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queenluaHow the hell do you talk about the last book in a series? And, especially, how do you talk about the last book in this series?
I read the first book while at a shitty hostel in San Francisco, right? And I called my boyfriend in the middle of that ~*~econometrics as doomsday prophecy~*~ scene, because I was laughing so hard I was crying and I had to share that moment with someone. Then I cornered some rando Dutch guys in the hostel kitchen to also share the moment with them (with less success, though they were awfully nice about it). Then I got back home a few days later and wouldn't shut up about it to my friends.
For a while, I pitched the novels on the strength of their worldbuilding, but in hindsight that's not quite right. There's too many seams and cracks, in this vision of the future; too much that's glossed over via faith or "wouldn't it be cool though" and Great Men wandering around doing Great Things. If you're interested in worldbuilding in the sense of meticulous civilizational realism, everything thoroughly figured out and 100% plausible, and so on, these books aren't that.
But. If you enjoy worldbuilding in the form of interesting ideas, thought experiments, manic jumping from thing-to-thing, philosopher-energy and horny-energy and showoff-energy and unhinged-energy and melodrama, all knitted together with hella panache and weirdo overly-earnest speeches—if you've ever enjoyed anime guys duking it out over Big Ideas—yeah, this series delivers, in a way entirely new to me. (In novel form, at least. When someone on Tumblr pointed out JEDD Mason has some serious Kaworu-from-Neon-Genesis-Evangelion vibes so much clicked for me, haha.)
What I'm saying is this series feels more like this great big galloping thing than a book, and I'm not sure a conventional book write-up really captures the feeling of the thing. So I've been dragging my feet talking about it!
But let's try.
* In general, I thought this was a stronger narrative overall than The Will to Battle, but not as strong as Too Like the Lightning and probably a bit shy of Seven Surrenders.
* That's still really good, to be clear. I put down TWtB feeling faintly disappointed; I put down Perhaps the Stars feeling like something flawed-yet-momentous had just reached a pretty satisfying end.
* In particular, we finally got to the war....!
* ...but the war was. um.
* The early war portions were a weird mix of "actually kind of clever" and "no one is this dumb/courteous/earnest in wartime, please stop straining my credulity." Maybe I'm too ruthlessly realpolitik? But like, I'm sorry, Carlyle persuading an invading army to back off of Romanova by being terribly polite and shaming them into playing fair does not pass muster; if I'm in a war and I have a chance to capture a major city, I'm capturing the fucking city. I also found it weird how utterly incurious everyone seemed about the source of the global radio silence, and the global car hijacking, like—did no one care? or was there just literally no one around competent enough to try to find out the source? Neither of these, uh, reflect particularly well on the populace of Terra Ignota.
On the positive side, I found the Cousins' tiring guns simultaneously clever and dubious as hell; in general I would like more of Kosala doing seemingly-nice-but-dubious-as-hell things because that's a pretty sickass Cousins vibe.
* However: while they strained credulity a bit, I did like the narrative effect of that global radio silence, and the global transportation nerf, very much. I actually would've liked to have them Be In A Place for longer, actually—I don't think it felt quite oppressive enough, quite long enough, before we got the alternate system online + started just Faustbursting all our comms.
* Also, when the cars were about to go down, and Martin was being very coy about where he was located? and when he's finally forced to announce "Klamath Marsh" and everyone's just gasping in horror because, dear god, the wilderness, the desolation, the inhumanity of it all??? I was laughing my ass off, like—I have a friend who lives near there, and the idea of everyone being like "oh NO that godless WILDERNESS how will you SURVIVE" is just so funny to me. Like, I realize this is the US many centuries into the future and the point is that he's far from JEDD and yada yada, but still :P
* (a lot of the joy I find in these books is laughing at some of the images that are either intentionally or unintentionally silly via juxtaposition! does anyone else feel that way?)
* speaking of silliness: Carlyle's solution to the problem of "oh no what if people find out about each other's religions" was SO fucking funny and SO very Peak Terra Ignota. we got a global war going on, we got serious military shit to figure out, but we gotta stop everything for ten pages to explain this convoluted scheme for rendering everyone's religions inscrutable, because everyone just being chill about religion for eight seconds is unthinkable. I love it. I love this ridiculous weirdly-puritanical-in-certain-ways universe.
