Hello! This is my first post here at Stardestroyer.net. I was inspired by Ahriman238's review of the Orion's Arm Universe to start my own review of Green Antarctica. Green Antarctica is an alternate history timeline originally created on AH.com with the fantastic point of divergence being that Antarctica never glaciates. It evolves a horrifying set of wildlife and an even more disturbing set of human cultures that variously practice grotesque things like eating people alive, sewing people together human-centipede-style, using quadruple-amputee brainwashed starved children to guide rockets, and harvesting skin from living people. I'm going to rather harsh on Green Antarctica because it violates a basic ruleof fantasy that barring whatever fantastic elements are necessary for the premise of the story, the rest of the story should be plausible. Green Antarctica breaks this rule so many times that I'm going to have to number each time a breach occurs. Well, I'm going to review all of the Green Antarctica Universe page by page, as it appears on the original. Here it goes:
Tsa and his former companions were not the first humans to end up on the Antarctic shores.
During this period, there was a strong equatorial current running along the Australian coast past Tasmania until it met the circumpolar currents and shed its heat.
At times, this current would move close to Tasmanian shores, sweeping up debris and the dugout canoes the local inhabitants. Storms or tsunami's would also wash aboriginal inhabitants out to sea and onto a perilous journey south.
In one remarkable incident, a sudden storm and a shift of current had sent almost an entire village in dugouts along.
In all, perhaps a hundred humans had involuntarily made the journey over a ten thousand year period during which the current held sway, usually ending up somewhere along a few hundred mile stretch of the storm coast. During that time, numerous small specimens of Tasmanian or Australian life had also found its way south, most of which had no survived.
The first human who reached Antarctica did so as a rotting corpse, 42,000 BCE. The next, a pair of terrified, starving wretches had stumbled up on strange shores two thousand years later. One would die within a few weeks, the other did not survive the winter.
Tsa and his companions had been fishermen, and unusually skilled and bold. That had been their undoing, the equatorial current had caught them. But they'd proven themselves to be hardy survivors, catching fish and surviving on rainwater. When they'd stepped, shivering onto these new beaches, they had been humanity's best chance of establishing a foothold on Antarctica.... except that they had been three men.
* * * * * * * * * *
Distances, Tsa had learned early, were hard to judge in this strange land. It took him the better part of a day to reach the place he'd seen the plume of smoke.
Yes!
They were people, like himself. He watched the miserable band carefully for a few minutes. There was a warrior though his only weapon was a broken piece of driftwood, a mature woman, a youth and two girls. They huddled around the fire, looking miserable.
Where had they come from.
*******************
Most of those who had ended up taking the southern passage had been men. Typically, it was usually men fishing in the dugouts. Of the twenty women drawn down, many had drowned along the way. One woman had made the journey down to these shores, and had survived for almost thirty years without ever seeing another human.
In this instance, a Tsunami had swept Australian shores south of the barrier reef killing hundreds. In one village, a small handful had managed to cling to a tree as it was swept out to sea. Not all of them had survived, two had drowned or succumbed to the elements, one had simply surrendered to despair and let go.
********************
Excitement was too much, and Tsa showed himself to the strangers.
It was immediately clear that these were a different people from any that Tsa had known. They were frightened and wary.
But they were also hungry and desperate. The needed the tools that Tsa had accumulated, they needed to know how to hunt, what roots were edible.
Tsa learned a little from them. starvation had lead them to discover some plants were edible that he had never tried. Over time, they learned to communicate in a crude fashion. He hunted with the warrior and the youth, and together they took down larger game.
But despite companionship, Tsa was unhappy. These new people had no sense of the white death that was coming. As astonished as they were by perpetual day, they did not realize that there would be perpetual night, or a desperate need to prepare.
The women beckoned to him. He had been so lonely so long, had suffered so without companionship. But the warrior rejected his entreaties and pleas. Just one, to warm his nights, to braid his hair for him, to do the women's tasks.
He had insisted, it had earned him a brutal beating. As damaged as he was by frostbite, wounds and privation, he was no match for the warrior.
Instead, he redoubled his efforts, building a shelter to house them all, hoarding immense amounts of roots and seeds, dried meat to last the winter he knew would come. He managed to enlist the youth in his undertaking, though the warrior and women laughed at the efforts.
Come winter, they learned different. He felt a glow of satisfaction as the warrior and his harem, the woman and one of the girls visibly pregnant, huddling forlornly to his fire.
