How should people live, respond to, protest, in an age of re-emerging fascism? Are glamour and satire important?

The "liner notes" only refer to Douglas Adams, but there's a long history of SFF comedy: Harry Harrison, Bob Shaw, and of course Terry Pratchett come to mind. What are your comedy favourites?

What pop culture references did you spot? (Beyond Eurovision, that is.)

1. Comedy
How do you do comedy in games? There have been other comedy games (Paranoia, Toon, Inspectres) but comedy is regarded as being hard. How can you do it? Have you successfully run a deliberately funny game?

2. Art
There have been attempts to do music-based games, and performance art based games (Til Dawn, Umlaut, World Wide Wrestling), but they're all based around competitive performance and beating the opposition. But a lot of the struggle in Space Opera is about writing the song. Similarly, in The Disposessed, the struggle is with Shivek creating his theory. How can we represent this artistic struggle in games, and make it compelling for the players?

3. Non-violence
Related to the question above, a lot of RPGs have conflict and vioience as key parts of the narrative. How can we bring more variety into our games? How can we make the exploration of new settings fun, or base games around co-operation and understanding?

Related to this is the structure of the book, with alternate chapters of background exposition and the trials of the Decibels. Did that work for you? Did you like having exposition, or should it have been worked into the main sequence of events?

This book posits a universe that has no intrinsic meaning. There is no god, no creator, no higher purpose, no energy field that binds all life together. Life arrives spontaneously and is ubiquitous. Those lives are limited by reach and time. There's no afterlife: this one shot is all we get. No one life, or even one species, has inherent worth. There's no objective difference between people and meat.

This is, essentially, the point of view put forward by Western secularism.

In such a world, such a universe, what should we do? How should we live?

Valente recounted a letter sent to her by a reader. The reader thanked Valente for the book. She read it to her young husband while he was dying in hospital of cancer. They both enjoyed it and it was their last shared experience. The book brought some some beauty to the profoundly stupid terminal illness.

We're all in the same situation, but hopefully not so immediate. We don't have any deep effect on the world. We'll be dead in a few handfuls of years. When we're gone, almost no-one will notice, let alone care for long. What's the point?

In the book, Valente essentially says that we should accept that life is stupid, and work to make life more beautiful. Beauty, art, love: are those what we should be striving for? Are they enough?