but for real though, today’s chapter was so damn good it motivated me to at least try to write recommendation. i need more people to read it — someone who follows me has got to be willing to give it a try
Seek is an original science fiction story set in the radically distant future, updating roughly every week (or lately, closer to every two)
the world is barely recognizable, practically post-scarcity and full of cybernetic modification and AI
in fact, one of the pov characters is one such AI, and the other is so heavily modded i’ve seen one person derisively call her a cyberfox. this hardly scratched the surface of what’s interesting about them and their situation, but this is just a quick recommendation
you can read the first chapter here: https://seekwebserial.wordpress.com/2024/10/18/0-1-0-hack/
i’ll admit, the start can be a bit shaky (this whole “guy wakes up in a hostile high-tech facility with no memory of what’s going on” setup is definitely not the most inspired of starts, and this is all the more dubious when it’s so far still unclear what role he’ll play in the long run direction of the story)
furthermore, the structure of Seek is ambitious — and questionable in a way that strains against the foremost issue of a rotating pov stories. there are three perspective characters, each essentially living in entirely different worlds and “eras”.
as a result, it feels at times like reading three different novels interleaved, with little tying them together. now, a sense of interconnection has begun to emerge, a dozen odd chapters down the line, but yeah
if you stick with it, though? there’s incredible payoff, several intensely satisfying character moments in a fascintating world futuristic to the point of becoming alien
the blurb goes:
Despite our best efforts, few survived faster than light travel. None survived the trip back. So we took a different approach altogether. We started bringing the universe to us.
There’s no point. What hasn’t changed in the last four hundred years won’t change in our lifetimes.
There’s no point. We’ve solved it. Everything humanity needs, it has. We’ve reached the finish line.
There’s no point. Turn off the lights, close your eyes, and cover your ears, nightmares come manifest.
Three storylines from three individuals, worlds and eras apart.
as i try to write this recommendation, i’m finding myself trying to summarize all the cool things it does — how society and culture is reshaped by this abundance of resources and automation, and the gross proliferation of advertisement and surveillance that results. or talk about the emphasis the cybernetic augmented place on the fidelity of their mods. but at a point it feels like i’m just doing a worse job of telling the story
so i think the one thing i’d point to as my favorite part of Seek is its portrayal of the integrated “onboard” AI that quickly become more widespread over the course of the story.
there’s such a creativity and attention to specificity when it comes to portraying how different people relate to their onboards, down to the formatting flourishes the text uses to set off and differentiate scenes where several different intelligence conversing
but i digress
it isn’t just the worldbuilding that gets me, but the character writing, and even the plot has started to heat up — as i said, the reason why i’m writing this now is because the newest chapter (2.6.w) is easily the best in the serial
i have further thoughts on its painstaking tension, the suffocating powerlessness on multiple levels but they don’t exactly mean much if you aren’t caught up
so yeah. i love this story and i’m hoping for it to garner more readers
if i have to end off with one last piece of bait — we have one protag become taylor swift times a thousand and the other become a terrorist. things get crazy