a couple months later I made it back out to my meet-up with Crux and got the ball rolling. As it turns out, he had contacts in the Mandate's BuCult, once they hit the market with human music it spread all the way to the Carina-Sagitarrius arm inside of a Solar year. That's how we got out of the Teapot War, you know? Way I heard it, the Lotozi got their tendrils on some Wu-Tang and Wagner, not even a quarter-revolution later they've got diplomats calling their UNS counterparts over here to offer a ceasefire in exchange for a set of new, unreleased performances.

And there's the true story of how Monnie Williams became the richest woman in the galaxy through the power of music. That kid from Footloose can suck it. Now gimme me my fuckin' drunk, pal.

[Edmus]

Kind of opposite to HFY is Peter Watts' Blindsight, anyone given that a read?
It's pretty unpleasant, but I couldn't put it down.

[redwallzyl]

To be fair to it (though I don't really want to, tbh), there's quite a bit of sci-fi that gets just incredibly fucked up, and in all sorts of different ways. Lot of it you fortunately don't run into often, but there's stuff tucked away in the dark places of the genre that go places you may regret going. Seriously, try trawling through some of the voluminous short stories molding around, and see if you really still consider card's stuff all that odd. It probably is just odd, but there's few parts of the literary world that goes as far as sci-fi can and does.

i have always liked scifi but no one ever seems to make anything I'm interested in. likely because i absolutely hate distopian books. probably something to do with being an archeology student i just cant stand the thought.

[Edmus]

Pick up some of the older stuff 2nd hand. It's normally pretty optimistic, and it's interesting to get outdated perspectives of the future (now present).

[Frumple]

Yeah, I don't even really know what the general things are sci-fi wise, these days, but there's definitely plenty that aren't dystopian. Definitely a lean towards stark just 'cause they tend to be space related and space is big, empty, and wants to kill you, but it's far from universal.

... just don't ask me for reqs. It's probably been half a decade since I read (or at least finished) a proper sci-fi novel that wasn't warhammer or battletech related. Well... except one of the pern lady's non-pern books I can't remember the name of and mostly remember for the non-negligible amount of interspecies relationship focus and the main female lead getting raped and knocked up. Second in the series, whatever it was. Never read the first. Keep forgetting I usually regret reading one of her books by the time I finish it.

Might have been some bolo stuff in there, too. Some of those are pretty neat, others are holy shit bleak.

[Flying Dice]

You mean that series where they're dumped on the ag-world that secretly belongs to the high-tech aliens by the asshole conquering aliens and their slave-soldiers? And the protagonist is constantly going on about the massive size of her alien boyfriend's schlong?

Yeah, McCaffrey was already weird enough when it was just the psychic resonance sex and Clarketech genegineered dragons or the unrequited love between the deformed fetus-AI stuck in a ship and her muscle/diplomat.

[stabbymcstabstab]

Is there any sci-fi out there that isn't dystopian in some way? it seems like you're more likely to find one without weird, not well written sex scenes, then a Utopia-based one that's a actually Utopia.

[Frumple]

You mean that series where they're dumped on the ag-world that secretly belongs to the high-tech aliens by the asshole conquering aliens and their slave-soldiers? And the protagonist is constantly going on about the massive size of her alien boyfriend's schlong?

That sounds about right. She never really got as bad as p. anthony, least of what I read, but I definitely associate their writing pretty closely.

And sure, there definitely are, I just can't recall the ones I've read at the moment. Haven't gotten around to reading it myself, but maybe the Culture (iirc) stuff? AI superships heading a fairly utopian society, and played pretty straight on that side of things. Seem to recall it being sorta' popular-ish at one point.

[itisnotlogical]

See, I actually miss sci-fi that was weird. I feel like modern science fiction just puts sci-fi sounding stuff into a story that could have been told in any other setting, like Avatar or the Robocop reboot or new Star Trek. A lot of shitty awful sci-fi was weird, but so was 2001, Snow Crash, Dune, Metropolis, Evangelion and others. Even that stuff remains divisive and isn't universally well-regarded, and that's the way I liked it.

I can't think of a science fiction film for years and years that actually gave a fuck about being speculative, beyond Star Trek-tier "racism story but with aliens" metaphors. Even Star Trek doesn't bother with those anymore, they're just any old action movie with a sci-fi skin now. Ctrl-f replace "terrorists" with "aliens" and "car" with "space ship."

