On the last day of his life, Melvin Sninkle toured the Smithsonian Museum. The building had been superficially damaged, but repairs were already underway and a new wing was being added to commemorate the Columbus Strike. Ostensibly, the new wing was the purpose of his visit, but due to a near miraculous scheduling conflict that had postponed the ribbon cutting ceremony -
I should be in bed already so I'm going to try and keep this short, but I've never been particularly good at that. I just read up to this in one sitting, so I figured I owed you the benefit of my Unique and Very Important Opinion ;p
I enjoyed the read quite a bit, though there were some parts that were there seemed to be a substantial shift from "interesting narrative" to "the author wants to tell me all about something". That's not to say that what you were telling me was uninteresting, but it seemed like the conceit of the historian explaining the past to the reader seemed to give way to thinly veiled opinions about the present.
That's not to say I even disagree with any of those opinions, it just seemed like you slipped a few blog posts into an interesting and entertaining story. That said, I don't know dick about writing fiction, not to mention how to write fiction that is trying to explain ideas to the reader. It seems like quite a task, and one that I couldn't even come close to doing as good of a job as you at.
I don't have the issue with the characters that Odd anon seems to. Yes, they're relatively thin but there's something to be said for characters that are cartoons. I don't think you're trying to explain the essence of the human spirit or anything, so using characters as archetypes sits just fine with me. Yes, the intelligence/military shill character was devoid of any humanity, but given she seems to be more of a stand-in for those aspects that are present in many people, I don't see it as a problem.
My last comment is that I enjoy the light hearted, easy reading approach to your writing. While I consider Lem the gold standard of sci-fi, dear god can he be hard to wade through at times. As much as I get from Lem, I'm honestly more likely to read something by a "less serious" author who's style is less serious.
Keep up the good work! I'm looking forward to the conclusion. I'm just now noticing that yo posted this almost a year ago, and I swear to god if I don't get to learn what the Wizard is planning with several thousand watts of coherent light, I'll bug you on every one of your barpod posts until you finish!
Reviewing what I've read up till this point. Good parts then bad parts.
The ideas themselves are quite good, and their depiction does a decent job of showing the current-day problems with decision-making, expertise-management, collective predictions, information distribution, etc. "The Forum" and "The Index", and their displayed implementations read nicely. (There's a bit of "childishness" on occasion, but I assume that's a deliberate stylistic choice.) (You're probably already aware of this, but Metaculus is doing something that could be viewed as a primitive version of the Index, having entries for predictions by public figures.)
The explanations are okay, but occasionally lacking detail or key points. I'd recommend trying to go a bit more into likely problems that would arise and ways they could be mitigated.
The fiction and characters are, ah, not good. The messianic protagonist, the over-the-top villains, and the ignorant state of the depicted society is cringeworthy. I'd strongly recommend dumping the named journalist characters entirely. The scenes of heroic efforts by The Good Guys do not add anything positive. I would expect a story around this topic to have a theme of problematic institutions and the collective development of their solutions, not of Good Guys triumphing over Evil Villains. The culmination of the president's face-off with reporters was awful, and made it hard to keep reading. Additionally, the depiction of the president being the country's best communicator (not to mention being the person who can single-handedly think up the best proposals) is also counter to the idea of having the best people in the best positions for them, rather than just assuming some people are good at everything and can just handle things (ie, the current system of elections to person-in-charge).
I strongly recommend heavily editing the relevant chapters. There's some good stuff here, and it would be disappointing if it were lose possible readership simply because of the issues with the fiction/story parts.
I should be in bed already so I'm going to try and keep this short, but I've never been particularly good at that. I just read up to this in one sitting, so I figured I owed you the benefit of my Unique and Very Important Opinion ;p
I enjoyed the read quite a bit, though there were some parts that were there seemed to be a substantial shift from "interesting narrative" to "the author wants to tell me all about something". That's not to say that what you were telling me was uninteresting, but it seemed like the conceit of the historian explaining the past to the reader seemed to give way to thinly veiled opinions about the present.
That's not to say I even disagree with any of those opinions, it just seemed like you slipped a few blog posts into an interesting and entertaining story. That said, I don't know dick about writing fiction, not to mention how to write fiction that is trying to explain ideas to the reader. It seems like quite a task, and one that I couldn't even come close to doing as good of a job as you at.
I don't have the issue with the characters that Odd anon seems to. Yes, they're relatively thin but there's something to be said for characters that are cartoons. I don't think you're trying to explain the essence of the human spirit or anything, so using characters as archetypes sits just fine with me. Yes, the intelligence/military shill character was devoid of any humanity, but given she seems to be more of a stand-in for those aspects that are present in many people, I don't see it as a problem.
My last comment is that I enjoy the light hearted, easy reading approach to your writing. While I consider Lem the gold standard of sci-fi, dear god can he be hard to wade through at times. As much as I get from Lem, I'm honestly more likely to read something by a "less serious" author who's style is less serious.
Keep up the good work! I'm looking forward to the conclusion. I'm just now noticing that yo posted this almost a year ago, and I swear to god if I don't get to learn what the Wizard is planning with several thousand watts of coherent light, I'll bug you on every one of your barpod posts until you finish!
Reviewing what I've read up till this point. Good parts then bad parts.
The ideas themselves are quite good, and their depiction does a decent job of showing the current-day problems with decision-making, expertise-management, collective predictions, information distribution, etc. "The Forum" and "The Index", and their displayed implementations read nicely. (There's a bit of "childishness" on occasion, but I assume that's a deliberate stylistic choice.) (You're probably already aware of this, but Metaculus is doing something that could be viewed as a primitive version of the Index, having entries for predictions by public figures.)
The explanations are okay, but occasionally lacking detail or key points. I'd recommend trying to go a bit more into likely problems that would arise and ways they could be mitigated.
The fiction and characters are, ah, not good. The messianic protagonist, the over-the-top villains, and the ignorant state of the depicted society is cringeworthy. I'd strongly recommend dumping the named journalist characters entirely. The scenes of heroic efforts by The Good Guys do not add anything positive. I would expect a story around this topic to have a theme of problematic institutions and the collective development of their solutions, not of Good Guys triumphing over Evil Villains. The culmination of the president's face-off with reporters was awful, and made it hard to keep reading. Additionally, the depiction of the president being the country's best communicator (not to mention being the person who can single-handedly think up the best proposals) is also counter to the idea of having the best people in the best positions for them, rather than just assuming some people are good at everything and can just handle things (ie, the current system of elections to person-in-charge).
I strongly recommend heavily editing the relevant chapters. There's some good stuff here, and it would be disappointing if it were lose possible readership simply because of the issues with the fiction/story parts.