The idea is that Omega makes the world stay roughly as it is, but the individual beauty and other virtues of the books are lost. The books are replaced by something generic and drab that is still able to generate roughly the same large-scale effect due to Omega’s tweaks. And everyone you know personally is exempt. So for example Tolkien may be expunged, and instead someone else wrote some epic fantasy that helped launch a genre and it had something like orcs in it, but it wasn’t nearly as powerful and beautiful and everything as Tolkien was. Same for Stephenie Meyer: whatever you liked about Twilight is gone, replaced with some generic vampire love story that inexplicably became incredibly popular, and you’re able to base Luminosity on it, and maybe add more of your personal imagination to offset the drabness, so large-scale effects added up to the same in your world.
Basically I’m trying, instead of asking the familiar “your top 5” or “the 5 books you’ll take to an uninhabited island”, to ask “which 5 books you find it most painful to contemplate being lost to the world as if they never existed, but everything else mostly stayed the same”. It’s an inherently self-contradictory question, I know, but maybe still worth asking.
Hmm. Taking this question at face value where I am only prioritizing by the individual flavor and character of the books and not their cultural significance, I’m going to say let’s keep J.K. Rowling… Tamora Pierce… Sharon Shinn, Laini Taylor, John Scalzi. I was also tempted by Philip Pullman (but I think about 75% of what I’d miss is people putting daemons in arbitrary fanfiction, which it sounds like would get suitably replaced?) and Zenna Henderson (but I think losing her stories would probably be a smaller loss to me than the ones I picked).
I did this by looking at my bookshelf which has actual books on it, so if I was supposed to interpret it to include screenwriters or anything the answer is invalid.
The idea is that Omega makes the world stay roughly as it is, but the individual beauty and other virtues of the books are lost. The books are replaced by something generic and drab that is still able to generate roughly the same large-scale effect due to Omega’s tweaks. And everyone you know personally is exempt. So for example Tolkien may be expunged, and instead someone else wrote some epic fantasy that helped launch a genre and it had something like orcs in it, but it wasn’t nearly as powerful and beautiful and everything as Tolkien was. Same for Stephenie Meyer: whatever you liked about Twilight is gone, replaced with some generic vampire love story that inexplicably became incredibly popular, and you’re able to base Luminosity on it, and maybe add more of your personal imagination to offset the drabness, so large-scale effects added up to the same in your world.
Basically I’m trying, instead of asking the familiar “your top 5” or “the 5 books you’ll take to an uninhabited island”, to ask “which 5 books you find it most painful to contemplate being lost to the world as if they never existed, but everything else mostly stayed the same”. It’s an inherently self-contradictory question, I know, but maybe still worth asking.
Hmm. Taking this question at face value where I am only prioritizing by the individual flavor and character of the books and not their cultural significance, I’m going to say let’s keep J.K. Rowling… Tamora Pierce… Sharon Shinn, Laini Taylor, John Scalzi. I was also tempted by Philip Pullman (but I think about 75% of what I’d miss is people putting daemons in arbitrary fanfiction, which it sounds like would get suitably replaced?) and Zenna Henderson (but I think losing her stories would probably be a smaller loss to me than the ones I picked).
I did this by looking at my bookshelf which has actual books on it, so if I was supposed to interpret it to include screenwriters or anything the answer is invalid.