[TheBiggerFish]

That's the usual problem with HFY, some neat ideas and a premise with potential overshadowed by the bad writing. Speaking of...

Spoiler: A lazy bit of a different sort of HFY that I shat out in an hour or so. (click to show/hide)

You ever ride the bus as a kid? Remember that first time when you were alone, momma couldn't come or something? That ride's fuckin' scary, you're all alone and don't have a clue what you're supposed to do, but the moment you get on the return trip it ain't even a thing. The shuttle hop back from Rigleth Anum was a little like that, 'cept the weirdos were bug-faced aliens from Tau Ceti. Well, actually they were mostly Formolai, since we were all riding from Rig-A to Exchange Five-Seven-One. If you never seen Forms, think about being on that bus with a whole lotta shy five-foot anteater-lizards.

Though if you know anything about 'em, you know they ain't really shy. They've got this stuff, electro-something, shit's like what sharks have, right? Except it's super strong and doesn't reach very far. So if one of them gets too close to a body, they feel all their nerves and shit going off. That's why they always do that thing where they act like the loser at a club, except that for them it's like not staring at you for creepy-long times from across the room.

Anyway, thing was, the shuttle was a dirt-old Kellerite heap of shit, the operator was the fiftieth owner or something, so you had twenty-odd Forms all trying to keep their two meter personal space clear, when we've got forty seats in a seven-by-four meter box. I'm just getting my groove on with some old school shit, all the pieces going along loud as hell, when I get a tap on my shoulder. This Form, big brass pair, right? Got close enough to touch me without getting the willies, and he's staring at my audio plugs with his ears cocked forward like a dog. Turns out, he could hear well enough to catch the tail end of Neilsen's Fifth.

Now, I ain't got a word of any of the Form languages, but that's no trouble-he didn't have a lick of English or Mandarin either, but the translator cut in right as the last refrain died. Nice model, too, barely any stuttering and the grammar was damn close. Lil' guy wanted to know what it was. This was the first of this I'd heard, the first time any of old Earth's daughters or sons found out, so far as I know. The Forms, they're different in a lotta ways, but sometimes they're just right on galactic average. Like with music.

See, that's what happens when you evolve on a nice, lazy garden world, you don't have to worry about much, so you never need to pull together. You just cruise along doing your thing, not bothering much 'cept when you want something from someone. Leastwise, that's what the bio-geeks say. I mean, they have music and shit, it's just all like that old folky stuff where you got someone with a guitar or shit maybe singing along to their playing, sometimes with the crowd doing whatever amounts to clapping along. Bands? They ain't got 'em. You start talking about an honest orchestra, and lord, their eyes bug right out-when they got eyes, anyways.

As I was saying, this Form wants to know what I was listening to, so I tell him. I mean, I didn't rattle off the name of the symphony or the group playing it, I just said it was orchestral. He sits there for a second or two, his head quivering a little, then admits that his translator didn't have that word. So I went simpler, told him that it was a bunch of people all playing at the same time, and he really freaks. The guy got the concept side of it, just didn't understand the practice-I quote, “How do they prevent discord generation? Absolutely improbable for so many sophonts to happen to overlap neatly for so long.”

That's the moment where I got where he was coming from. The hangup wasn't that he didn't get the idea of a bunch of people all playing at once, but that they'd do so as a group instead of sawing away at a hundred different tunes. Turns out he thought at first that it was just a really loud recording of four or five bards in the same room. Once I got the point across, I swear, that Form looked like he was about to drool on my damn lap. Never heard of an orchestra, never even seen two or three folks play together-the hell do you say to something like that?

I'll tell you what, you offer to pull up another one, this time with video. So I popped the screen up and flicked my datstick to some old footage, a real famous performance, and held it out so's he could tap his own audio plugs into the feed-and talk about guts, he had some shit that cut through my security, didn't even wait for me to unlock the signal. I can't say I've ever seen an alien orgasm in public, but that poor boy came close.

I get where he was coming from, too. You live your whole life, your entire history, nothing but single artists doing what they could on their own, then you see ten thousand people singing and playing one of the finest tunes anyone ever put to paper? Shit'd be like living your whole life on brown rice and lukewarm water, then someone comes along and hands you a big ol' slab of chocolate and a bottle of French red.

