for me it felt like gaiman/ishiguro/murakami for kids
the main impressions i have left of it are of trippy kaleidoscopic space fabric and someone in a jar; i distinctly recall being very frustrated that the author did not bother to explain in great detail exactly how the space witch went from being a star to being a space witch
child me yearned for the spreadsheets
obligatory mentions for tengger cavalry, nine treasures and SULD
i’m a freshwater guy myself but i also do paludariums and vivariums. always wanted to try a topoff only saltwater system based around mangrove filtration with macro and seagrass but am too nervous to make the plunge lol
you invest it in (foreign) right wing radical organizations bent on overthrowing their democratically elected government. that way, when these groups eventually succeed due to your generous contributions they will allow you to swoop in and buy up their country’s previously nationalized natural monopolies at bargain bin prices through local intermediaries at which point you can cut costs and inflate prices for the citizens of the entire country and receive many orders of magnitude ROI
it’s win-win so long as you propagandize enough people about how this specific thing that you’re doing is actually defined as democracy, they’ll be totally ok with it and won’t suspect a thing
this is my pet concern as well and it’s always struck me as being bit darwinist. i cope by telling myself that instead of environmental evolutionary pressures, it’ll be social and cultural pressures instead. so long as those pressures are grounded in material reality and are able effectively act on the population at large, we won’t evolutionarily overfit and get stuck in some local minimum. all the more reason to prefer socialism over liberalism.