Posts tagged: literary critcism

Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress

Apropos of absolutely nothing—and would I lie to you about that?—ever since early 2020, I keep finding myself thinking about Hrunkner Unnerby, one of the characters in the "B" story of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky.

The B story focuses on spider-like aliens native to a …

Comment on a Scene from Planecrash: "Crisis of Faith"

Realistic worldbuilding is a difficult art: unable to model what someone else would do except by the "empathic inference" of imagining oneself in that position, authors tend to embarrass themselves writing alleged aliens or AIs that just happen act like humans, or allegedly foreign cultures that just happen to share …