He didn't say nothing for a while, just breathed in and out. I can't really be sure, but if he'd been human I'd say it was his voice cracking as he asked my name. I gave it, asked his-the translator spat out one of those crappy equivalencies, [Crux of Springtime Vigor]. Forms aren't much for touching strangers, remember, but honest truth, he knew a bit about xenos body language and offered a handshake, ears and nose fluttering. Shit's like kissing a stranger with tongue while sobbing for Forms, except less messy. Next question was whether he could buy a copy of the recording.

Lemme lay this out first. I was on that shuttle 'cause I was coming back from Rig-A on business for Samsung. They were looking to get a deal on a license and tooling to make holo-tanks, enter the market early, since Sony was still fucking around trying to make 'em from scratch. I got paid five figures to ride a space-bus there and back with the hard copy of the contract.

I was gonna give Crux the song and footage gratis-shit's just a copy of a copy, so who cares? He jumps in before I can get a word out and offers up a deed to some building, fuck me if I knew where. Whatever, he's falling over himself, ain't no skin off my nose, he just asked for another arrangement as part of the deal. Started out all complex alien business doublespeak, we talked around in circles until I figured out that he just wanted exclusivity and more business. Basically I didn't sell or give anything like that to any other non-humans and we set up a meet for me to bring a proper archive of “throng-song gatherings”.

That's when he quoted the per-song fee and the bonus for visual footage to go with. That crazy Form was offering five grand in Orion-arm credchits for every grainy concert tape I could dig up, or a forty percent share in profits after royalties held for the artists-and fuck the ones who wanted the whole pie after the fact, artist's cuts are legal standard across the whole Milky Way and they've been like that since we were hairy all over. I'm no idiot neither, that was about a hundred grand US each, and if someone with high-grade electronics was offering bank like that, it meant he saw a hell of a lot more coming down the line. I took the forty. Fair's fair, it was his contacts, I just picked and carried the selection.

Once I made it back to terra firma I ran a search on the deed, found out it was an honest to god self-contained luxury module on Helalei Station, practically sharing bulkheads with the embassy segment. That thing was worth more than half the orbitals in Sol put together, barring the Jovian refineries, I shit you not.

Anyway, a couple months later I made it back out to my meet-up with Crux and got the ball rolling. As it turns out, he had contacts in the Mandate's BuCult, once they hit the market with human music it spread all the way to the Carina-Sagitarrius arm inside of a Solar year. That's how we got out of the Teapot War, you know? Way I heard it, the Lotozi got their tendrils on some Wu-Tang and Wagner, not even a quarter-revolution later they've got diplomats calling their UNS counterparts over here to offer a ceasefire in exchange for a set of new, unreleased performances.

And there's the true story of how Monnie Williams became the richest woman in the galaxy through the power of music. That kid from Footloose can suck it. Now gimme me my fuckin' drunk, pal.

Dude, that was pretty good.

[Frumple]

See, I actually miss sci-fi that was weird. I feel like modern science fiction just puts sci-fi sounding stuff into a story that could have been told in any other setting, like Avatar or the Robocop reboot or new Star Trek. A lot of shitty awful sci-fi was weird, but so was 2001, Snow Crash, Dune, Metropolis, Evangelion and others. Even that stuff remains divisive and isn't universally well-regarded, and that's the way I liked it.

They're also all pretty tame by sci-fi weirdness standards, heh. Even 2001 and NGE. Movies are one thing, but we've been talking books, and books can get away with a whole hell of a lot movies can't.

Still, I'd give some of the later dune books gave an alright showing of things, as that goes (Space emperor god worm? Space emperor god worm.), for all a lot of people try to forget dune had any sequels. We're still getting all sorts of shit off in that direction, but the chances of any of it hitting the silver screen is basically nil.

Though I still have bouts of mild reflexive terror every time someone mentions Firefly. Goddamn anthony, goddamn publishers trying to play that thing off as sci-fi. I mean, I guess it technically was, but blegh.

[itisnotlogical]

I was having some serious trouble comprehending things past God-Emperor, and having a blast doing so. It probably says a lot about me that Dune Messiah (AFAIK the worst-reviewed book in the series) is my favorite.

I have to give Brian Herbert some credit for the Butlerian Jihad books, he tried some out-there stuff in his own dumb way. Like the one robot trying to learn human emotion, so he paints a picture using a bucket of blood and gibs. Points for effort.

