Loaded Dice
3 min readMar 8, 2024

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Sure, I seldom write, though more for introspection purposes than with an eye to publishing or some degree of success. I reckon that as soon as text is written, it does exist. Currently page count is already copious, and a halfway (?) dot in an end of phrase has been put in the setting. Despite this, inflationary phase, as it may be named, isn't over in a sense that some new thoughts sometimes are integrated between the so-called bra- and ket- points.

I see currently no big reason to self-translate it into English, which may take a considerable amount of attention, as the text is dense, experimental (to wit, random line in a random dialogue there may bring into play way more words than could be typically heard from MCU heroes or in the final trailer of 3 Body Problem), close to mise en abyme, and unsuited to trends fashionable in Anglospheric SF since the Sad Puppies affair. Mythopoetic and often opaque, but sometimes heavily peppered with cosmology and mathematics. I will illustrate it with translation of two snippets randomly pulled out of sections far from one another:

{Up to current times, on Roppongi they tend to feed from taxes tallied up after jackpot of artic forms hit. The Pentagon-associated aesthetic does not fall afar from the monophyletic coordinating committees for controls of nuclear weapons inside the Mare Imbrium Eastern Fusion Authority. Whatever tier you manage to climb, they do put all qudits on scarlet red, to obvious detriment of strategy entanglement.}

In a somewhat analogous manner, Higgs field carriers had their reputation as holy monads built up on the Outer Moons much due to random, not well grounded, naming of the local gauge symmetry breaking effect after that ancient scholast.

and

The Vagranti Rassputnik usually had none to do with populistic ideas of the building of socialism on one individual moon, but sometimes was brimming with them… In accordance with an old-school view of seneschal enterpriser Jean-Luc Godard, brought back to Order from the Knighthood of Wights, Vateuiche system intellectuals found with dissatisfaction that quite innocent, as it might seem, proposal for political opponents to go to Bath for a period of six hundred standard days entails the runaway heating of said bath with Rindler-Unruh diarrheic radiation.

What else we can do, seneschal enterpriser Godard had a habit of saying, as he recalled landscape after the battle of Cannes on early Cosmic Age Terra. Any stygmodernist is obliged to carry stylistic difficulties somewhere in other time and place from where those dwelt before, and the weight of the cross is not given above what ye are able to bear.

(self-translation from Russian, with an addition/replacement of joke about Bath — in original text of mine a close equivalent could be found, though of course it has nothing to do with Bath in England or an expression which included the latter. Other wordplays survived in translation well)

For Russian readers, though, it, too, may be not very well suited, because they're today prone to much lighter SF, mainly stemming from novelizations of MMORPG or Strugatsky brothers-tinted fanfics. Hard SF or new space opera in Russian are almost nonexistent. Time travel/alternate history stories rulz. ;)

Diversity, inclusivity, CRT, LGBT rights etc. I don't touch at all, mostly because the work is set in a pretty far future (even the calendar has been restarted to make the Moonwalk by Armstrong et al. the Year Zero), when various forms of corporeal modifications or mental split/combine/harvesting are seen as granted in those societies where corresponding needs emerged.

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Loaded Dice
Loaded Dice

Written by Loaded Dice

We begin with the bold premise that the goal of war is a victory over the enemy. Slavic Lives Matter

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