Mencius Moldbugman

For the Lovecraft fans we have Easter Eggs like the doomed Sarnath Street, an AR reading of Unknown Kadath, sly references to the mad Arab Alhazred, mutated beings known as shoggoths but a conspicuous and unforgivable lack of racist-named cats.

Contextually the story brings to mind many other books and films. The idea of areas of a city lying unknown just out of sight to its residents reminded me of China Mieville’s The City and the City. The avatar-laden virtual world was similar to the 2013 film The Congress.

Without spoiling anything, the plot is a complex story about a man’s relationships with various sexbots and real women in a world where technology has transformed sex into an overly-excessive smorgasbord of fetishes, mutations and glorified onanism. Teledildonics aplenty.

As with the Gig Economy, the author is more concerned with plot and ideas rather than character. The narrator is an anonymous erudite similar to the one in Gig Economy. This is in the Lovecraftian tradition of identical cookie-cutter protagonists who were stand-ins for HP himself

This is both a curse and a blessing. Fans don’t read Lovecraft for the nuanced protagonists but rather for the ideas surrounding them. The same is true here. I can imagine women disliking this story very much due to the lack of relatable characters.

The narrator, like the one in Gig Economy, is a little overly-erudite considering his surroundings. GE had a basement dwelling NEET but one who was capable of quoting Deleuze. Likewise, it’s strange in this world of dazzling technology, AR games and a million distractions...

... to have a narrator who can so readily quote Borges, know obscure Irish pantheists like Scotus Eriugena and possess a Classicist’s knowledge of Greek mythology. It’s satisfying for the intellectually curious reader but more than a touch unbelievable.

If @0x49fa98 ever does write a full-length commercial novel it would be great to see him develop in the area of character depth. However, what his stories lack in character depth they more than make up for it in idea depth. There is just so much here to even attempt to list.

Sexbots, AI Gods, augmented reality taken to extreme, gamification of life, apps for every aspect of your life... I read GSH hoping that any developers weren’t reading it too as I don’t want them to actually bring some of the ideas into reality.

The central theme - and the titular pun - of the story is how the acceleration of technology has caused a breakdown in relationships not only between humans but with any deity who may or may not have existed but who now is definitely dead in the Nietzschean sense.

And from this God-shaped hole, strange new gods arise, for nature abhors a vacuum. Humanity hates the void too, and creates grotesque abominations to fill in the black hole where once lay something of greater substance.

It’s really hard to review this story without giving too much away but I do recommend everyone give this a read. The ideas are electric and the writing is intense and full of imagery. The descriptions of the augmented worlds are positively exhilarating.

Minor criticisms: At times the story does lapse into incoherence and the finale is quite sudden and flat following the same narrative structure as Gig Economy’s conclusion: a monologue, followed by a brief description and ending in an exclamation.

I would love to see GSH extended into a full-length book where the ideas were built upon and we had more information about this world and the people in it. As it stands today, it’s 60% of one of the greatest modern horrors being written.

I also hope this is only the beginning for @0x49fa98 and that he builds a Mythos similar to his namesake. I want to see his sex-god Galatea being referenced in crossover works and whatever other disciples of the crawling chaos may be lurking out there.

The foundation is already out there with Gig Economy & now God-Shaped Hole. I wish to propose to @0x49fa98 if he’s willing for other writers to share in this world-building with him, like how August Derleth and Robert Bloch continued Lovecraft’s Mythos. The results could be wild

I also hope these stories inspire others out there to write. Big publishing has effectively killed genuine imaginative writing and true talent now lies out there on twitter and other platforms waiting to be discovered and disseminated. “If there is hope, it lies in the frogs.”