Surely he deserved a woman.
He got another beating, and had to cringe and be to avoid being thrown out into the cold. It was the worst humiliation of his life.
Revenge came the next summer. The three males were out hunting one of the Shaggo, lumbering creatures who walked on their knuckles to protect huge claws.
As the Warrior rushed forward, Tsa rammed his spear into the man's back. Turning, the warrior twisted about, trying to bring his spear about. The youth shoved his spear into the warrior's side. They held the spears in him as he twisted, blood frothing from his mouth. It had seemed that he'd taken a long time to die.
The Shaggo watched this drama with dim incomprehension, and slowly shambled away.
The youth was panting, frightened. Tsa put his hand on the youth's shoulder. The women were his now. But he was not foolish, he would share.
So, Antarctic civilization begins with a start of darkness. Tsa, the founder of the Tsalal, or Green Antarcticans, is a rapist and murderer, so it's implied his descendants will be like him.
"In the clarity of hindsight, it must be accounted that I was never truly a religious man. In these recent months, I have been compelled to ponder long and hard upon the nature of God. For in contemplation of God, there is the consequence of heaven, and of its obverse, hell. Of these nations of the Tsalal I find myself among, I have discovered that hell is of earth indeed. These dark monsters, for I can scarce bring myself to call them human, must surely spring from the loins of Satan incarnate. Murder, incest, beastiality, every perversion of every sort is embraced by them, they delight in cruelty and know know refinement. I have watched as my companions have been tortured to death, have had unbearable indignities visited upon my own body. They are the utter opposite of everything we know as civilization, yet are not savage. Rather, they are like a black mirror unto ourselves. As industrious, as clever, as restless and dynamic. They have taken my ship apart like a child's puzzle, meditating over each component, striving to duplicate and better the production. I curse the day that the wandering spirit sent men to sail the seven days. Truly, ignorance was a gift from God. It would be better for all if the civilized nations never knew such a people existed. But in the knowledge which must come, I can only hope that providence inspires the spirit of man to unite and exterminate these brutes. Yet in my heart, I feel fear, because now they know that we exist..."
The author appears to be making the Tsalal into a Dark-Eldarish civilization that is physically similar to humans in the same way Dark Eldar are similar to other elves, but are psychologically speaking, extremely sadistic and perverse similar to how the Dark Eldar are.
"Invasion: How Species and Peoples Have Transformed the World" Jared Diamond, 2012
"....of course, biological exchanges, the movement of plants and animals from one biogeographical region to another has been going on a long time. The most famous, of course, is the South American interchange, when three million years ago, South America joined North America. An interchange which saw devastation for much South American flora and fauna, but some notable successes. Of course, there have been other such exchanges...
"The human era, however, has seen a proliferation of biological exchange to an unheard of degree. Dogs in Australia, rats spread across polynesia, horses and oxen across Europe and Asia. Literally every agricultural plant, and a great many parasite species and hangers on have moved far beyond their original biogeographies by virtue of human transmission. The modern era has accelerated this beyond all reckoning. It took dogs 30,000 years to make it to Australia after human habitation. It's taken less than two centuries for rabbits, starlings, camels and goats to invade the Australian countryside....
"The rule is that smaller biogeographical regions invariably suffer when mixing with larger. The larger region has generally had more diversity, larger populations, and for want of a better term, more effective and robust species who often supplant local flora and fauna. This rule breaks down with the so called Antarctic interchange...."
"Of course, it is impossible to think of Scotland, without its rolling fields of midnight sedge, and the burly shaghuts lumbering across the highlands. But Scotland was, even a century ago, quite a different place. Local grasses and bushes have been largely displaced by an aggressive Antarctic species, all but inedible to European herbivores, necessitating the importation of Antarctic herds. And what significant city or town in Europe or North America has not been plagued by colonies of hive monkeys. The Raccoon is now an endangered species, extinct in 4/5ths of its former range...."
"Economic utility has been behind many of these invasions. The importation of Shaghut to Scotland or the Baltics is an attempt to turn a profit from the disaster otherwise represented by the spread of Antarctic flora. .... It's hard to imagine how such activities as cotton picking or fruit harvesting would have been carried out without the domestication of hive monkeys, but the the economic gains from the introduction of this species have never been balanced against the inevitable consequences of feral populations running wild..."
