- Dołączono
- 14 Gru 2022
It's not a novel but Analogue: A Hate Story is a pretty interesting take on that idea. It's a (Canadian I think?) visual novel about a guy who tracks down an ancient failed generation ship floating in space. He tries to figure out exactly what happened so it's just hours and hours of reading through system logs and the personal entries of various individuals on the ship while gradually piecing together the timeline from departure to total collapse. All the while there's a pair of AIs, only one of which can be active at a time because the reactor doesn't have enough output to sustain both AI cores simultaneously anymore, let alone the entirety of the ship, who will offer additional insights and opinions on the logs you're reading.Ok its tropey and clichéd, but the bare bones idea, a murder mystery on a Generation Ship carrying the refugees of a dead Earth to a new home, could be a pretty good story if it was done right and by someone who knew what they were doing, that didn't ham fistedly shove their own wet brain political biases into a story already padded out by clumsy prose and half realized ideas.
I won't go too far into it in case anyone wants to read it but basically at some point the people in charge decided to revert (or perhaps had the idea from the start and just had to wait until they were far enough from Earth for Earth to do anything about it) to the culture of pre-industrial Korea and abandon the idea of finding a new home.
For the two AIs, one is more modern and progressive and disapproves of what happened while the other is very traditionalist and can't imagine why anyone would have a problem with how things went. They both know different things and also have things that they're not able (or are unwilling) to share that they have to try and hint at and guide you towards without saying directly
It does have a decent bit of sexual content but I don't remember any of it being graphic (it's all characters recounting what happened, not line-by-line thrust-by-thrust as it's happening, I think the actual physical descriptions are very limited and it focuses on the emotional aspects of it, at the very least that's what has stuck with me). Probably the most uncomfortable is The Pale Bride, a girl who had been put into cryostasis prior to the cultural flip-flop due to medical issues, being put into an arranged marriage and then forcibly(ish) consummated. It does get uncomfortable as mentioned, but I think it's effective and it didn't come across as fetishistic or anything