Scientia Weaponizes The Future

[Crayz9000]

I don't think the Japanese have anything to do with it? There's no indication on the wiki page and such a major alternate history is a big stretch for a setting that's supposed to be 'earth until superpowers'. The right combo of capes and the right (or wrong) ideas in an already-authoritarian nation leads to a coup and the CUI pretty easily, with a bit of Cauldron support (they want stable nations, not humane ones). As an aside, I think it's a little insulting to call Wildbow 'really lazy' for not elaborating on an effectively irrelevant worldbuilding detail. The political structure of the CUI basically never comes up in canon (except maybe as aside mentions of important people), so.

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I'm going off my admittedly fallible recollection so it's possible that the WW2 divergence was Earthscorpion or another author's rationalization instead. I mean, at least that seems slightly more plausible than China going off its rocker, absorbing Japan, and restoring the Emperor all after '82.

... And yeah that was some fandom nonsense I got mixed up, Japan wasn't part of the CUI at all.

I'll grant your point that in a superpowered world it's still a possibility, but given that there actually are elections in China (despite what the US State Dept claims) and that most of their people generally seem to be happy living there (again, leaving claims from dissidents who always seem to bump elbows with US State Dept figures aside) that would either require someone able to cultivate a very much supernatural cult of personality in a short time and drag huge swathes of the Party leadership under their sway, or a very bloody coup, and possibly both.

As for "timeline was basically real life until 1982" there are enough butterflies in Worm to make that particular WoG extremely unlikely. Such as the existence of Brockton Bay itself.

Any suggestions for readings on these topics perchance? Literally the only thing here I was aware of was Stalin's resignation attempts (and Khrushchev being a backstabbing shit).

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You could try Khrushchev Lied as a starting point. It's contentious in some academic circles as the author is an English professor who studied Soviet history as more of a hobby, but everything in the book is exhaustively cited from Soviet archive researchers and other sources, which is more than I can say about some other writers like Simon Sebag-Montefiore.

Mark Tauger also wrote extensively about agriculture in the USSR during the early years. Archive of writings of Professor Mark Tauger on the famine scourges of the early years of the Soviet Union - New Cold War: Know Better

 

[XiaoYueMao]

Remember that the communist party switched to the current mostly capitalist system after trying it the other way and it going very badly. Command economies just don't work very well.

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no offense but this shows a severe lack of understanding china and its political history, fun fact, in 1970 roughly 67% of chinese millennials who went to college in the US stayed in the US citing lack of a future in china. today 97% return to china citing they believe they will have a better future there.

China did some very fucked up shit and killed many people for it yes, but 90% of Chinese people were below the poverty line and living in farming villages, dying of basic diseases. today the vast majority of chinese citizens are above the poverty line (which in china is defined two times as high as in the US) and has most eradicated homelessness. to most of us chinese nationals, quality of life has constantly improved! sure its not the *best* but its gotten infinately better and its still getting better. china today is the world leader in a number of fields, including green energy systems like solar panels, electric vehicles, as well as other fields like AI development and such. theres a reason why the CIA failed to instigate mass revolution in china a few decades ago, no seriously, look it up, they declassified their attempts and citied their failure for "too few lack faith in their future" of course they then go on to claim were all just brainwashed, because nobody under a red state could ever be a free thinker could we?.

again, china has definitely done and is doing bad things, and its by no means perfect, ill even admit its definitely not as good as the US (though we definitely have better infrastructure, last time the US updated theirs was 50+ years ago). the point however isnt that china is perfect, but that its not some apocalyptic hellhole everyone in the west constantly acts like it is.

TLDR: no, china didnt switch its economic model because communism "went very badly" they did it because they had no choice. to give a closer to home example: Venezuela was blockaded and embargoed by the world at the US's request including oil exports... aka the exports their entire economy was based on, so it crashed, of course today non-economists blame socialism, and while admittedly they didnt help, that wasn't what crashed the economy, the US embargo did. the same issue occured in china, industry was ramping up but buisnesses outside of china refused to buy without concessions, those concessions being letting them setup shop in china, which is why china slowly swapped to allowing semi-private buisness ventures. same reason the USSR did it during Gorbachev, though that mook was politically inept and had no idea how to do anything, his policies may have been popularly supported but he did them so quickly and without any support that things quickly escalated leading the collapse of the union rather than remaining a superpower while swapping economic models over a couple decades like china did. alas, hindsight is 20/20





anyway, Im not really invested in this conversation and dont want this to be a thing to dwell on, these replies just showed up in my notifications im just now going over and felt I needed to clarify, politics is my passion and im Ultimately politically neutral, im not invested personally, more of a hobby/profession than anything

 

[XiaoYueMao]

Such as the existence of Brockton Bay itself.