The shaghuts are giant ground sloths used by the Leng, a self-proclaimed ubermensch race of Green Antarcticans as mounts for their rockets. The hive monkeys are monkeys domesticated to pick fruit and to function as Green Antarctican sex slaves. The grimdarkness is really starting to show here.
The out and out racism is starting to show, I think
"Aid, trade, green technology and peace." - Hans Rosling.
"Welcome to SDN, where we can't see the forest because walking into trees repeatedly feels good, bro." - Mr Coffee
One thing that I always thought to be stupid about the series is how callous the Tsalal are about human life and how disposable they think it is, even though it would be at a premium. Lets think of it in terms of food: An adult human being needs about 1 kilogram of food a day to be healthy. If we divide it in half for the years of childhood, that means it takes about 2740 kilograms of food to raise a child to be a healthy adult. Getting a child to adulthood represents a considerable investment of resources. Having a kid is a considerable investment of resources in a marginal society. You don't want to waste that investment by killing one of your own children for playing with a dead seabird because it's white and the color white is evil. That is criminally wasteful in the extreme.
For the same reason you are on the margins you don't want to encourage infighting, let alone relishing in torture. A war could lead to your crops being torched and your people freezing to death through the long winter. Infighting would be even worse.
And that "baby piloted missile" idea is unbelievably retarded. Even leaving aside the ethics of it, it's wasteful of a human life that could be better applied elsewhere, it would require expensive holding equipment and it would far more likely than not traumatize the kid into being unable to perform the function.
I can get them cannibalizing the dead (even though this would inevitably lead to prion based diseases, but if the choice is starving to death or going bonkers down the line) and infanticide as a means of population control, but so much of Tsalal society is utterly bonkers. It's making the Dothraki and the Ironborn look like paragons of utilitarian pragmatism. Basically Green Antactica reeks of Grimderp.
Zor
HAIL ZOR!WE'LL BLOW UP THE OCEAN!
Heros of Cybertron-HAB-Keeper of the Vicious pit of Allosauruses-King Leighton-I, United Kingdom of Zoria: SD.net World/Tsar Mikhail-I of the Red Tsardom: SD.net Kingdoms WHEN ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE ON EARTH, ALL EARTH BREAKS LOOSE ON HELL Terran Sphere The Art of Zor
Here's a sample interview between an ordinary human and a Tsalal:
[quote=Ordinary Human]Hello tsalal, long time lurker, first time I actually mustered up the um, valor, to actually question.
For you see, I'm chilean, well, a descendant of the chilean expatriates in Peru, but you catch my drift.
Anyways, I'm not gonna waste my time asking whys or if it was fair, as I don't want to start a flamewar here, but still I can't but help asking... how?
The Mapuche had managed to beat the Spanish to a standstill in less than a century, my nation is proud to remember their fierce legacy, how... how could you beat them in such a short time frame? Nevermind actually my country or that of our brothers in Argentina. Historiography here is full of inaccuracies and undoubtedly biased viewpoints given that even to this day there's many irredentist feelings, so I'd like to know what's the Tsalal viewpoint on those events.
As for less touchy matters, how'd you think someone like me would be received if I dared to visit what-once-was-Santiago? (I can't bear to name its current name, sorry)
I've heard many intriguing tales about the city, including rumors that the colonial tunnels were used to transform it in a pseudo-sunken city, but I fear I may be... unwelcome, to say the least, if I dare step on the lands to the south.
Thanks![/quote]
[quote=A tsalal]
Hi Chum,
It's not so much that the Mapuche were beaten as obliterated. There's a stand up fight. But no one fights an avalanche.
You have to understand what was happening around that time. We had really only known the rest of the world was inhabited since Captain Cook. He'd been lucky, or unlucky enough to wander into the Necrophile Empire which seized him and his ships and kept them alive. The politics of the day were that any genuine novelty or potential advantage would be seized and examined carefully.
As it turns out, the news of Cook was suppressed for almost a generation. But Cook's effects were revolutionary. He introduced us to an entire alternate evolution of gunpowder weapons, which revolutionized warfare. Rockets and rocket technology never went away, of course. It was just that there was a whole range of new toys and applications. The results were a generation of wars and bloodbaths like the worst parts of the White Age.