* Back to the war: in addition to people just being weirdly implausibly earnest and/or clueless, the stakes just didn't feel very... real... most of the time? Like, when it looked like they were actually going to blow up the moon and Mars, I gasped at the audacity of it; I thought, damn, Palmer's going to write a narrative with some actual palpable and painful loss... setting back Utopia's space travel thing by centuries feels like a real consequence of war and really painful...! But uh, then we literally deus ex machina our way out of it, so, whatever. I mean, the mecha is cool as hell, and I feel ridiculous dunking on a scene that concludes with "and then we motorcycled in a badass bitch to save the day with our giant laser space robot", but...
* I'm nominating Su-Hyeon for Top 10 Anime Betrayals TM, holy fuck. That whole chapter with 9A slowly realizing who their enemy was was a total gut punch; I had to put the book down for a bit.
* 9A's "look at all us girlbosses" speech was hilarious (I've definitely been in the room when a fellow lady-engineer was giving a similar speech, lol), but... it did feel a bit odd that Palmer just gave us a whole page of "here's everyone's Real Bio Genders; check this answer key against your test" sort of thing? I've not been invested in the gender stuff in this series in general (it's just the bit of storytelling that I've personally found kind of shaky/inconsistent and thus have been determinedly ignoring), but even so, it felt a little like cheating!
* oh also: 9A's voice did eventually grow on me, and I liked them plenty by the end (rip bridgerghosting), but I was so glad when Mycroft came back. my boy is absolutely unhinged. i love him
* This narrative continues to want me to love Utopia, in a way that I continue to find actively irritating. Like, in the early war, when "U-Beasts" are attacking and people naturally conclude it's Utopia, and 9A's like "no, Utopia are smol precious beans who have never done anything wrong in their lives," and they're getting pissed at everyone for being so "stupid" for assuming Utopia are the bad guys, I was sitting here like... hello? they did do a big preemptive strike thingy? they do act like condescending self-absorbed recluses and have done so for centuries and apparently have no interest in a PR firm for changing that impression? they're in fact capable of wiles? the logical thing to do in a war is to in fact do the war??? Bueller? Bueller?
* Alternatively: I think the narrative wants me to think the Brillists are evil, or at least not to love them, but joke's on the narrative, babey! Felix Faust has been my dude for multiple books now (I seem to recall a friend saying something to the effect of "he's the only one having any fucking fun in this utopia," and like... yeah...), and I was not expecting him to become a major player, at all, and I was so delighted with him here.
* In general, the whole argument Felix gives for Brillism vs Utopia was so delightful and funny to me because I have absolutely heard this barfight in San Francisco; I know exactly the type of nerds who passionately argue about proper resource allocation for brain-uploading versus space-traveling; and I love them
* i will concede that the way he fucked up Dominic is absolutely savage, though, jesus
* so. MASON oath. pretty windbaggy right
* relatedly: MASON dying by doing a dumb, while Kosala's fucking screaming at MASON to not do the dumb, is so fucking in character
* come to think of it, of all the characters that died, I think Ganymede had the best death—that duel! classy! cool! Ganymede-y! crushing, but at least he died in a very Humanist way
* I'm disappointed with how completely Nurturism got dropped as a source of conflict and discussion. Like, Lorelei Cook rolls into the scene, and the issue's briefly foregrounded, but then... she blows up and it's never discussed again? Everyone who's Good agrees that Nurturism is uncomplicatedly bad, and that's all we get. When I finished TWtB, I honestly thought Nuturism was going to be one of the main themes, if not the main theme, of the coming novel—Madame's way of raising her kids seems straightforwardly manipulative! there are some genuine complicated ethics questions around set-sets! the whole process around how a society decides what's OK to do to kids and what's not OK is generally kinda contingent and messy and complicated and I really wanted to see that explored here!
* That whole "Diary of a U-Beast" chapter with Lorelei was some good spooky stuff, though.
