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Out of all settings though, Sci-fi horror is not one we see much of, with only Returnal coming to mind in recent memory. We’ve seen the lot, from traditional side-scrollers like Rogue Legacy, to off-the-wall rhythm action games like Crypt of the Necrodancer, there is a Roguelike for just about anyone. The key to their success it seems, is finding another genre that gels well with the underlying formula and make it fit.
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You’d be forgiven if you thought that this is becoming a tiring trend, but when thinking about it, there are few games that are treated poorly by the die-try again mechanics that Roguelikes champion. There is not a month that goes by where we don’t see the phrase come up to describe a potential new indie darling, least of all with April’s Returnal, which saw the sub-genre make its way to the triple-A echelons. Not necessarily the ones with the lofty goals a decade earlier, either.Jin PS5 / Reviews tagged repetitive / roguelike / scifi. Varley excels at the short length and any of his collections are worth doing GBH to get hold of.ġ: By which I mean some boomers.
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It’s a 1970s Varley short story so even if one disagrees with the real-world premises the story itself is pretty much guaranteed to be well written and worth reading. The social despair required for the story might be driven by Watergate, the economy and the slide of the boomers into self-indulgent decadence. Otherwise, it could as easily be set in the late 1970s, when stagflation seemed endless and the instability of cartels not quite so obvious. What compels this story to be set near the turn of the century is the need for the rubella babies to be old enough to have kids. One of the reactions is for small groups to set up new attempts at utopian communities, a very American thing to do, from Shakers to hippy communes. The boom/bust cycles are much worse than in OTL, as bad as in the 19 th century and with every cycle, more and more people are added to the unemployable catagory. Where there any 1970s SF stories which did not assume things would continue going to hell? Obviously in this TL, Alan Greenspan died young. I really should put ‘synopsis does not do story justice’ warnings. The children left behind have given up their sight and hearing to remove the barriers to understanding and he decides to join them in deaf-blindness. New Year’s Eve 2000, he decides to return to Keller, where he discovers the adults have left through some means which is uncommunicable to him. Unable to deal with this he leaves and enjoys some success in an increasingly decayed mainstream society. Eventually, he becomes aware that there are levels of communication which he can not aspire to, which even his hearing lover Pink, who has lived her entire life in Keller, can not aspire to. The story has two threads after this: his gradual exploration of the increasingly sophisticated levels of communication the people of Keller have developed and the history of the community, starting with the rubella outbreak in the 1960s which led to the birth of thousands of deaf-blind babies in the US. He stays for a while, falling in love with a adolescent hearing child of the founders. He encounters a colony of deaf-blind people in Navajo country who have set up their own isolated culture away from hearing society. The US is in sad shape, from food riots in Chicago to melt-down refugees in the midwest. He decides to backpack to California, figuring he won’t have the time to explore the US later in life. Synopsis: The US is in yet another serious “non-depression” and the narrator is out of work again.
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The collection is very good and I recommend it but be warned it is out of print. This is a review of the short story The Persistence of Vision (tPoV), not the collection tPoV. I’m cheating: after reading even a light bus-crusher like Eon I wanted something I could knock in an hour. The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 1978