Of course, the word does get out. Cook and his new worlds become common knowledge from maybe 1795 onwards, and its hard to explain how traumatic and insane that was for people back then. People thought they understood the world and their place in it, and then suddenly, everything everyone knew, every accepted concept was turned inside out, brought into question. It was psychologically traumatic, and perhaps at other times in our history, we would have handled it. But this was an era of a strange brittle inflexibility, and the revolution in war had magnified that inflexibility into a kind of mental calcification kind of like your 18th or 19th century Europe.
Then there's the generations of new contacts with the outside world, the disease interchange. Smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, syphilis. It went both ways, and admittedly, our medicine was pretty good, but it was still terrifying.
You look at the Tsalal World about 1800 to 1810, its incredibly militarized, practically every man and woman is trained in some aspect of military deployment, after twenty five years of breakneck development and import, we've gotten very very good with firearms, pistols, artillery and cannon, and even worse, our tactics and strategies with these have matured and integrated into our war fighting. You have civilization after civilization in the depths of cold war psychosis. Then the diseases hit, and you have these terrifying epidemics coming out of nowhere.
People around that time are literally going insane. One of my literature professors talked about the writing of that time, and he said it was as if everyone then was suffering major post traumatic stress disorder. Cities, Towns, Nations, Entire civilizations where everyone was so high strung, where waking up terrified was a norm, where loud noises could provoke a riot.
I've read of phenomena from that time called screaming orgies, where someone in a crowd would start to scream and it became uncontrollable, everyone began screaming helplessly at the top of their lungs and no one could stop, larynxes would rupture, people coming to try and stop it would join in the screaming, soldiers sent to open fire would lose themselves screaming, people would physically fall down from exhaustion but keep on screaming. There's records of screaming orgies that went on for days, where hundreds died. There's nothing in our history, before or since, like that.
So then in 1816 (your measure) the Tamborah Volcano blows in Indonesia. Europe and North America experiences its 'Year without a summer' and the last of the great European famines. Well, for us, it was a hundred times worse. Our geography meant that the fallout of Tamborah was much much worse, there were ashfalls, dark skies, temperature drops, the glaciers began to move, it was extreme and crazy. It was a repeat of the Taupe Volcano experience of a couple of millennia ago, which had been a defining world trauma - the end of the world back then, and was seared into everyone's collective memories. So after all the craziness, this was happening, it was the end of the world.
And you know, it was as if everyone in the world, the Tsalal World suddenly screamed 'fuck this, I'm getting the fuck out!!!' It was a continent wide howl of misery and terror and frustration, a millennial fever to dwarf all millennial fevers.
And there was some place to get the fuck out too....
You had millions of people, cannibals, necrophiles, torturers, warmongers, killers, soldiers, men of leng, Tcho Tho, Azul, Hali, you name it, and they wanted off. They wanted off the goddammed continent.
There's records of thousands of people just walking out into the water, walking into the ocean en masse and drowning. There's these breakneck efforts to construct seagoing and oceangoing craft of any sort, of communities ransoming gold and jewels and silver and anything they can come up with to buy passage on European slave ships.... The survival rate on our first ships was only 70%. That is, that there was a 1 in 3 chance of sinking and drowning in the circumpolar current, and still people were packing in. The ships refined, but even during the peak, we still lost one ship in twenty, and that didn't bother anyone. We all just wanted out so desperately.
So you want to know what happened to the Mapuche. One day, they woke up in their local village with their horses and dogs, and down at the beach, there were suddenly a hundred thousand clinically insane, hyperviolent, paranoid, terrified, frantic people dragging ocean liners up the shore with their bare hands, building a city literally faster than you could watch.
Now, if you were Mapuche, you could try and fight that, and discover you and four or five acres surrounding you being incinerated in a hail of gun and rocket fire. Or you could try and hide from thousands of terrified hyperparanoids willing to incinerate four or five acres because a seagull looked at someone funny. Or you could try and talk to them.... which mainly got four or five acres incinerated.
Or you could run.
It was as simple as that.
The truth is that there were simply overwhelming numbers, they were showing up overnight, they had overwhelming technology, and they were all batshit crazy.
As for Huzahchuquos-!wo-Qyuttttut, a lot of people still call it Santiago. Which is peculiar, as the name translates as 'Place of treacherous wombs filled with poisonous worms' - Spanish is a funny language, apparently. It's a nice place, it still retains some of the classic early Spanish architecture preserved to this day, and a lot of the early landing buildings are preserved, the people are very friendly, its a city of art and culture, festivals and fun. There is even a local population of Hispanics descended from the original inhabitants (not everyone was enslaved and eaten ... well, not completely eaten). There are a lot of Free irish there. People come from all over the worlds.
