"What is?"

"Like—okay I really like stuff that explores alien societies, especially ones that are actually smart and thoughtful about their castes. I like sci-fi that treats the lightspeed limit like the hard problem it is instead of handwaving it away. I like exploration of alternate presents where some technological changes were or weren't made, and I like speculative future fiction, particularly when it's careful about its societal worldbuilding. Does this paint a picture?"

"Hm, I think so. Social science fiction."

"Yeah, that sounds like a good description."

"Ever read Twelve?"

"Don't think so, what's it about? Guessing twelve castes?"

"Yes, and they're divided up really unusually, it's been called 'the anti-Blackout' but I think it's - differently different."

"Why anti-Blackout? And how different?"

"Well, Blackout's one or rather no castes, see, and they get categorized near each other but Twelve's by a Voan and intended for a more... serious audience, and has different background tropes."

"Interesting. I'll need to look it up."

"It only got hand-translated recently, might be why you haven't seen it."

"Ah, makes sense. Machine-translated books aren't that bad, though."

"Machine translation is good enough for browsing the internet but there are a lot of books published in the world and all else being equal native or hand-translated is just better."

"Well yeah, I said not that bad, it's still mostly not good. But yeah I haven't read any machine-translated books in a while. You should add a fiction recommendation thing to your blog, you have good taste."

"I could maybe add a link to a side blog for that, I don't want to unnecessarily dilute the site's greyness."

"—oh right yeah there's that constraint. Ugh."

"Ugh!"

"Well, I'll at least get to appreciate your good taste, selfishly."

"You're very lucky. Although I'll consider doing a side blog for fiction, it's not like I don't write down all my opinions anyway."

He giggles. "And Amenta thanks you for it. Are there many opinions other than the predictions you wish you could post but don't?"

"I don't mean anything specific, I just write a lot. I wouldn't mind copying the fiction musings to a blog and lightly editing."

"I know, I just meant in general, whether there was something in the category."

"Sometimes I want to go a little heavier on the politics than I do but it's usually not worth the extra arcball articles."

"I think I might have watched arcball three times in my life."

"It's a good sport as they go. Well, as the ones with enough to write statistics articles about go, I'd probably have had a slightly easier time generating a sincere interest in gymnastics but I think there's less material without the team aspect and the noisy performance information."