![]() ![]() ![]() Things come to a head, or rather neck, when Dream Derek starts to develop a weird throat infection / infestation and (gasp!) dares to take a day off work to recover. Enter the eponymous Derek, who is LitenVärld’s dream employee: Loyal to a fault, a boon for sales, and ever so slightly creepy. One thing that capitalism loves to do is to replicate its successes ad nauseum, thereby creating new markets and consumers.Ī side-effect of this notion, of course, is duplicate employees. ![]() Nino Cipri manages to combine both these keen SF traditions with the crazy idea of LitenVärld outsourcing its supply-chain management to an, er, multiverse. Fast-forward to now, and the focus is firmly on post-scarcity economics. Kornbluth in ‘The Space Merchants’ (1952). SF has a long history of being both critical about capitalism and taking the mickey out of it, as did Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. The professional publishing and review industry tends to get sniffy about Goodreads reviewers and how they write uncritical statements like ‘I loved this book!’ and ‘This book is amaze-balls!’ Well, both of these statements apply to ‘Defekt’, which packs in an incredible deal of bonhomie and joie de vivre between its covers. Every job has at least one fucking Derek-an otherwise inoffensive coworker that still somehow manages to earn your ire at every turn, because it’s easier to heap scorn on a clueless coworker than to change the system actually making your life hell. ![]()
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