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I actually figured out where Brocktan bay is supposed to be.... its in new Hampshire, and lo and behold new Hampshire has only a single stretch of land that borders the sea and just barely large enough to be a small city.... though the typography doesn't really match the story version so its definitely completely made up

 

[R1chterScale]

You could try Khrushchev Lied as a starting point. It's contentious in some academic circles as the author is an English professor who studied Soviet history as more of a hobby, but everything in the book is exhaustively cited from Soviet archive researchers and other sources, which is more than I can say about some other writers like Simon Sebag-Montefiore.

Mark Tauger also wrote extensively about agriculture in the USSR during the early years. Archive of writings of Professor Mark Tauger on the famine scourges of the early years of the Soviet Union - New Cold War: Know Better

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Danke schon!

 

[Graviator]

Ward is ambiguous about whether Brockton Bay is in New Hampshire or Maine. Worm doesn't even mention which side of Boston it's on.

 

[Crayz9000]

Anyway, I apologize for furthering the derail. It's not the author's fault that the CUI is a somewhat nonsensical cutout, so the only thing that actually stood out was the lack of a communist opposition to the CUI government. Regardless of your view of communism, no dictatorship is going to be able to stamp those ideas out completely. The closest analogy I can think of is the "gun hidden behind every blade of grass" conclusion the Japanese came to when considering invading the US.

 

[syrtis]

Okay, I'm gonna preface this by saying that I'm very obviously a Marxist though not as knowledgeable about China as I would prefer. That said, from what I understand the idea is to go through the Marxist ideas of stages of development (Feudalism -> Capitalism -> Socialism -> Communism) with the current state of things where there is large private ownership but certain key industries are nationalized being a compromise, allowing the country to go through the capitalist development it otherwise would've missed while retaining overall state control and preventing counterrevolutionaries, a similar thing was done in the USSR (though to a much, much, *much* more limited extent) with the NEP.

As for command economies not working well, I would tend to disagree (though obviously it's rather hard to pull off) the Soviet Union went from agrarian backwater to holding off against the industrial powerhouse that was Nazi Germany in 20 years (though it should be noted that Germany had a major economic slump in the great depression and the Soviet Union didn't due to the centrally planned, relatively isolated economy being somewhat detached from global markets) and then went on to being a superpower rivalling the US.

The other, more direct comparison would be East vs. West Germany. While it is definitely true that West Germany was richer than East this can be seen to derive from their starting positions. West Germany got to benefit from the Marshall Plan whereas East Germany didn't, was forced to pay war reparations to the USSR, and had it's government gutted by de-nazification (alot of the West German government was made of former Nazis). Due to this, the East Germany GDP per capita ended up being about 1/2 that of it's western counterpart by the time of annexation, but it should be noted that the economy was growing notably faster, with the East German economy in its last decade growing at an average of 4% while the West German economy grew at an average of 2% (accounting for inflation).

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You might be interested in reading Fredrick Hayek's paper "The Use of Knowledge in Society" pdf download link. His ideas concerning knowledge transmission and price as a knowledge transmission mechanism are a really interesting critique of command economies. He tends to miss how price is an imperfect knowledge transmission mechanism that can lead to capitalism's flaws and it's human cost, but it does really hit on something interesting and flawed in command economies.

 

[Kryslin]

Re: Brockton Bay -

I've heard it said that Brockton Bay is a mirror image of Vancouver, flipped east-west and scaled down, by several other authors of worm fanfiction. Which kind of makes sense, since Wildbow is from that area (I think)? That being said, it could be anywhere in New England, because there are several locations that have sheltered harbors, though none that exactly match the description of canonical Brockton Bay.