* Another great chapter: "Melodrama." Laugh-out-loud hilarious; King of Spain was so hilariously his own dim self; Madame was so entirely Madame; and what a fitting end for her :P
* thisbee deserved a better end. julia's ending is agreeable. love my weaselly conniving bitches
* the general comparison between "interacting with this total weirdo Mr. JEDD Mason" and "doing an Actual First Contact with Actual Aliens" some day was touching and warm and made me go reread the original Turing test paper for similar touching warm feelings, lol
* I sure wish I were more familiar with the Illiad and the Odyssey so I could've more deeply appreciated all the parallels, lol. I have a friend with a master's in Classics who's partway through the series right now and I am DYING to have her get to this last one so she can geek out endlessly at me with all the clever little details that I'm sure I was totally missing :P
* So like. Mason really made the whole-ass world surrender to him just so he could do some mild-ass reforms, huh. In a meta sense, this just feels like the author being a victim of her own talent—the buildup was so stupendous and so dramatic that any conceivable resolution was going to feel like a letdown. But there's something a little irritating about JEDD basically inciting a whole war because he's got this vision of The Good he's going to give to us all, and then the reforms happen and it's like... really? you couldn't have just filed some motions in Romanova and do this the slow boring democratic way or something? millions of people just died, my dude
* in general UN lady has some good fucking points. more Dembélé please
* also I'd like to meet some normies.
* in conclusion here's a bit that slew me & feels like the heart of the novel in a lot of ways & in memoriam my dear Bridger:
god, so good. i'm so glad this series is concluded! i'm so glad books like these exist! thank you for the thoroughly wild and incomparable ride, dr. palmer, wherever you are
I read the first book while at a shitty hostel in San Francisco, right? And I called my boyfriend in the middle of that ~*~econometrics as doomsday prophecy~*~ scene, because I was laughing so hard I was crying and I had to share that moment with someone. Then I cornered some rando Dutch guys in the hostel kitchen to also share the moment with them (with less success, though they were awfully nice about it). Then I got back home a few days later and wouldn't shut up about it to my friends.
For a while, I pitched the novels on the strength of their worldbuilding, but in hindsight that's not quite right. There's too many seams and cracks, in this vision of the future; too much that's glossed over via faith or "wouldn't it be cool though" and Great Men wandering around doing Great Things. If you're interested in worldbuilding in the sense of meticulous civilizational realism, everything thoroughly figured out and 100% plausible, and so on, these books aren't that.
But. If you enjoy worldbuilding in the form of interesting ideas, thought experiments, manic jumping from thing-to-thing, philosopher-energy and horny-energy and showoff-energy and unhinged-energy and melodrama, all knitted together with hella panache and weirdo overly-earnest speeches—if you've ever enjoyed anime guys duking it out over Big Ideas—yeah, this series delivers, in a way entirely new to me. (In novel form, at least. When someone on Tumblr pointed out JEDD Mason has some serious Kaworu-from-Neon-Genesis-Evangelion vibes so much clicked for me, haha.)
What I'm saying is this series feels more like this great big galloping thing than a book, and I'm not sure a conventional book write-up really captures the feeling of the thing. So I've been dragging my feet talking about it!
But let's try.
* In general, I thought this was a stronger narrative overall than The Will to Battle, but not as strong as Too Like the Lightning and probably a bit shy of Seven Surrenders.
* That's still really good, to be clear. I put down TWtB feeling faintly disappointed; I put down Perhaps the Stars feeling like something flawed-yet-momentous had just reached a pretty satisfying end.
* In particular, we finally got to the war....!
* ...but the war was. um.
* The early war portions were a weird mix of "actually kind of clever" and "no one is this dumb/courteous/earnest in wartime, please stop straining my credulity." Maybe I'm too ruthlessly realpolitik? But like, I'm sorry, Carlyle persuading an invading army to back off of Romanova by being terribly polite and shaming them into playing fair does not pass muster; if I'm in a war and I have a chance to capture a major city, I'm capturing the fucking city. I also found it weird how utterly incurious everyone seemed about the source of the global radio silence, and the global car hijacking, like—did no one care? or was there just literally no one around competent enough to try to find out the source? Neither of these, uh, reflect particularly well on the populace of Terra Ignota.
On the positive side, I found the Cousins' tiring guns simultaneously clever and dubious as hell; in general I would like more of Kosala doing seemingly-nice-but-dubious-as-hell things because that's a pretty sickass Cousins vibe.
* However: while they strained credulity a bit, I did like the narrative effect of that global radio silence, and the global transportation nerf, very much. I actually would've liked to have them Be In A Place for longer, actually—I don't think it felt quite oppressive enough, quite long enough, before we got the alternate system online + started just Faustbursting all our comms.
* Also, when the cars were about to go down, and Martin was being very coy about where he was located? and when he's finally forced to announce "Klamath Marsh" and everyone's just gasping in horror because, dear god, the wilderness, the desolation, the inhumanity of it all??? I was laughing my ass off, like—I have a friend who lives near there, and the idea of everyone being like "oh NO that godless WILDERNESS how will you SURVIVE" is just so funny to me. Like, I realize this is the US many centuries into the future and the point is that he's far from JEDD and yada yada, but still :P
* (a lot of the joy I find in these books is laughing at some of the images that are either intentionally or unintentionally silly via juxtaposition! does anyone else feel that way?)