[Flying Dice]

That's the usual problem with HFY, some neat ideas and a premise with potential overshadowed by the bad writing. Speaking of...

Spoiler: A lazy bit of a different sort of HFY that I shat out in an hour or so. (click to show/hide)

You ever ride the bus as a kid? Remember that first time when you were alone, momma couldn't come or something? That ride's fuckin' scary, you're all alone and don't have a clue what you're supposed to do, but the moment you get on the return trip it ain't even a thing. The shuttle hop back from Rigleth Anum was a little like that, 'cept the weirdos were bug-faced aliens from Tau Ceti. Well, actually they were mostly Formolai, since we were all riding from Rig-A to Exchange Five-Seven-One. If you never seen Forms, think about being on that bus with a whole lotta shy five-foot anteater-lizards.

Though if you know anything about 'em, you know they ain't really shy. They've got this stuff, electro-something, shit's like what sharks have, right? Except it's super strong and doesn't reach very far. So if one of them gets too close to a body, they feel all their nerves and shit going off. That's why they always do that thing where they act like the loser at a club, except that for them it's like not staring at you for creepy-long times from across the room.

Anyway, thing was, the shuttle was a dirt-old Kellerite heap of shit, the operator was the fiftieth owner or something, so you had twenty-odd Forms all trying to keep their two meter personal space clear, when we've got forty seats in a seven-by-four meter box. I'm just getting my groove on with some old school shit, all the pieces going along loud as hell, when I get a tap on my shoulder. This Form, big brass pair, right? Got close enough to touch me without getting the willies, and he's staring at my audio plugs with his ears cocked forward like a dog. Turns out, he could hear well enough to catch the tail end of Neilsen's Fifth.

Now, I ain't got a word of any of the Form languages, but that's no trouble-he didn't have a lick of English or Mandarin either, but the translator cut in right as the last refrain died. Nice model, too, barely any stuttering and the grammar was damn close. Lil' guy wanted to know what it was. This was the first of this I'd heard, the first time any of old Earth's daughters or sons found out, so far as I know. The Forms, they're different in a lotta ways, but sometimes they're just right on galactic average. Like with music.

See, that's what happens when you evolve on a nice, lazy garden world, you don't have to worry about much, so you never need to pull together. You just cruise along doing your thing, not bothering much 'cept when you want something from someone. Leastwise, that's what the bio-geeks say. I mean, they have music and shit, it's just all like that old folky stuff where you got someone with a guitar or shit maybe singing along to their playing, sometimes with the crowd doing whatever amounts to clapping along. Bands? They ain't got 'em. You start talking about an honest orchestra, and lord, their eyes bug right out-when they got eyes, anyways.

As I was saying, this Form wants to know what I was listening to, so I tell him. I mean, I didn't rattle off the name of the symphony or the group playing it, I just said it was orchestral. He sits there for a second or two, his head quivering a little, then admits that his translator didn't have that word. So I went simpler, told him that it was a bunch of people all playing at the same time, and he really freaks. The guy got the concept side of it, just didn't understand the practice-I quote, “How do they prevent discord generation? Absolutely improbable for so many sophonts to happen to overlap neatly for so long.”

That's the moment where I got where he was coming from. The hangup wasn't that he didn't get the idea of a bunch of people all playing at once, but that they'd do so as a group instead of sawing away at a hundred different tunes. Turns out he thought at first that it was just a really loud recording of four or five bards in the same room. Once I got the point across, I swear, that Form looked like he was about to drool on my damn lap. Never heard of an orchestra, never even seen two or three folks play together-the hell do you say to something like that?

I'll tell you what, you offer to pull up another one, this time with video. So I popped the screen up and flicked my datstick to some old footage, a real famous performance, and held it out so's he could tap his own audio plugs into the feed-and talk about guts, he had some shit that cut through my security, didn't even wait for me to unlock the signal. I can't say I've ever seen an alien orgasm in public, but that poor boy came close.

I get where he was coming from, too. You live your whole life, your entire history, nothing but single artists doing what they could on their own, then you see ten thousand people singing and playing one of the finest tunes anyone ever put to paper? Shit'd be like living your whole life on brown rice and lukewarm water, then someone comes along and hands you a big ol' slab of chocolate and a bottle of French red.

