Josh

reconciling faith, fate, free will, drugs, Vietnam, and violence

Fun, short, and well written.

Neat family dynamic premise with fairly shallow character development and superficial dystopia.

Why the “twist”? I think I would have liked it better to have been a story of modern day Jack Turner recounting the experiences while navigating his current life.

It's a sketch comedy that you'd see only if the actor was really selling it and then everyone would winner why you keep watching it. The last 50 pages changed into a more lethargic pace but with larger strides. There's no point to this story, but most pulps are just that and that's this.

JD Vance has helped convinced me to get into writing and he helped convince me to be a more active person.
He did this by writing a bad “memoir” and by being a politician that thrives on hate, exploitation, and fear.
Thanks JD.

It's a book. It's short. It's a sci-fi story that covers a cyborg's(robot with organic material?) life after it has removed it's regulator. It's obsessed with consuming media. It learns to have pals. It's a story we are getting from murderbot's memoir-vlog. It's capitalist future wheee corporate planetary expeditions are led and there's some neo-liberal form of this that exists as “preservation”. Preservation lets units exist as free entities but requires that they be signed to a human guardian.
People commonly practice polygamy.
People feel for robot rights.
Some people are greedy.
Some people are less so.
Story is not really fun or new.
It does not explore new concepts (other than a muderbot that loves consuming media).
It's a “soft” sci-fi that has no challenging/thought provoking elements.

The writing itself wasn't bad, but what was written wasn't good.

In the mid 1800's, Dostoevsky wrote the predecessor to early 2000's autistic 4chan basement dwellers. This socially dysfunctional character is in a world where they can't adequately interpret their own feelings or the feelings of others. The author of the notes is constantly at odds with their own desires and with other people intents. Their ability to discern what they want vs what they are anticipating to be the expected outcome of that want is fragmented. I mean to say, they don't know what they are feeling as much as they are feeling a first emotion, then a counter emotion, then a tertiary emotion, and then they feel compelled to rationalize these conflicting feelings and thoughts into a fractured philosophy and moral compass.

The book consists of the shallow notes of a poor and mentally isolated man that tries to convince himself (us?) that it's great to be in the “underground”.

It's late and I'm not organizing my thoughts well, but this book doesn't feel like a deep philosophy like other discussions suggest. It's not filled with “deep hard questions”. It also doesn't feel comical. Even if you manage to keep up with the frantic pacing, the comedy would be if you find being manically mentally exasperated funny. Is he making a fool out of himself? Yes, but, that's because the character is necessarily foolish due to their environment. They don't fit. If there's a joke, the joke is the world that necessitates their existence in such a state.

Cool concept with mid writing and weak spots all over.

Dnf

Might have in LOA

I've been trying to read this book for a decade.