* speaking of silliness: Carlyle's solution to the problem of "oh no what if people find out about each other's religions" was SO fucking funny and SO very Peak Terra Ignota. we got a global war going on, we got serious military shit to figure out, but we gotta stop everything for ten pages to explain this convoluted scheme for rendering everyone's religions inscrutable, because everyone just being chill about religion for eight seconds is unthinkable. I love it. I love this ridiculous weirdly-puritanical-in-certain-ways universe.
* Back to the war: in addition to people just being weirdly implausibly earnest and/or clueless, the stakes just didn't feel very... real... most of the time? Like, when it looked like they were actually going to blow up the moon and Mars, I gasped at the audacity of it; I thought, damn, Palmer's going to write a narrative with some actual palpable and painful loss... setting back Utopia's space travel thing by centuries feels like a real consequence of war and really painful...! But uh, then we literally deus ex machina our way out of it, so, whatever. I mean, the mecha is cool as hell, and I feel ridiculous dunking on a scene that concludes with "and then we motorcycled in a badass bitch to save the day with our giant laser space robot", but...
* I'm nominating Su-Hyeon for Top 10 Anime Betrayals TM, holy fuck. That whole chapter with 9A slowly realizing who their enemy was was a total gut punch; I had to put the book down for a bit.
* 9A's "look at all us girlbosses" speech was hilarious (I've definitely been in the room when a fellow lady-engineer was giving a similar speech, lol), but... it did feel a bit odd that Palmer just gave us a whole page of "here's everyone's Real Bio Genders; check this answer key against your test" sort of thing? I've not been invested in the gender stuff in this series in general (it's just the bit of storytelling that I've personally found kind of shaky/inconsistent and thus have been determinedly ignoring), but even so, it felt a little like cheating!
* oh also: 9A's voice did eventually grow on me, and I liked them plenty by the end (rip bridgerghosting), but I was so glad when Mycroft came back. my boy is absolutely unhinged. i love him
* This narrative continues to want me to love Utopia, in a way that I continue to find actively irritating. Like, in the early war, when "U-Beasts" are attacking and people naturally conclude it's Utopia, and 9A's like "no, Utopia are smol precious beans who have never done anything wrong in their lives," and they're getting pissed at everyone for being so "stupid" for assuming Utopia are the bad guys, I was sitting here like... hello? they did do a big preemptive strike thingy? they do act like condescending self-absorbed recluses and have done so for centuries and apparently have no interest in a PR firm for changing that impression? they're in fact capable of wiles? the logical thing to do in a war is to in fact do the war??? Bueller? Bueller?
* Alternatively: I think the narrative wants me to think the Brillists are evil, or at least not to love them, but joke's on the narrative, babey! Felix Faust has been my dude for multiple books now (I seem to recall a friend saying something to the effect of "he's the only one having any fucking fun in this utopia," and like... yeah...), and I was not expecting him to become a major player, at all, and I was so delighted with him here.
* In general, the whole argument Felix gives for Brillism vs Utopia was so delightful and funny to me because I have absolutely heard this barfight in San Francisco; I know exactly the type of nerds who passionately argue about proper resource allocation for brain-uploading versus space-traveling; and I love them
* i will concede that the way he fucked up Dominic is absolutely savage, though, jesus
* so. MASON oath. pretty windbaggy right
* relatedly: MASON dying by doing a dumb, while Kosala's fucking screaming at MASON to not do the dumb, is so fucking in character
* come to think of it, of all the characters that died, I think Ganymede had the best death—that duel! classy! cool! Ganymede-y! crushing, but at least he died in a very Humanist way
* I'm disappointed with how completely Nurturism got dropped as a source of conflict and discussion. Like, Lorelei Cook rolls into the scene, and the issue's briefly foregrounded, but then... she blows up and it's never discussed again? Everyone who's Good agrees that Nurturism is uncomplicatedly bad, and that's all we get. When I finished TWtB, I honestly thought Nuturism was going to be one of the main themes, if not the main theme, of the coming novel—Madame's way of raising her kids seems straightforwardly manipulative! there are some genuine complicated ethics questions around set-sets! the whole process around how a society decides what's OK to do to kids and what's not OK is generally kinda contingent and messy and complicated and I really wanted to see that explored here!
