The End of the World is Flat, by Simon Edge

[RosaBonheur]

Has anyone read this?

I'd love to hear what people on this board think of it.

PS - no I haven't got the wrong board. It's a novel which satirises gender ideology.

PPS - not a sales plug either, I am not connected with the author in any way other than a brief Twitter exchange!

I have!
I thought it was a very witty and clever allegory of what's been happening in the last decade or so.
Have you read it OP?

I've not read it myself but I've seen the book mentioned and recommended on FWR, so I know you're on the right board. If I ever finish Wolf Hall I might give it a look.

I loved it! I thought it was very clever. And I’m hoping for a similar neat ending to the whole farce.

I read it. Thought it was good fun. The made up Twitter exchanges and company virtue signalling were hilarious

I read it when it came out and really enjoyed it. It was a fun read. If you enjoyed it, Identity Crisis by Ben Elton might be up your street

It's very good. Very clever.

Yes, really enjoyed it.

I've just started it- I'm in contact with him on Twitter and he's a really incisive and witty communicator so I knew the book would be good. He's written several others that have been well received.

I read it a few months ago and really enjoyed it. I think I need to read it again and see if I get any more out of it on a second reading. Although the ending was a bit neat for my liking, it really got me thinking about what/who is behind the rise of gender ideology and how it might end. (I'm quite sure it will end, the only question is how many laws across the world will have been changed by that point and won't be changed back. And of course what becomes of all the people who shaped their lives around it.)

Thanks for the recommendation, @JacquelinePot, I'll have to check that one out.

I read it, too, some time ago. I found the bit about buying accounts and robots fascinating: The robots tweet to each other and like each others' tweets and then some real people follow them and start liking their tweets, too. Is this how it actually works?

I have often wondered about some Twitter accounts I have seen which have a thousand followers yet have never tweeted, according to their profile page. But I haven't researched this question at all.

The book is a fun read and applies to not only this topic but also to the way social media reinforces tribalism, emotions over thinking, and anger over other emotions.

Yes @nepeta, the social media aspect was fascinating and terrifying in equal measure. Is that really how it works?

I remember being on social media (mainly Facebook but some Twitter as well) in the run up to the Brexit referendum and coming across the same pro Brexit accounts time and time again, spouting the same nonsense constantly, being provocative. At the time I wondered why so many accounts were posting the same copy and pasted gibberish, but I didn't join the dots. Then all the Cambridge Analytica stuff came out and I realised in hindsight that I had been arguing with accounts which were either bots or people being paid to do that. And so of course now with the gender stuff, you see the same accounts posting the same things over and over again on Twitter and you don't know how many are real people and how many aren't. It's a very strange kind of warfare.

(I'm not suggesting that everyone posting in support of Brexit was a bot and not a real person, or even that they were all posting gibberish, by the way. But there was a definite pattern of lots of accounts posting the same factually incorrect stuff from a script. And some of the TRA accounts seem eerily similar.)

And this is the problem which happens when we can no longer trust that what we see or read is real. Are we chatting with robots? Are the videos we see doctored or entirely made up?

There are political actors which benefit from this (at least in the shortest of runs), but democracy certainly does not.

I'm afraid that I found it dull.

I read it last summer after someone mentioned on a thread here that the Kindle edition was reduced to 99p. An excellent read, and the parallels/parody came over very well.

I enjoyed it, it was an easy, pleasant weekend read that highlighted some good points. I did want to know more about the history of stonewall / trans movement etc to see the parallels once I'd finished the book.

I read it ages ago and enjoyed it. After watching what's been happening in Australia and New Zealand this week I am of the option you can't satirise this stuff because it's completely fucking nuts. No satire is insane enough.

I really liked it. I'd actually like it to be on a schools reading list because of how it shows manipulation through social media.

Here's an older thread that I resurrected last summer for a few more opinions

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4298863-The-End-Of-The-World-Is-Flat

Yeah it was the "TERDs" thing that made me think of it!

Thank you @Birdsweepsin. I didn't clock Lateefa Latif at the time!