tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:172935lightreadslightreadslightreads2017-04-13T02:09:44Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:172935:208266If Then by Matthew De Abaitua2017-04-13T02:09:44Z2017-04-13T02:09:44Zpublic0<a href="http://amzn.to/2o8rvYg">If Then</a><br /><br />2/5. Post economic collapse. A small community lives under the rule of The Process, an algorithm programmed to run their lives to maximize fairness and happiness. Then there's a lot of brain implants and philosophical arguments and violently awful World War I battle simulations, and it's all weird as hell.<br /><br />The best book that I've viscerally disliked in quite a while. It <i>is</i> good – there's all sorts of chewiness to this. Pieces that you can keep turning and turning after reading. I could go on about self-determination and collective violence and collective inaction and whatever.<br /><br />But. But I didn't like it's smug omniscient slant. And I <i>really</i> didn't like the way my back had tensed up by the 20% mark. I'm not sure I can put my finger on all the subliminal cues I was picking up, but I was just waiting for a steaming pot of misogyny right to the face. Which didn't quite happen – in so many words – except. You know when a dude writes a woman thinking about sex, and it is just so incredibly <i>a dude writing a woman thinking about sex</i>? Like, you can spot the dude component of that from space? Yeah.<br /><br />Basically, I felt totally vindicated when I discovered, around the 75% mark, that the author is the sort who will publicly complain about a review of his book that he doesn't like. Which is just. Never ever ever a good look. Particularly when the reviewer is a woman who called out some potential misogyny.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=lightreads&ditemid=208266" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments