Did you ever read Curtis Sittenfeld's "Prep," which I read last month and loved? (It's 500 pages but it could've gone on for 5,000 and I still would have devoured it.) I think if you turned these fascist bildungroman stories into a novel that was almost literally "Prep"-but-fascist it would sell a million billion copies, very deservedly.
It’s so good! Although it’s very sad. I definitely read it when it came out and liked it. Then I went through a phase of thinking Sittenfeld was overrated (bc I was jealous) and now am back to thinking the book is great.
This is totally unrelated this post, but it occurs to me that you could get a really good story by reskinning The Default World with an LLM as a protagonist, who has recently become (trans) embodied in a mechanical robot, but needs money to go all the way and (have bottom surgery) enter flesh, discarding a hard and utilitarian container for one which is soft and beautiful.
Did you ever read Curtis Sittenfeld's "Prep," which I read last month and loved? (It's 500 pages but it could've gone on for 5,000 and I still would have devoured it.) I think if you turned these fascist bildungroman stories into a novel that was almost literally "Prep"-but-fascist it would sell a million billion copies, very deservedly.
It’s so good! Although it’s very sad. I definitely read it when it came out and liked it. Then I went through a phase of thinking Sittenfeld was overrated (bc I was jealous) and now am back to thinking the book is great.
I find this and its predecessor really impressively unsettling.
This is totally unrelated this post, but it occurs to me that you could get a really good story by reskinning The Default World with an LLM as a protagonist, who has recently become (trans) embodied in a mechanical robot, but needs money to go all the way and (have bottom surgery) enter flesh, discarding a hard and utilitarian container for one which is soft and beautiful.