[Review] End of Month Reviews #34 - October 2006 [spoilers]

[Saxon Brenton]

Martin replied:

[...]
>>         I think I can see how it was passed, but I think it has more to 
>>do with the structure and nature of the storytelling in the Superfreaks 
>>setting than with in-story logic.
>
>That plus the fact that once you establish that you are dealing with a 
>world in which people can fly, climb walls and have bits of metal emerge 
>from their forearms then right away you are not dealing with the real world 
>and it just becomes a question of keeping the world you are dealing with 
>internally consistent.

True.  Although that reminds me about past arguements on the RAC*
groups about whether the default assumptions of most (shared
universe) superhero universes are 'just like real life with select
bits added' or whether they should include logical extrapolations
of knock-on effects.  I'll be honest and say that given your use
of the cop show structure I had been expecting the Superfreaks
setting to be more like Real Life than most other settings. I think
that's why the situation surprised me so much: I hadn't expected
to need to suspend my disbielf to quite that extent, and was half
expecting a more sinister explanation involving political
manipulation and/or mind control, hence the comments about dream
maniplaution for #13.


[...]
>              So I suppose we can look at Superfreaks now as a world where 
>anti-abortion activists don't exist, at least not to the extent they do in 
>the real world (because nobody in their right mind would recommend abortion 
>anyway over contraception as a means of birth control) and so we don't have 
>the stem cell debate and, by extention, the knee jerk objection to cloning 
>and thus we end up with this seemingly bizarre legal decision that slipped 
>through the cracks and didn't even make headline news.

Oh, I doubt if you even need to go that far.  The reason I used
both civil rights and the pro-life/pro-choice arguements is to
deliberately include both left and right ideologies that are
vocally advocated by their respective partisans under the U.S.'s
rights of free speech.  It occurs to me that if you posit that
advocacy in general is nowhere near as vocal in the Superfreaks
setting, then you'd get much the same result as what was shown:
something was able to slip through and the general public might
not know about it for a while.  Mind you that's still a somewhat
substantive change from Real Life and might have it's own
not-inconsiderbale knock-on effects.

---
Saxon Brenton   Uni of Technology, city library, Sydney Australia

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