Chelsea

Useful methodology for many people including me, but the specific stories need some work and there are about half a dozen significant errors. Anki is invaluable for learning through this method btw.

I deserve some reward tape after finishing this behemoth. I'm going to take drugs and watch cat videos for a couple hours, then come back to write a review.

I didn't expect much from this because I bounced off the serialized version on the SCP wiki, but it improved a lot in the editing process!

I love that it just ran with the concept and let it get as crazy as possible. My favorite bit was the huge antimemetic leviathan skull that they turned into a meeting room with built-in idea containment.

The writing is basically fine. It's all written in the present tense which I always find a bit annoying. The use of black boxes as 'censorship' feels a bit overdone to me at this point, but that may be because I've spent too much time reading SCPs.

I thought using memetics as a lens to explore how fascism captures and corrupts people was a very fun angle, and a good way to tie all the interesting bits here into a cohesive novel.

I read this in the middle of Cyteen to understand some of the references to it in that book.

40,000 in Gehenna is basically fine if you like pulp sci-fi or are really into the alliance-union universe. It's not as packed with interesting ideas as some of Cherryh's other work. That's not to say there's nothing here -- you just have to dig through some not-very-interesting set building to get to it. I think Cyteen's references back to this book actually do more with the ideas than the book itself does.

It's a little too thriller-y for me, and I think the premise worked better as a short story. I would have liked denser worldbuilding around how instancing works -- the book operates on Sliders logic, in the sense that this alternate universe only diverges from the real world in the circumscribed limits that are relevant to the narrative or can be used to make a point or allusion.

Like far too much contemporary literature, this book leans on the present tense to make the story feel more immediate. It also swaps between second-person and third-person to distinguish between two different kinds of POV, which I found annoying.

The themes are lovely, though, and richly explored! That just works better for me in a short story than a 350 page novel.