 

[Aunty Shi Ping]

I feel that it suffices to say that Sciencia's morality, and S.W.F.'s accuracy as a world simulation, are very much valid targets of doubt. People should be free to speak up that they are correct or incorrect, given that the story appears to have aspirations of being both a morally and socially (and technologically) accurate example. If such things are flawed, insightful, biased, or perfect, then it directly speaks to the aims of the work, and thus would appear to be on topic. That said, these are matters of money, politics, and religion, so actually debating with one another over which are the "correct" or "bad" examples of such is, technically, highly suspect, and, inevitably, both a derail and off-topic. I would personally advise refraining from directly interacting with other posts on such topics, and restraining oneself to posting one's own thoughts(which are clearly labelled as such), with specific references to how their pertain to S.W.F. itself, ideally with references to further reading on the subject; Or following formal debating rules with a limit of three posts per poster on any given topic, with each clearly labelled as which phase of the formal debate it is aspiring to be, as it seems reasonable to seek out a well-tested formalised structure when one is freely available? Then again, it is ultimately up to the forum staff, and my own ability to follow my own advice is highly suspect.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

Re: Brockton Bay -

I've heard it said that Brockton Bay is a mirror image of Vancouver, flipped east-west and scaled down, by several other authors of worm fanfiction. Which kind of makes sense, since Wildbow is from that area (I think)? That being said, it could be anywhere in New England, because there are several locations that have sheltered harbors, though none that exactly match the description of canonical Brockton Bay.

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At some point in the Nine arc a number of towns in Connecticut are mentioned as being on the Nine's route, which is the best canonical evidence I know of for any given locale. I agree that the city is not meant to be a real place though, unlike Ellisburg.

Having actually been to Ellisburg, there's so little there I think the Goblin King's creations would have starved before they got going. Seriously, the population is a couple hundred. The town doesn't even have any traffic lights, gas stations, or stores.

 

[XiaoYueMao]

Having actually been to Ellisburg, there's so little there I think the Goblin King's creations would have starved before they got going. Seriously, the population is a couple hundred. The town doesn't even have any traffic lights, gas stations, or stores.

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better than China...... in Texas, literally a village of ~1,000 .... doesnt do its name justice really (and by better, i mean in terms of expectations.... seriously, China, Texas should be a large city atleast)

 

[jay m]

there might be a Discord or discussion forum somewhere to take the socio-economic aspects? Even though it was derailing badly, still we had some interesting points being raised. I dropped in too late to participate, save for this.

 

[Anti-No]

Wu Wen strongly suspected that their new overlord had intervened. And not to shift to new propaganda in her favor, either, which was surprising. For the first time in her life, Wu Wen was watching a Chinese news source that appeared to be free to say whatever it wanted. She couldn't imagine what they must have been told in order to produce something more in the style of the illegal foreign news feeds.

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This is going to have so many people looking up in shock.

"Speaking of time, what about the more distant future, Mr. Chao?" asked the anchor.

"It's hard to say," he answered. "What sort of governments will be set up? How independent will they actually be? Will they function well, or fall to ineffectiveness or violent factional infighting? I wish I could offer comfort, but anything could happen now. Our future will be up to Scientia and the people in these new governments. I can only hope that reason will triumph over factionalism and violence."

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True enough. China has a long storied history showing how all of theese options can be.

"Can you guarantee that this won't get me killed?" Wu Wen asked, caution and anxiety in her tone.

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Wise question.

"First, as a delegate to a Constitutional convention. There needs to be a government before anyone can be elected to it. Then I was thinking you should run for whatever the delegates choose to call the chief executive," answered the phone.

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Supreme Mugwump? Empress of China? The Boss? Secretary of the Central Comitee? El Presidente? Comrade? Fyhrer? Minister(s)?

...

We know there will be an Emperor, most probably in a very minor role, but useful for diplomacy. Scientia will probably be known as the "Power Behind the Throne" of the actual rulers, in a "don't make me come over there" way, with some meddling and crisis stopping in between. Western news sources? ...good chance they will call Scientia "Empress of China" or something,

Internally, autocratic monarchy and authoritarian governments seems to be what China has the most experience with and traditions for for the last couple of thousands of years. "Republic" means "supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives" - and no, not even maybe. Not in Earth Bet either. Earth Bet CUI sounds like just more of the Imperial Autocratic Monarchy to me. So the biggest problem would actually be that while Scientia would actually like her China to become a Republic - that China has no experience with being a republic. And changing traditions like that is VERY hard to do without stirring up trouble. People simply does not know how to handle it without going back to the old dictatorship & bribes systems. Without AI support I'm pretty certain it would have been a doomed project, but as is, partial success is at least potentially achieveable.

