Ensemble cast, most of them female. There's also a half dozen male characters who could have been protagonists themselves in a different telling of the story, but this centered on the women.
Hundreds of pages. I could not put it down.
Why? Difficult practical problems. Cosmic stakes. Stupendous world-building. Massive challenges, overcome with superhuman courage and sacrifice. Interesting science concepts. This is excellent science fiction because the setup: "how the hell are they going to solve THAT?" has an extremely interesting payoff. The sex of the characters is just a side effect of the concept being explored and it's a compelling concept.
I asked Claude to analyze the last 300 videos from the "I've had it" podcast and to give me the world view of someone who relies on them for news.
Claude: "A person immersed exclusively in this ecosystem views the world through a lens of totalizing political paranoia and self-righteous outrage, reduced to a black-and-white spectacle of righteous resistance versus abject evil. Every complex geopolitical event, economic strain, or cultural shift is flattened into a single, sensationalized narrative: an imminent fascist takeover orchestrated by a comic-book lineup of "oligarchs," "whack jobs," and corrupt elites. Operating within a high-decibel echo chamber, they mistake vulgar catharsis and relentless mockery for sophisticated political analysis, consuming news not to understand the world, but to validate their own moral superiority and partisan disdain.
Ultimately, this worldview fosters a profound cognitive dysfunction, replacing civic discourse with paranoid conspiratorial thinking and performative activism. Complex institutional processes are dismissed as mere theater, while every political opponent is demonized as a bad-faith actor or cultist beyond redemption. By relying on a steady diet of apocalyptic warnings and therapeutic venting, the consumer becomes addicted to a cycle of perpetual grievance and righteous panic, rendering them entirely incapable of engaging with nuance, counter-evidence, or the lived realities of anyone outside their immediate political tribe."
@MakewiEatsSpam@memeticsisyphus The subject, and the architecture of the story. Boys want superlative archetypes who struggle and fail and then win. Something to aspire to be. They crave role models.
@IterIntellectus I would only quibble with "let"
Thats not going to happen. The male authors are going to have to embody that hero and build a publishing edifice of their own. It is already happening. The stone the builders rejected will become the capstone.
this is also why boys are reading so much less now that children’s publishing has become female dominated
men write archetypes. women write about themselves.
men write about heroes, villains, gods, monsters, extraordinary characters who embody something greater than themselves, heroes that boys can admire and aspire to become
women write characters who look like them, think like them, have their problems and insecurities, characters they can identify with and project themselves onto
men use writing as a vehicle for self-transcendence while women use it as a vehicle for self-recognition
it’s the difference between wanting to become Batman and wanting Batman to become you
it’s then obvious why boys craving the hero’s journey would rather retreat into video games than read yet another piece of autobiographical, gossip-filled, moralizing turboslop
if you want boys to start reading again you need to let men write again