* That whole "Diary of a U-Beast" chapter with Lorelei was some good spooky stuff, though.
* Another great chapter: "Melodrama." Laugh-out-loud hilarious; King of Spain was so hilariously his own dim self; Madame was so entirely Madame; and what a fitting end for her :P
* thisbee deserved a better end. julia's ending is agreeable. love my weaselly conniving bitches
* the general comparison between "interacting with this total weirdo Mr. JEDD Mason" and "doing an Actual First Contact with Actual Aliens" some day was touching and warm and made me go reread the original Turing test paper for similar touching warm feelings, lol
* I sure wish I were more familiar with the Illiad and the Odyssey so I could've more deeply appreciated all the parallels, lol. I have a friend with a master's in Classics who's partway through the series right now and I am DYING to have her get to this last one so she can geek out endlessly at me with all the clever little details that I'm sure I was totally missing :P
* So like. Mason really made the whole-ass world surrender to him just so he could do some mild-ass reforms, huh. In a meta sense, this just feels like the author being a victim of her own talent—the buildup was so stupendous and so dramatic that any conceivable resolution was going to feel like a letdown. But there's something a little irritating about JEDD basically inciting a whole war because he's got this vision of The Good he's going to give to us all, and then the reforms happen and it's like... really? you couldn't have just filed some motions in Romanova and do this the slow boring democratic way or something? millions of people just died, my dude
* in general UN lady has some good fucking points. more Dembélé please
* also I'd like to meet some normies.
* in conclusion here's a bit that slew me & feels like the heart of the novel in a lot of ways & in memoriam my dear Bridger:
I lowered Excalibur. I remember staring at its shining blade, once plastic now perfected, left by Bridger, not for me, not for this moment, not to slay the outpath's enemy, completing here the hot revenge even Achilles didn't wish for. Excalibur is for some other moment, further out in time. Because it's real. All of it, all the relics, we have them. We humans will, even to your day, reader, have an Ancile Breaker when we need it, and the Alexander and what we'll learn from disassembling it, science to make crossing the outer sea a little easier, and we'll have Cato-Helen and Achilles's brains, and the potions to teach us all of Thanatos, and the crystal ball to teach us of space and distance, and the magic wand to teach us who knows what, and this Excalibur which will be ready when it's needed someday in the great unscrolling Plan of Providence that Bridger—the facet of our Maker who does not like sad books—made just a little easier.
god, so good. i'm so glad this series is concluded! i'm so glad books like these exist! thank you for the thoroughly wild and incomparable ride, dr. palmer, wherever you are
no subject
Date: 2021-12-09 09:13 pm (UTC)I am actually the person who caused Ada to start watching anime. The fact that this is probably my greatest influence on human culture in general to this date is intensely weird, I tell you what.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-10 11:01 am (UTC)omigosh... what a fantastic factoid, and what a cultural legacy indeed! and i am delighted to learn the world is once again more charmingly connected than i previously thought; tyty :D
no subject
Date: 2021-12-14 04:40 pm (UTC)Yeah, I felt that too when trying to write about this one -- it's an edifice and a conversation, but it's hard to talk about this book/the series in a book-shaped way.
and "no one is this dumb/courteous/earnest in wartime, please stop straining my credulity."
I could kind of accept those bits, not because they felt realistic to me but because it kept reminding me (as the book explicitly did) that these people (minus Achilles) only know war from textbooks and LARPing.
how utterly incurious everyone seemed about the source of the global radio silence, and the global car hijacking, like—did no one care? or was there just literally no one around competent enough to try to find out the source? Neither of these, uh, reflect particularly well on the populace of Terra Ignota.
I'd assumed that most people accepted the propaganda that this was more Utopia shenanigans, but you're right that that doesn't reflect well on the population. I guess it was really good Brillist propaganda :P
I found the Cousins' tiring guns simultaneously clever and dubious as hell;
I did like the way the Cousins did a lot of effective-at-minimizing-harm but super shady things in the way (the Gorgons, and also the abductions or the people prone to violence and the little villages for them -- talk about dubious as hell).
* (a lot of the joy I find in these books is laughing at some of the images that are either intentionally or unintentionally silly via juxtaposition! does anyone else feel that way?)
Definitely! Though I think mostly the intentionally incongruous ones.