 

[Rajvik_wolfboy]

And changing traditions like that is VERY hard to do without stirring up trouble

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So much this, now if our state department could only internalize that

 

[Kryslin]

I suspect China will find itself working towards a Chinese version of a constitutional monarchy. It has the benefit of being familiar, with a largely figurehead Emperor, and the real power being held by the elected officials, especially the Prime Minister.

 

[Evil Plan]

Dovetail

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Whomst?

I have no recollection of having heard of this character before this fic. Is this an OC who "would have" died before canon? Or a WoG character of the same?

As for claiming the Scientia is the real supervillain and he was just a minion, that still screws him (he's still a supervillain either way) and it doesn't really make any sense that Scientia would make the PRT aware of her own extremely expensive and well-developed operation and help take it down.

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If a defense attorney brought it up, the PRT would absolutely have to evaluate it as a possibility, though. That's just basic "intelligence department" behavior. Organizations have internal fractures all the time, and paying attention to those is a thing spy agencies and intelligence agencies rely on.

If it ever occurs to them, the PRT should be seriously considering "okay, if this is Scientia burning a subordinate or a pasty, why would she be doing so? What might she be getting out of it?" This should be relatively easy to deprioritize on the basis of "Coil isn't acting like someone who was ever working for someone else, much less like someone who realizes they got burned," but they should check for that.

I disagree with every single thing you just said. Of course, that's just a difference of opinion, so each to their own. But please don't go saying that shit like your the be-all and end all of the writing.

I would love a story about Taylor being competent like that. Thinking ahead, of plans falling in place just right. Of how the action and reaction change the world around what she's doing. You don't need to half-ass things to force in "Drama" in an attempt to hit some odd goal of "better."

But I also enjoy this fic a lot. So not really comparing, just saying the other stuff is fine too.

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Eh, it can be fun occasionally or if really well-done, but that type of story is highly vulnerable to "The Heist Movie Problem". Basically, it's very very hard to do "here are the characters planning their heist in detail; here are the characters following their plan without a hitch" without the audience becoming bored. There's a reason the bank robbery in Worm canon used a mix of advanced planning and doing stuff in the middle of the robbery while going "as per our planning"; and there's a reason why if you read "Path to Munchies" it switches to being mostly told from the perspective of other characters after Taylor figures out her power.

 

[PrinceOfDoom]

Whomst?

I have no recollection of having heard of this character before this fic. Is this an OC who "would have" died before canon? Or a WoG character of the same?

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Dovetail is actually a canon indipendent hero in Brockton Bay. Taylor's EXTREMELY narrow viewpoint didn't include the large amount of other capes in the city. Her and Sere are two canon heroes that eventually join the Protectorate in Brockton later on in the story. Usually by the time people have abandoned the main story line as its post timeskip when they show up.

They're often used as extras or possible additions to the roster because Wildbow never fucking bothered to make more then a few more canon names in Brockton even though there was supposed to be at least 20 more capes in the city then the ones usually shown.

Remember, Wildbow wrote from Unreliable Narration and Inconsistent Point of View. So he never bothered to say... list all the heroes in more then a few locations or even in things other then Endbringer Fights listed more then the heroes and villains he already named even though Taylor had access to literally every hero and villain on the planet and most others when she went Full Khepri.

Its basically another reason why Wildbow needs a kick. Filling out the massive number of other capes out there is often looked down on by 'purists' who think anyone not named by Wildbow explicitly is somehow lesser.

I mean, I live in a state capital and I know my city would be full of them. And many of the other states out there.

Sadly, as to the PoV of canon... its like none existed.

Wildbow slacked at the worldbuilding side of things when it came to capes and who and what they are.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

If you'd like to read up on Dovetail, here's her wiki entry. (I am eternally grateful as an author for how comprehensive the Worm wiki is. If I had to go searching through the full text of Worm itself for something it could take me hours.)

Incidentally, my take on Dovetail is that she's usually deployed in the outlying cities and towns rather than Brockton Bay itself. Each PRT department needs to cover a whole geographic area and not just one city, after all. Piggot called her in for the assault on Coil's base because that was an all hands on deck situation.

Wildbow slacked at the worldbuilding side of things when it came to capes and who and what they are.

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I think this might be a little too harsh on Wildbow. I think he did the worldbuilding he needed to do for the story as he went, and that's just what time permitted given his extremely impressive update schedule. I'm pretty happy with the result, honestly. It supported the main story without getting bogged down in irrelevant detail the way some fantasy novels with perhaps a bit too much worldbuilding sometimes do. When I take my story somewhere outside the stuff that Worm canon covers I need to fill in the gaps, but I don't mind doing that.

