YMMV / Pump Six and Other Stories

• Anvilicious: Whether it be about the rich exploiting the poor, Bystander Syndrome contributing to environmental degradation, or the evils of GMO farming, there's maybe one story (Softer) that isn't more a treatise than a plot.
• Clueless Aesop: Pasho, big time. The aesop is as much a convoluted mess of contradictions as are the Jai ways. The story is about the importance of own cultural identity and how technology never really is neutral, but instead affects people and their way of life, often drastically changing them, until they are just part of the crowd, losing their original identity. It also tries to talk about the dangers of globalisation. Problem is, the mouthpiece of all those concerns is a brutal Proud Warrior Race Guy that could be a poster boy for the most extreme forms of violent nationalism (tribalism, really, because that's how small and narrow his scale is) and comes with absolutely zero redeeming qualities, being just a maniac warlord with obsession about wiping out anything else than his own culture and closest kin. Which Gawar would then gladly use to assimilate others into his "true ways" and rewrite history to completely remove his enemies from the memory of the people. We are supposed to take his speeches as a way against the evils of foreign technology and influences, along with unrestricted exchange of ideas. And then, of course, he gets poisoned by Raphael, to make sure Jai culture will be changed anyway. This isn't just a Broken Aesop, it meanders in such twisted ways and gives such an unsympathetic and just plain evil counter-viewpoint that the message of "every culture should be respected, regardless of anything" falls flat.
• Narm:
  • The conclusion of The Fluted Girl. Oh yes, the rich and powerful feast on the poor and powerless... by literally eating them for their own, sick amusement! The subtlety of the entire moment is so lacking, a raging bull in a china store would work better.
  • Gawar is the carricature of a Grumpy Old Man constantly invoking Appeal to Tradition, which is supposed to be satirical, but he's so over-the-top, the final result is just ridiculous and impossible to be taken as anything else than one, big joke.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Pump Six is one for Idiocracy and Cyril M. Kornbluth's The Marching Morons: world is falling apart around the ever-increasing sea of mouth-breathing idiots. But rather than playing up breeding patterns, it focuses on combination of societal apathy and ongoing degeneration caused by lethal pollution — if idiocy isn't going to finish off humanity, then cancer will.
• Squick: Lidia and Nia playing each other. As an instrument. The amount of augmentation their bodies sustained to make it possible is just nauseating. And to make things worse, their performance is deliberately choreographed as a sexual act.

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