The great shafts are still there, by the way. Dug in the first twenty-five years. The biggest and deepest goes down about a thousand meters. Most of the lower levels have been sealed off though. Past 200 meters I think no one lives, its just storage. It's only in the fifty hundred meters that you get a lot of cross tunnels. They're really only of interest to antiquarians, really. There's stories, of course, but hey, there's stories everywhere.
You should really visit. People descended from the original Santiagans are a delicacy there. Is that the right word. A rarity, that's better. There's a sense of awe and wonder. It's like meeting a homo habilis walking down a Roman thoroughfare. It's like a dinosaur. People want to meet you, they want to touch you, small you, they want to take pictures with you, they'll ask you if you have any dogs. You would be loved.
Oh and don't worry about the restaurants. It's all pork, I guarantee it. The tradition is to provide an elaborate provenance for the meal, but really, some of those stories are generations old, don't take them seriously. Although if someone offers you Hermano Echevveria, please decline, I had the runs for a week. Hermano Echevveria meat refers to a very specific quality of meal.
[quote][/quote]
[quote= An ordinary human]
Hello Chal, long time lurker, first time I actually mustered up the um, valor, to actually question.
For you see, I'm chilean, well, a descendant of the chilean expatriates in Peru, but you catch my drift.
Anyways, I'm not gonna waste my time asking whys or if it was fair, as I don't want to start a flamewar here, but still I can't but help asking... how?
The Mapuche had managed to beat the Spanish to a standstill in less than a century, my nation is proud to remember their fierce legacy, how... how could you beat them in such a short time frame? Nevermind actually my country or that of our brothers in Argentina. Historiography here is full of inaccuracies and undoubtedly biased viewpoints given that even to this day there's many irredentist feelings, so I'd like to know what's the Tsalal viewpoint on those events.
As for less touchy matters, how'd you think someone like me would be received if I dared to visit what-once-was-Santiago? (I can't bear to name its current name, sorry)
I've heard many intriguing tales about the city, including rumors that the colonial tunnels were used to transform it in a pseudo-sunken city, but I fear I may be... unwelcome, to say the least, if I dare step on the lands to the south.
Thanks![/quote]
[quote= A Modern Tsalal]Hi Chum,
It's not so much that the Mapuche were beaten as obliterated. There's a stand up fight. But no one fights an avalanche.
You have to understand what was happening around that time. We had really only known the rest of the world was inhabited since Captain Cook. He'd been lucky, or unlucky enough to wander into the Necrophile Empire which seized him and his ships and kept them alive. The politics of the day were that any genuine novelty or potential advantage would be seized and examined carefully.
As it turns out, the news of Cook was suppressed for almost a generation. But Cook's effects were revolutionary. He introduced us to an entire alternate evolution of gunpowder weapons, which revolutionized warfare. Rockets and rocket technology never went away, of course. It was just that there was a whole range of new toys and applications. The results were a generation of wars and bloodbaths like the worst parts of the White Age.
Of course, the word does get out. Cook and his new worlds become common knowledge from maybe 1795 onwards, and its hard to explain how traumatic and insane that was for people back then. People thought they understood the world and their place in it, and then suddenly, everything everyone knew, every accepted concept was turned inside out, brought into question. It was psychologically traumatic, and perhaps at other times in our history, we would have handled it. But this was an era of a strange brittle inflexibility, and the revolution in war had magnified that inflexibility into a kind of mental calcification kind of like your 18th or 19th century Europe.
Then there's the generations of new contacts with the outside world, the disease interchange. Smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, syphilis. It went both ways, and admittedly, our medicine was pretty good, but it was still terrifying.
You look at the Tsalal World about 1800 to 1810, its incredibly militarized, practically every man and woman is trained in some aspect of military deployment, after twenty five years of breakneck development and import, we've gotten very very good with firearms, pistols, artillery and cannon, and even worse, our tactics and strategies with these have matured and integrated into our war fighting. You have civilization after civilization in the depths of cold war psychosis. Then the diseases hit, and you have these terrifying epidemics coming out of nowhere.
