lizbee | (Reply)

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Wow. This whole post was a fucking voyage. I hope your ankle heals swiftly!

Thank you! I wasn't really going to write this up, given that I'd already had a nice ramble about it on Facebook (I wanted the opinions of a specific friend, you see...) but then I made the connection between "having a cry" and "getting medical treatment".

I feel like Empire is Bad is more of a mind blowing revolutionary concept in some circles of SF than it ought to be.

RIGHT. Just last week, I got into a fight on Reddit with a guy who was very angry when I said the Federation is an empire. A benevolent, volunteer-members-only empire! But it still has a homogenising effect on the universe, and that's worth talking about.

(I also feel like Babel's premise may have felt more revolutionary to people outside the Commonwealth. Like, we touched on the Opium Wars and the conquest of India in school. Only the magic was new, and honestly, the worldbuilding around that was pretty weak.)