"here's everyone's Real Bio Genders; check this answer key against your test" sort of thing? I've not been invested in the gender stuff in this series in general (it's just the bit of storytelling that I've personally found kind of shaky/inconsistent and thus have been determinedly ignoring), but even so, it felt a little like cheating!
Interesting! I'd been dubious about the gender thing at the start and found it more interesting with every successive book as I got more of a sense of what it was there for, and I did feel like that scene -- or, rather, 9A's realization of the victory against Madame that this scene implies -- mostly paid off the gender stuff, in a way I wasn't expecting.
and apparently have no interest in a PR firm for changing that impression?
I bet it's 'cos PR mavens are all in Gordian :P No, but actually, I felt like while Mycroft definitely and apparently 9A as well are Utopia partisans, I didn't think the narrative was trying explicitly to be (though it's definitely stacking the deck a bit). I do feel like Mycroft, like Cato, is a Utopian at heart, for all that he did not choose a Hive, and so his sympathies lie there. I was more surprised about 9A, but actually I think 9A has a tendency to think the best of people who are nice to/around them, so maybe the Utopia stanning is partly Huxley's presence/help and partly listening to Mycroft about how awesome Utopia is, IDK...
* Alternatively: I think the narrative wants me to think the Brillists are evil, or at least not to love them, but joke's on the narrative, babey!
I didn't get that sense either. Or, rather, Brillists certainly did a lot of extremely shady stuff, but I thought it fell under the same general "shady stuff for the greater good" umbrella as Utopia and Cousins. (But maybe that's my Gordian bias showing, Felix Faust has been one of my favorites for several books as well, and this one only slightly dampened my delight in him.)
the whole argument Felix gives for Brillism vs Utopia was so delightful and funny to me because I have absolutely heard this barfight in San Francisco;
OK, this is a delightful characterization of the trunk war, and actually makes me like that whole setup (which I found one of the least plausible things in the whole structure) a lot more. I will be thinking about it purely in these terms from here on XD
I think Ganymede had the best death—that duel! classy! cool! Ganymede-y! crushing, but at least he died in a very Humanist way
Agreed wholeheartedly! Ganymede was another one of my favorites over the last couple of books, but what a way to go out!
That is a really good point about Nurturism and set-sets, it was kind of dropped, wasn't it... I didn't even notice because of everything else going on, but what do we actually get as far as set-set resolution? Eureka and another set-set nominated for office, but was there anything else?
* in general UN lady has some good fucking points.
YEP!
(P.S. You seem to spend a lot of time in San Fran! If you're ever here once we get out of These Unprecedented Times and are up for hanging out, let me know! I probably won't be up for a bar fight about digital immortality vs going to space, but I am always up for nerding out about Terra Ignota or any other shared books and stuff :)
no subject
Date: 2021-12-14 08:58 pm (UTC)Also, extremely pleased to find another Gordian enjoyer :) I have occassionally been a bit envious at just how dominant Utopia is in the cool-science-gadget category, so it was honestly kind of fun to see "very good at psychology" being so strong in this last book, and seeing someone outside Utopia doing very technically sophisticated things... and come to think of it, the Humanists got some excellent moments too; pretty fun how much room all the Hives had to shine here, haha.
re: gender: I may well reread these books in their entirety someday, and I definitely intend to pay more attention to the gender stuff when I do. My impression in book 1 was "okay, there's something the author's trying to say about gender here, but the execution feels kind of wobbly and it's kind of off-putting if I focus on it overmuch, so I'm just going to kinda breeze along and end up assuming whatever pronouns for whoever based on gut feel, and I just won't think on it too much!" Which I realize is not properly engaging with the books, but, eh, I had a fine time anyway :P But it'd definitely be interesting to go back and actually think through the project now, with the whole picture in mind & feelin a little less dodgy about it.
Eureka and another set-set nominated for office, but was there anything else?
Not anything else that I recall, unless we're counting JEDD's institue-for-the-study-of-gender thing, but that's only tangentially related in that you can argue that "being raised with specific gender ideas" is one end of a spectrum that goes all the way out to "being raised to do crazy fancy computer mathy stuff in very specific conditions." The only real Nurturist voice I recall, outside of Cookie, is Felix, right? and I don't think he mentions the topic at all in this volume.
You seem to spend a lot of time in San Fran!
Indeed! I went there several times a year before the pandemic started. Haven't been down lately but I'm long overdue for a trip sometime in 2022; I'll definitely send you a note when I do :D