I discovered a new genre. It’s fan-fucking-tastic. As far as I know – I just discovered this last week – it’s a YouTube thing. The quality varies from “remind me, why does the internet exist?” to “Fuck Yeah!”. I’m not entirely sure why these are on YouTube; there’s no video. They’re audio books.
I love the premise, though.
I was born into the early humans-suck era. However, my childhood was much more late atomic era. For those of you (is there even a “you”? I appreciate the likes I do get) who do not understand, the atomic era was when we were going to have nuclear powered ships, submarines, and air planes. We now have two out of three, so yay us! It was also the era when were going to have flying cars. We still don’t, so yay us! (Imagine the fatalities of/from human-driven flying cars.) The point being, everyone expected us to have all sorts of cool new shit, most of it atomic, and cool, futuristic lives. That was followed by the humans-suck era, which we are (hopefully) near the end of. Malthus, Ehrlich, Peak Oil, Global/Climate whatever-it-is-today, Etc…
The HFY genre is the atomic era reimagined in the early 21st century. I didn’t know that I needed that.
The basic premise is the Fermi Paradox turned inside-out. All the stuff we think of as “normal Earth” is actually “death world – no one could possibly live there”. Gravity is too high. Weather is too severe. Tectonic activity is too high. Climate is too extreme. Too many predators. Etc… It all combines to make humans basically super-powered.
If you want to explore, find a channel that has humans reading. Some of the AI reading is OK, but most of it is pretty bad.
And, yes, there are stories about cats; it is the internet after all. Rule 34 most definitely applies, although YouTube is tame on that front.
Marked Up 