He didn't say nothing for a while, just breathed in and out. I can't really be sure, but if he'd been human I'd say it was his voice cracking as he asked my name. I gave it, asked his-the translator spat out one of those crappy equivalencies, [Crux of Springtime Vigor]. Forms aren't much for touching strangers, remember, but honest truth, he knew a bit about xenos body language and offered a handshake, ears and nose fluttering. Shit's like kissing a stranger with tongue while sobbing for Forms, except less messy. Next question was whether he could buy a copy of the recording.

Lemme lay this out first. I was on that shuttle 'cause I was coming back from Rig-A on business for Samsung. They were looking to get a deal on a license and tooling to make holo-tanks, enter the market early, since Sony was still fucking around trying to make 'em from scratch. I got paid five figures to ride a space-bus there and back with the hard copy of the contract.

I was gonna give Crux the song and footage gratis-shit's just a copy of a copy, so who cares? He jumps in before I can get a word out and offers up a deed to some building, fuck me if I knew where. Whatever, he's falling over himself, ain't no skin off my nose, he just asked for another arrangement as part of the deal. Started out all complex alien business doublespeak, we talked around in circles until I figured out that he just wanted exclusivity and more business. Basically I didn't sell or give anything like that to any other non-humans and we set up a meet for me to bring a proper archive of “throng-song gatherings”.

That's when he quoted the per-song fee and the bonus for visual footage to go with. That crazy Form was offering five grand in Orion-arm credchits for every grainy concert tape I could dig up, or a forty percent share in profits after royalties held for the artists-and fuck the ones who wanted the whole pie after the fact, artist's cuts are legal standard across the whole Milky Way and they've been like that since we were hairy all over. I'm no idiot neither, that was about a hundred grand US each, and if someone with high-grade electronics was offering bank like that, it meant he saw a hell of a lot more coming down the line. I took the forty. Fair's fair, it was his contacts, I just picked and carried the selection.

Once I made it back to terra firma I ran a search on the deed, found out it was an honest to god self-contained luxury module on Helalei Station, practically sharing bulkheads with the embassy segment. That thing was worth more than half the orbitals in Sol put together, barring the Jovian refineries, I shit you not.

Anyway, a couple months later I made it back out to my meet-up with Crux and got the ball rolling. As it turns out, he had contacts in the Mandate's BuCult, once they hit the market with human music it spread all the way to the Carina-Sagitarrius arm inside of a Solar year. That's how we got out of the Teapot War, you know? Way I heard it, the Lotozi got their tendrils on some Wu-Tang and Wagner, not even a quarter-revolution later they've got diplomats calling their UNS counterparts over here to offer a ceasefire in exchange for a set of new, unreleased performances.

And there's the true story of how Monnie Williams became the richest woman in the galaxy through the power of music. That kid from Footloose can suck it. Now gimme me my fuckin' drink, pal.

Dude, that was pretty good.

TFW you see all the awkward turns of phrase and typos you missed in the first pass. :|

But yeah. Same idea of humans evolving on a deathworld, but taken in a totally different direction from what's usually done. Humans stand out in that setting because highly social behavior is an instinctive norm reinforced by biological pressures, since we had to work together to survive and develop civilization where most species got along just fine living largely solitary lives-when you're the equivalent of an apex predator in a soft world there's not much impetus to cooperate closely, either individually or as a species. You can agree and work together just fine, but you don't need to or desire such on a basic level. As it happens, that extended to music-artistic expression, somewhat predictably, remained just as much a solitary affair as anything else. You might perform for others or use ideas developed by others, but the tacit mental image of multiple performers together is of a disconnected gathering of individuals each working alone.

Naturally, that's not desirable for anyone: each musician ends up having their sound quality polluted and none of the audience get a coherent performance. Then you have humans-we're used to being parts of a greater whole, the whole idea of "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" is very alien to most sophonts, but the quality of the output is clear despite the strangeness. It's something aliens can appreciate, extrapolate from, and eventually replicate, just not something that most would ever conceive of on their own.

As an aside, it also means that aliens in that 'verse generally don't play multiplayer games much, it's all equivalents to solitaire.

Just an idle thought extrapolated to a certain degree of extremity, but that's all of HFY in a nutshell and it's fresher than the usual "humans are the big scary space monsters". Instead of that or being pets, we're fairly average in most respects but abnormally culturally rich. Influence victory, hooooo!