People around that time are literally going insane. One of my literature professors talked about the writing of that time, and he said it was as if everyone then was suffering major post traumatic stress disorder. Cities, Towns, Nations, Entire civilizations where everyone was so high strung, where waking up terrified was a norm, where loud noises could provoke a riot.
I've read of phenomena from that time called screaming orgies, where someone in a crowd would start to scream and it became uncontrollable, everyone began screaming helplessly at the top of their lungs and no one could stop, larynxes would rupture, people coming to try and stop it would join in the screaming, soldiers sent to open fire would lose themselves screaming, people would physically fall down from exhaustion but keep on screaming. There's records of screaming orgies that went on for days, where hundreds died. There's nothing in our history, before or since, like that.
So then in 1816 (your measure) the Tamborah Volcano blows in Indonesia. Europe and North America experiences its 'Year without a summer' and the last of the great European famines. Well, for us, it was a hundred times worse. Our geography meant that the fallout of Tamborah was much much worse, there were ashfalls, dark skies, temperature drops, the glaciers began to move, it was extreme and crazy. It was a repeat of the Taupe Volcano experience of a couple of millennia ago, which had been a defining world trauma - the end of the world back then, and was seared into everyone's collective memories. So after all the craziness, this was happening, it was the end of the world.
And you know, it was as if everyone in the world, the Tsalal World suddenly screamed 'fuck this, I'm getting the fuck out!!!' It was a continent wide howl of misery and terror and frustration, a millennial fever to dwarf all millennial fevers.
And there was some place to get the fuck out too....
You had millions of people, cannibals, necrophiles, torturers, warmongers, killers, soldiers, men of leng, Tcho Tho, Azul, Hali, you name it, and they wanted off. They wanted off the goddammed continent.
There's records of thousands of people just walking out into the water, walking into the ocean en masse and drowning. There's these breakneck efforts to construct seagoing and oceangoing craft of any sort, of communities ransoming gold and jewels and silver and anything they can come up with to buy passage on European slave ships.... The survival rate on our first ships was only 70%. That is, that there was a 1 in 3 chance of sinking and drowning in the circumpolar current, and still people were packing in. The ships refined, but even during the peak, we still lost one ship in twenty, and that didn't bother anyone. We all just wanted out so desperately.
So you want to know what happened to the Mapuche. One day, they woke up in their local village with their horses and dogs, and down at the beach, there were suddenly a hundred thousand clinically insane, hyperviolent, paranoid, terrified, frantic people dragging ocean liners up the shore with their bare hands, building a city literally faster than you could watch.
Now, if you were Mapuche, you could try and fight that, and discover you and four or five acres surrounding you being incinerated in a hail of gun and rocket fire. Or you could try and hide from thousands of terrified hyperparanoids willing to incinerate four or five acres because a seagull looked at someone funny. Or you could try and talk to them.... which mainly got four or five acres incinerated.
Or you could run.
It was as simple as that.
The truth is that there were simply overwhelming numbers, they were showing up overnight, they had overwhelming technology, and they were all batshit crazy.
As for Huzahchuquos-!wo-Qyuttttut, a lot of people still call it Santiago. Which is peculiar, as the name translates as 'Place of treacherous wombs filled with poisonous worms' - Spanish is a funny language, apparently. It's a nice place, it still retains some of the classic early Spanish architecture preserved to this day, and a lot of the early landing buildings are preserved, the people are very friendly, its a city of art and culture, festivals and fun. There is even a local population of Hispanics descended from the original inhabitants (not everyone was enslaved and eaten ... well, not completely eaten). There are a lot of Free irish there. People come from all over the worlds.
The great shafts are still there, by the way. Dug in the first twenty-five years. The biggest and deepest goes down about a thousand meters. Most of the lower levels have been sealed off though. Past 200 meters I think no one lives, its just storage. It's only in the fifty hundred meters that you get a lot of cross tunnels. They're really only of interest to antiquarians, really. There's stories, of course, but hey, there's stories everywhere.
You should really visit. People descended from the original Santiagans are a delicacy there. Is that the right word. A rarity, that's better. There's a sense of awe and wonder. It's like meeting a homo habilis walking down a Roman thoroughfare. It's like a dinosaur. People want to meet you, they want to touch you, small you, they want to take pictures with you, they'll ask you if you have any dogs. You would be loved.
