I got a cheap Chinese one (no camera, wifi) in 2024 and it's been a game changer. Yeah it's kind of dumb but it runs every day and picks up an unholy amount of dust, cat hair, and the like. Maybe if you were already vacuuming every day they're pretty useless but for me it's been night and day. As another commenter said, they're also surprisingly repairable, and I bought a ton of spare parts before the tariffs went in.
While I don't think you're wrong about the orientalist elements in Western cyberpunk, consider that Japan also produced two of the seminal and genre-defining works of cyberpunk (Akira and Ghost in the Shell).
The Dispossessed was great! I wanted to read something by Ursula K. Le Guin for ages, and then happened to be staying in a friend's house where that book happened to be on a bookshelf. So I'd the happy experience of just giving it a go, knowing nothing. And it was very good.
Hadn't heard of either of the other two authors though - thank you for sharing!
Le Guin was also anarchist-minded in real life, too. I recall her explicitly endorsing Murray Bookchin in her late years.
The Dispossessed is excellent literature regardless of one's politics, though. The anarchist society depicted in it is utopian, but shown with warts and all fully exposed, and that makes it that much more believable.
I find that it pairs great with Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which, while very different in terms of language and writing (but also great!), sort of does a similar exposition of an anarcho-capitalist utopia - again, warts and all.
Most of the designs for a system like this are "chip" designs where a single 1cm x 1cm silicon wafer is towed by the sail.
This design prevents the need for lasers so large that they create enough ozone to kill the entire human race.
The contents of the chip vary, based on who is speculating, but tend to contain exotic, uninvented, circuitry capable of both harvesting energy from the laser and doing "something" of use besides zipping by the target at 0.2c deaf, dumb, and blind. Sometimes it's even an AI-enhanced swarm! (Shoulda figured out how to work blockchain in there, post-doc guy)
Regardless, during the 40 trillion kilometer voyage to Proxima Centauri, that 1x1cm silicon wafer (and the sail) will hit space dust, and numerous other atoms and molecules (including carbon rings) because empty space... isn't.
So it passes through the sail and then hits the spacecraft attached to the sail. Now what? kaboom? small holes in the hull would not be good for the occupants.
When it passes through the sail, enough energy is deposited in the grain to explode it, so if there's sufficient distance to the hull the vapor deposits sufficiently low energy/area to be tolerable.
Also, worth noting that these temperatures are not that high as far as plasmas go. This is 3-5 eV, which is firmly in the "low temperature" regime (like a fluorescent bulb).
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