I recently read a novel by Paolo Bacigalupi called The Windup Girl, and it had themes which reminded me a lot of the hostilities between Synth Foods and the various angry farmers. Basically, the novel takes place in a near-future where much of Earth's natural resources have been depleted, and most of the world is reliant upon the "calorie companies", Western corporations which genetically engineer and produce new crops to keep ahead of various super-blights (which were their fault to begin with), and in doing so keep much of the world in their pocket. The novel is set in Thailand, and much of it deals with the violent resentment towards the calorie companies and their unwanted Western influence.
It's a very dark book, definitely for mature readers only, but it's very good.
What Synthfoods is doing and has been doing is similar to what united fruit company has done in the past and what is still done on a smaller scale today.
The company is a great RP project I reckon
There used to be pictures here
once known as Richard Farbridge, OBE and Ronaldo Benitez
I really liked "The Windup Girl." I honestly was not expecting something like it when I first opened up the book. As for what Sythfoods is doing in the game, they most certainly are manufacturing diseases and immunising their crops against them, then releasing them into the wild to crush the competition. However, this is only a very small part of their techniques used to destroy the competition's crops. The main thing that Synth is doing is altering the atmosphere of planets like Stuttgart, making it so that the very air itself has an unnatural oxygen-carbon-nitrogen ratio, which makes it so that their crops grow fine, while other plants suffocate.
On another note, I would just like to reenforce the "mature" label on The Windup Girl. There is some pretty adult stuff in there. Alltogether, though, very good book.
' Wrote:What Synthfoods is doing and has been doing is similar to what united fruit company has done in the past and what is still done on a smaller scale today.
The company is a great RP project I reckon
There's definitely a lot of good potential RP, but doing anything with Synth in game is pretty irritating. They are the faction without any actual bases and all.
I think the FloraGro commodity is going to have lots of interesting potential RP with all that, too
First off, this looks like a very interesting book and I see that it won the Hugo. I'll definitely have to check it out, so thanks for the recommandation.
As for relating the ideas back to Disco, it just makes me wish all the more that Freelancer was a deeper game than the sophisticated arcade shooter that it is. If bases had finite amounts of commodities, and had to be stocked with enough essential items like food and water, then Synth Foods would have actually have something tangible to do ingame. But sadly...I doubt it's even possible to code this. *sigh*
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