Oh and don't worry about the restaurants. It's all pork, I guarantee it. The tradition is to provide an elaborate provenance for the meal, but really, some of those stories are generations old, don't take them seriously. Although if someone offers you Hermano Echevveria, please decline, I had the runs for a week. Hermano Echevveria meat refers to a very specific quality of meal.
[/quote]
I remember this, the author is his deep stupidity thought that preindustrial/1880's rockets could be better than cannon.
Also he assumed that a society specifically designed to be the epitome of evil would survive the nuclear age.
Although some of the evil shit had some pretty well thought out reasoning behind it.
But that was the result of commenters not the author.
'Grimderp' is an interesting word, Zor. I think I get the meaning, and I like it.
But yeah, there's a recurring vein of "Powerful Sociopath Civilization That Is Strong Because EVIL IS POWERFUL" in modern fiction; the earliest example I can think of being S. M. Stirling's Draka.
And almost invariably, such fictional civilizations fail to explain how they're going to be functional and stable while adopting practices that in real life are avoided by all societies precisely because they lead to starvation, disease, or collapse of the population.
The Draka make far more sense than these guys. Their are plenty of real world atrocious behaviors in human societies that the author could have adapted, but he insists of pushing passed any possible suspension of disbelief in the quest to make these guys maximum evil. These guys weren't even remotely scary or even really repulsive because I could not take their existence seriously.
The Excellent Prismatic Spray. For when you absolutely, positively must kill a motherfucker. Accept no substitutions. Contact a magician of the later Aeons for details. Some conditions may apply.
Yeah. I'm giving the Draka as a founding example; since then it's gotten worse and weirder, until it's really blatantly just the result of random sociopathic fucks spilling the uninhibited slime of their imaginations onto the page. And with literally no ability to understand human nature, the sociopaths are unable to construct convincing human societies.
In fairness, if I remember correctly, the Antarctic Bastards did not gain a technical edge because of their (I'm pretty sure non-sociopathic) evilness, but because they developed gunpowder 9,000 years ago, had plant/animals suitable for domestic, and had to store up food for the long winters.
If I remember correctly, the first organized society was actually better morally speaking than most of the ones in TTL, they just fell due to a destruction of infrastructure caused by war.
The later societies just piled on cruelty upon cruelty for little apparent reason.
There is one story immediately after the fall about the emergence of necrophilia which makes a little sense (In a migration of the peoples type scenario, forcing conquered tribes to rape their dead leaders in order to break down old loyalties as part of forcing new ones upon them.) in that I could suspend my disbelief about it if the story was good.
But then the stupid bastard writing it keeps going, and it's too bad, because he spent a great deal of time setting up the flora, fauna, and environment of Antarctica. If the guy had just known to stop at the point where they are clearly antithetical to European Victorian values, enough to cause a war, and then given them some redeeming traits (egalitarianism might be a good start) he might have been able to make a compelling universe, especially sense I don't remember him being a mechanically bad writer. The story about the children being taught by the elders why white was evil and death sticks out in my mind as a good story. Though I don't remember it very well.
He's not a mechanically bad writer, in fact he's rather good at it. It's constructing a plausible evil society that he sucks at. It's not that fucking hard. Ancient Rome had orgies of sadism at their games and Carthage had child sacrifice. The Aztecs had human sacrifice numbering in thousands yearly and ritual cannibalism. But some people just have to jump over the shark . . .
Pro tip: In places where its hard to survive, human life isn't cheap, it's expensive. Replacing the slaves you just butchered for the lols is going to be hard.
The Excellent Prismatic Spray. For when you absolutely, positively must kill a motherfucker. Accept no substitutions. Contact a magician of the later Aeons for details. Some conditions may apply.
A similar thing can be said about the Gladiatorial Games. Fantasy writers and Hollywood in particular oversell just how deadly they were, confusing public executions with Gladiators when they were largely different things.
And they completely fail to understand the culture behind and around it. It was much weirder than they imagine.
ISARMA: Daikaiju Coordinator: Just Add Radiation Justice League- Molly Hayes: Respect Hats or Freakin' Else! Browncoat Supernatural Taisen - "[This Story] is essentially "Wouldn't it be awesome if this happened?" Followed by explosions."
Reviewing movies is a lot like Paleontology: The Evidence is there...but no one seems to agree upon it.
"God! Are you so bored that you enjoy seeing us humans suffer?! Why can't you let this poor man live happily with his son! What kind of God are you, crushing us like ants?!" - Kyoami, Ran
