The DW Accessibility Project Team

Apart from proofreading and related edits, book 7, "Vasanti Sultana and the Riddle of Hope," is done. It has 73 chapters, and 1067 pages.

And I also just found out that not only was compiling it in an ODM file the extremely aggravating way to do it, that caused me massive amounts of stress and frustration every time I added new chapters to it, but it was all a fucking POINTLESS WASTE OF FUCKING TIME because ODM files cannot be exported to Epub format; it gives me a weird error message whenever I try to do it. So the old way of doing things, where I just copy-pasted every chapter's text one after the other into one massive ODT file, was the right way to do it all along. FML. I will do that later. I ain't fucking with it right now.

I absolutely DETEST the "dark forest" theory because it's utterly ridiculous. It assumes that capitalism, imperialism, and conquest is universally normal, which is absurd. It isn't even normal for all of humanity! It's an aberration! And even if it was normal universally, the universe is so goddamned HUGE that there are basically infinite resources in the universe to use without even touching planets with life. Just mining the asteroid belt and the dead planets of our own solar system would probably take us thousands of years to start running dry of things. Then there are nebulae thousands of light-years across filled with so much water and amino acids and other good stuff that it would take a fleet of ten thousand ships with ramscoops a million years to deplete. There are massive, gigantic rocky planets with water and ingredients for life but are icy and dead or too hot for anything to live there, or the gravity is too high because they're so massive. An interstellar civilization could mine those as well, since these super-massive, vaguely earth-like worlds are much too extreme for complex life. Probably too extreme even for simple life!

The explanations I favor for why we aren't hearing signals from aliens are:
1. Aliens are out there and sending signals, but the universe is just so goddamned big that none of those signals have reached us yet, or they're too weak to ever reach us because they spread out too thin. I like this one because no matter how big you think even our galaxy is -- let alone the whole universe -- you are WAY off the mark because everything in space is bigger than the human mind can even begin to comprehend. And the signals we're sending out are already thinning out so much that I'm betting most of the oldest signals are indistinguishable from the cosmic radio background noise.

2. Humans are the only sapient species stupid enough to rape and wreck our own home planet for greed and capitalism. I like this one because I like the thought that war, conquest, imperialism, and capitalism are such aberrations that most alien civilizations are living their "milk and honey / hunter gatherer" lifestyle in peace, and it's only here on Earth that anyone went insane enough to invent war, conquest, imperialism, or capitalism.

Now these two ideas aren't even mutually exclusive. I could see agriculture and even industry developing without fucking up the planet's ecosystem or the aliens killing each other over resources. It would just take longer, with more cooperation, and focusing on mining areas and techniques that would do minimal damage to the environment, and then fixing any damage done as soon as possible.

Call me an idealist, but damn... if I was a better writer, I would be writing a sci-fi novel where industrial civilizations based on cooperation and sustainability arose, and were so common as to be normal. And Earth would be there, but I'd write a humanity that had realized they had no need to bother their neighbors because there's more than enough resources in our own solar system and in solar systems without any life of their own, that it would take millions of years to even begin running out of resources. And by then, hopefully humanity would learn good sustainability lessons both from their own mistakes and from the good examples of their neighbors. And the book or books would make it damned clear that humanity was singularly unique in the sheer speed and violence of their rising from hunter/gatherer to intergalactic civilization. We'd be the barbarians shocking everyone else with how fast we flung ourselves off our home planet. Before us, it would be unheard of for anyone to achieve an intergalactic civilization in less than a million years after the advent of writing.

Sure, there would be examples of civilizations that made it to an industrial level in less time, but the only evidence for any of those would usually be found by xenoarchaeologists digging up the ruins of such civilizations after they nuked themselves into extinction before ever getting so much as a probe into outer space. It would be considered a miracle or something that we managed to overcome our own barbarism. That "or something" making a great many other alien races decide to give us a wide berth in case we were just really good at pretending to be civilized. Basically, "humans are space orcs" but in a... not so good way. Not bad exactly, just... a bit like watching a civilization of the nastiest, most violent meth addicts manage to not blow themselves up, die of an overdose, kill all their own babies from neglect or abuse, or kill each other off for drugs or money, and then get clean and begin getting their lives back on track. There'd always be the memory of what we were, and the fear we'd fall off the wagon again.

Of course we're 100% still in that "violent meth addicts" stage. As long as capitalism exists, we're going to stay there. If we want to get clean, we have to get rid of capitalism and replace it with cooperation and sustainability. We have to start caring for the Earth and the ecosystem and helping it heal from our past mistakes.

I have been having issues reading for the last year or so, you might be aware. Only thing I had been reading during that time had been audiobooks, and even then sometimes I wasn't able to finish them. Well I finally managed to read something that wasn't an audiobook. It was a novella, but still...

A few weeks ago I bought "What Stalks The Deep" by T. Kingfisher on Kobo because I had signed up for a Kobo account to get books through them instead of on Amazon, and this one was on sale some weeks ago so I bought it and it languished there for a while, until I got bored enough to start reading it. I was mildly annoyed that I had missed the fact it wasn't an audiobook, but I soldiered on ahead anyway. And in just like, two or three days, I read the whole thing! Helps that it's a novella, but still... progress. Also mildly annoyed it's number three in a series, but the little bits of spoilers in the book for book 1 and 2 just has me all the more excited to read those.

Here's the review I wrote on GoodReads about it:

An excellent book filled with a mix of horror, Westerns, humor, and sci-fi. I love the casual LGBT representation done without stereotypes. All the characters are just ordinary people, ultimately, like in the real world. Yes, the era the books take place in is well before most modern terminology, but the books reflect that, everything feeling organic to the setting and the times.

An aspect of that is that one of the LGBT representations in this book was such a slow burn that it took the main character -- who by today's terminology in the West would be "non-binary, presenting male, assigned female at birth" -- half the book to suspect what was going on, and took even longer for that to be confirmed.

The main character's culture and gender is fascinating, too. Alex is Galacian, and in that culture apparently they have half a dozen different sets of pronouns, the one Alex uses is the set for soldiers: ka/kan. But they also have pronouns for men, women, children, priests, rocks, and God. And because the Galacian culture is a real world culture (in what is currently part of Spain), that just makes it all the more fascinating.

I was also deeply fascinated with the biology of this book's monster, and it is making me deeply eager to read the other books in the series. Because yes, I didn't realize this was the third book in the series when I bought it, and so I need to go back and read books one and two. But while this book does have some spoilers for those first two books, I don't think I'm really losing out on much by reading them out of order.

-- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7650697029?book_show_action=false