What have you read/watched/played/created/listened to this year?
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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If anyone wants a read that’ll seriously fuck with your head, try Hardfought by Greg Bear. A somewhat small novella, it takes place thousands of years in the future where humanity is engaged in a fight for survival against an enemy that no-one can understand.
The military patois is thick and barely understandable, with turns of phrases that you are forced to figure out on your own. The physics reads more like mysticism and religious doctrine. The combatants are modified from childhood to become perfect warriors until it is debatable if they are still human. A budding romance between a particularly talented pilot and the civilian analyst tasked to figure out and replicate the successes that produced her - which, ironically, was the humanizing elements of the highly illegal romance in the first place - sets the stage for humanity’s defeat.
And yet, a project started by the enemy in an attempt to understand the humans comes within a hair’s breadth of actually ending the war… until the alien’s own hidebound and ideologically blinkered leaders kill the project out of horror at the heresy it encapsulates.
Its ideas and concepts are maximally dense while the prose itself is sparse to the point of being almost haiku-like. The descriptions alone hew strongly to Chekov’s Gun, with no excess characterizations that don’t directly contribute. I have re-read it over a dozen times in the decades since I got it and every time I have peeled back more layers to find new revelations and themes.
Interesting, I’ll be checking it out.