 

[Unseelie]

Its basically another reason why Wildbow needs a kick.

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Wildbow never fucking bothered

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Wildbow slacked at the worldbuilding side of things when it came to capes and who and what they are.

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Am I misunderstanding something, or do you really believe authors are required to create lists of people that never appear in their story just to help out fanfictions?

 

[Satisfaction]

Am I misunderstanding something, or do you really believe authors are required to create lists of people that never appear in their story just to help out fanfictions?

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They don't need to. The Worm fandom in general just acts extremely entitled and frankly wildly insulting re: Wildbow and his worldbuilding.

Edit: Or at least, many people in it do.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

For what it's worth, I think the quality of the characters and worldbuilding is the biggest reason why Worm has such an enormous fanfiction community. For a web serial it's truly staggering the size of the fandom. Wildbow did a tremendous job of creating tools for other writers to tell stories with.

 

[sunsunsunsunsun]

Am I misunderstanding something, or do you really believe authors are required to create lists of people that never appear in their story just to help out fanfictions?

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Less "list people who didn't exist" than "came up with characters who should have impacted the story but didn't"

 

[Aunty Shi Ping]

Less "list people who didn't exist" than "came up with characters who should have impacted the story but didn't"

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It is a work of fiction, thus it is definitely flawed. There is a very great deal of very bad fiction out there, to call Worm "bad" does not seem justified, but by the same token, there seems to be a sufficient supply of people willing to argue that it is completely free of internal inconsistencies, implausible characterisations, or any number of other complaints that people have made of it. There are many things that I regard as bad about it, my own most significant block to reading it being that I can't suspend my disbelief enough to see it as anything other than an author torturing their character in largely arbitrary ways in order to provoke empty, obviously-forced drama, character d'arcs and pre-determined plot-points. It is one thing to see characters overcome obstacles, another to see a literary god push them over and endlessly kick them along a railroad. All that said though, I do not think that it fails the standards that should be applied to it. Some people love it, some hate it, some just don't care, and so very very many are none of the above, but at the end of the day it is just another work of fiction, albeit an exceptionally large one.

I think that it would be better to avoid citing the author's motivations without citations or extensive analysis and an admission that such efforts at analysis can fail and mislead. Sure, it is probably true that the author just didn't bother to fully consider the entire setting, and as such left out a great great very many external factors that would, in any sane scenario, intervene, but that is basically universal, and the author did, to the same extent, "not bother" to pen the entire work as a rock-ballad. Given that the work is, I feel, more evocative-entertainment than examination-entertainment, the latter is arguably more of a failure, and no fiction succeeds at the former...

Worm is not internally-plausible, but that does not make it substandard or incompetent, because it is not supposed to be an accurate simulation. When the current roster got tired, and The P.R.T. needed to be seen to do something to up the stakes, Doetail was brought in to counter Skitter, and was promptly humiliated. There is barely any character there, and there is no obvious reason as to why they didn't think to call upon a flier and terrain-fortifier for the post-Leviathan search-and-rescue efforts, or any of the other relatively-safe emergencies that they had that really could of benefited from someone with so much mobility, nor why someone with magic drying powers wasn't called in to help with post-Leviathan either. None of that matters, what matters is that the characters did, eventually, find a reason to exist, did so, and are now available for fanfiction. Given that Dovetail seems to be a genuinely decent person, it can probably be safely assumed that she spends her spare time using her powers to cause deaths by autoerotic asphyxiation. As a canon character with almost no screentime, she is basically a blank canvas...

 

[Arzte]

Am I misunderstanding something, or do you really believe authors are required to create lists of people that never appear in their story just to help out fanfictions?

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Obviously, otherwise how else with fanfic authors be able to come up with new and interesting characters? No, we need the OG author to create detailed lists of characters and outline world-building that literally does nothing for the story to better support fanfiction.

In all seriousness though, for a PoV and unreliable narrator fic, Wildbow did a hell of an amazing amount of world and character building. Like seriously, the amount we have to work with is pretty dang swell for where it came from (mainly Taylor) and her PoV

 

[TaliesinSkye]

The regular interlude chapters from other POVs were a stroke of genius in terms of worldbuilding, I think. We got a heck of a lot out of those. They're a really elegant solution to the limitation of a story otherwise being in a single POV. (Which has advantages, but showing worldbuilding is a drawback.)