Five Books Featuring World-Changing Visionaries

[james_davis_nicoll]

Characters hell-bent on reshaping the world, for better or worse...

Five Books Featuring World-Changing Visionaries

Comments

[patrick_morris_miller]

Luthen Rael, terrorist and hero:

I've given up all chance at inner peace. I've made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there's only one conclusion: I'm damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my, my eagerness to fight, they've set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down... there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my sacrifice? I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else's future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? EVERYTHING!

Hari Seldon is an edge case: his world is going to be reshaped one way or another, he just wants to determine how it gets reshaped.

[scott_sanford]

I'm reminded of Samsara by Scott Alexander, a short story about the last human who has not reached enlightenment.

[patrick_morris_miller]

Hacker News News' finest moment was when it called that website 'an empathy removal training camp'.

[scott_sanford]

Ouch!