I love your description. My best effort (when describing it to an interested friend last week) was to say "OK, two words for you: Martian Jesus." The excessive nudity should go without saying, really, because Heinlein.

Relevant to this post.

I kind of lean toward the world-as-MMO viewpoint too, when I stop to think about it. At least it also does a better job of explaining sin and injustice than many of the more classical approaches.

A rhinoceros beetle!

I agree. Of course people in this era thought practically everything was heritable (including tendencies toward crime), which lent more legitimacy to the whole "sterilize the unfit" attitude.

We'll likely never know, but my money is on the possibility that a few people were legitimately ill with something, and the rest suffering from mass hysteria (or mass psychogenic illness, as Wikipedia calls it.)

This reminds me of my Japanese friend telling me about JAXA's Hayabusa burning up in the atmosphere on reentry, and how emotionally stirring he made it sound. A lot of Japanese anthropomorphize the hell out of their robots (there were moe Hayabusa drawings, for example) for various cultural reasons. Kind of unusual…

Thick McRunFast!

Go forth and kill!

I've spent long stretches of time (several months, on one occasion) without talking to other human beings; people have asked if I was mute, in all honesty. (I'm not.) But I've always been very much into writing and reading, so it's not as if I gave up on language entirely when I stopped talking.

Female Trouble, Desperate Living and Polyester are also really good (and by "good" I mean "consistently over the top in the strangest way possible"), if that's your kind of thing.

Only time I've ever seen a grown man go sprinting out of a movie theater.

Goddamn, I wanted it to be satire too. It would've been an excellent one, very tongue-in-cheek. I've tried to read it multiple times and I just keep going "She's serious...she's serious about all this...none of this is meant to be funny...oh, I give up."

This is not Evangelion-flavored. It's salt, but not The Mexican Salt.

The harder version is the MAN version, according to the kanji. (Pocky also has a Men's version which is just a darker chocolate, IIRC.)

Seconding this. I remember stopping my car (along with a lot of other drivers) for geese who were crossing the road, and my Chinese friend goes "This would never happen in China." I assumed he meant that the geese would be run over but he clarified that people would be jumping out of their cars to grab them for…

This was probably one of the better "This is my utopia and here is how it works" novels I've read, and I've read a lot of utopian fiction.

Not knowing how to end a story is kind of an odd notion to me. But I think this comes from the style of story I write: I like to mislead the readers into thinking X is happening when the Reveal will show that it was Y all along. This means I start with Y, the ending, then figure out how to make it look like X, which…

Does this work any differently when it's friends/partners who are the actors? because we're trying to help a friend of ours who's having relationship issues and our approach is to understand her behavior as a product of her past experiences, rather than labeling her.

I can't listen to any music while writing (total, absolute silence or some kind of white noise is best) but I definitely have playlists that help get me in the mood for a writing session afterward.