Neal Asher has a new book out called Dark Diamond. The dedication page in it is quite frankly pretty horrifying.
Five years ago, I watched the two Falcon Heavy side boosters come into land at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base. Honestly, it was like something in a game animation and seemingly too perfect to be believable. Others, I've seen landing on drone ships with names taken from lain M. Banks' Culture books. Just recently, I saw a huge booster for the Starship come down to be caught between two metal arms - y'know, they caught something the size of a skyscraper like a dropping stick - and that was an astounding feat of engineering. But these are not in isolation, since SpaceX, as of last month, has launched over a hundred rockets in 2024.
Meanwhile, the guy who brought this about, the guy who is aiming to make humanity multi-planetary by putting us on Mars, has a few other projects on the go, like building electric cars, burrowing tunnels under cities, putting up a satellite internet system and, perhaps the most important of them all, preventing the totalitarians of our world from killing free speech.
So thank you, Elon Musk, for bringing to reality, right before my eyes, those things I read and dreamed about as a teenager.
That… is a REALLY unfortunate, given Musk's apparent aspirations to be a Culture-level Bad Guy™. It's like Asher's paid absolutely zero attention to the fact that the Starlink is considered pollution on a massive scale, from an astronomy perspective and numerous environmental aspects. And that Elon's Boring Company is widely acknowledged to have been a ploy to stop Cali from approving light rail projects. And that his purchase of Twitter was in fact a splurge to destroy a free speech platform and bend it to be another disinformation platform instead. Yuck.
I should add that while I personally don't really enjoy Asher's books all that much to begin with, I was utterly unaware of his politics until now. I will strongly recommend against him going forward, much like I do with Orson Scott Card, despite an extreme fondness for some of Card's earlier works.
Do you guys worry much about the politics of the authors you enjoy, or is it more of a me thing?
So good news: this item got procedurally removed.
Bad news? There's so much other terrible stuff in the bill now, like basically destroying the solar industry via removing tax breaks for solar projects and apply taxes to any solar from China. Musk has been freaking out about this all day as gasp, it could actually affect his personal businesses.