A pretty good sf story

[nancylebov]

Mine the Primes by Julian Todd. It's a cross between environmentalism and Atlas Shrugged-- not the sort of thing I'd expect to work, but it does.

It came up in a discussion at yhlee's about how much science you need to write science fiction.

I'm really not sure-- the problem may be that some authors are thrown off-balance by bad science or history or whatever. There are certainly stories that work very well for readers in spite of bad science or other nonsense. 1984_ has been a very useful horror story for the intelligentsia even if it doesn't make sense that O'Brian would put so much work into into breaking Winston. _Dune_ works nicely even though the still suits wouldn't. (They don't seem to have any way of getting rid of heat.) The still suits work very well as a way of underlining the scarcity of water.

I'm very fond of the premise of "Mine the Primes", but it's definitely a shiver-down-the-spine collision of coolness with only the smallest homeopathic nibble of truth.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Both reasonable, though I'm not sure how much Orwell implies that people haven't really changed, and the restrictions people live under are so severe that I'd expect a lot of rebels like Julia, even if relatively few like Winston.