{"id":9939,"date":"2025-11-19T21:28:03","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T03:28:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=9939"},"modified":"2026-01-17T18:34:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T00:34:09","slug":"dust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/dust\/","title":{"rendered":"Dust"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I have officially finished a series of books! That doesn’t happen much, mainly because of how I don’t read enough, but for other reasons too. In any case, noteworthy!<\/p>\n

This time, it was the third book of the Silo series, Dust<\/a>. And, you know what? It is definitely a conclusion to a story, with satisfying logical, logistical, and even emotional beats. But… it was also kind of overstuffed. I’m going to use an example from the story that is pretty much a spoiler, but if I disguise it by not naming any names or concrete details, I think it should mostly fly.<\/p>\n

So, a bunch of people are escaping doom, like let’s say 1% of the people in the doomed location escape to somewhere else. Due to happenstance, some of them are religious nuts. So the first thing the religious nuts do is go all Handmaid’s Tale<\/a> and forcibly select women for the men to marry (also forcibly), even women who qualify as underage, or wildly underage. And then someone shows up with a shotgun to resolve the situation. And it’s pretty realistic, both the horrific human behavior of people unhampered by rules and the part where those same people can be easily cowed under the correct circumstances. So it’s not that I disputed the realism of the vignette. But I dispute the utility of throwing in that kind of complication so late into a series that is about to end, and I paradoxically also dispute making it so easy to resolve, if you were going to monkeywrench it into the story like that in the first place.<\/p>\n

This did not ruin the book for me, but… it kind of felt like someone trying to write their way out of a corner and stalling for time, and then not having an editor to correctly excise those bits once the corner had been escaped. But that’s the important part. The corner was<\/em> escaped, and the story ended on a satisfying note, with a clear indication that there’s a lot more story left, even if it will never be (and should never be) written. Is this how all stories should end? Nah, lots of times “and they lived happily ever after” or “and he surveyed the lands he had destroyed with no small satisfaction” is the way to go. But I like stories that can pull off the “lived in, living world that you can imagine what’s next however you like” endings quite a lot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have officially finished a series of books! That doesn’t happen much, mainly because of how I don’t read enough, but for other reasons too. In any case, noteworthy! This time, it was the third book of the Silo series, Dust. And, you know what? It is definitely a conclusion to a story, with satisfying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1385,1289,430,1409],"class_list":["post-9939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-carrollton-public-library","tag-dystopian-fiction","tag-science-fiction","tag-silo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9939"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9944,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9939\/revisions\/9944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}