Disco Elysium Reading List?

[CommanderWaffle]

I've enjoyed Disco Elysium's critical eye toward political and economic systems, and I'm looking for some more reading in that vein. Does anyone have some recommendations for similarly critical modern reading?

[Sisyphus]

I'd recommend looking at Arrighi, Wallerstein, Varoufakis, or David Harvey.

[Bodacious]

Read Evola

[Twelvefield]

Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest is both a detective mystery, an action thriller, and a sharp insight towards marginalization through political agency. That's three things. You get a bonus thing, today is your lucky day. It's literally modern, if we accept that our current phase of decrepitude is post-modernist deconstructivism.

[ZAToM]

i recommend the manifesto from ted kaczinsky

[Isme]

On the Steam/Disco Elysium home splash page, there's a scroll-down. Right now there is a post from the devs about Hardcore Mode and Ultra Wide. Just below that (Jan 17 2020) is an article from the devs about their inspiration for the game. It's extensive enough to be pretty satisfying .

EDIT: Looking through the Inspirations I mentioned above I see a book that I will recommend:
The City & The City
by China Meiville

[Seifer]

Originally posted by ZAToM \\{{~*~}}//:

i recommend the manifesto from ted kaczinsky

[rbr]

Red Harvest is a fantastic novel.

[Twelvefield]

I agree, and yet it's far from Hammett's best, although in later titles he tones down the politics somewhat and vastly improves his character motivations. There are so many derivative works based on Dash Hammett's stories. Some are masterworks, like The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man movies, others are blatant rip-offs or based on the hope that the audience doesn't know the source material. Many of our contemporary mob and detective fictions owe so much to these original books. DE falls into that category, and it's one of the better reiterations of the Dash Hammett ethos.

[Holografix]

Dash Hammett is fine, but not as good as Raymond Chandler. If you like detective fiction, you can't do much better than Chandler. Try 'The Long Goodbye.'

[Twelvefield]

And again, I agree. Raymond Chandler is possibly the greatest American writer, period. Hemingway comes close enough, and so does Philip K. ♥♥♥♥. Still, Chandler's Los Angeles doesn't mesh as well with Martinaise and Revachol as Hammett's Personville in Red Harvest or San Francisco in The Maltese Falcon.

[Holografix]

Originally posted by Twelvefield:

And again, I agree. Raymond Chandler is possibly the greatest American writer, period. Hemingway comes close enough, and so does Philip K. ♥♥♥♥. Still, Chandler's Los Angeles doesn't mesh as well with Martinaise and Revachol as Hammett's Personville in Red Harvest or San Francisco in The Maltese Falcon.

art cop:
-1 Hand/Eye Coordination: Hands shake from anger how ♥♥♥♥ it all is

[Success]

Greatest American writer? That's a tall order. Flannery O'Connor's better than him, James Baldwin for sure, hell even Thomas Pynchon or Jeanette Winterson twist better sentences than Chandler. But! There's nobody that does gumshoe word salad like Chandler, "..one of those mixed up salads which men will eat with complete docility in restaurants, although they would probably start yelling if their wives tried to feed them one at home." - The Long Goodbye

Yet, there's a humour in Martinaise and Revachol that isn't gumshoe noir. Like when you poke fun at your love-life even though your heart is breaking...it's almost too meta. That's why maybe Disco is a game about a "detective" but it's like a strange parody of the genre, not quite gunshoe noir but something that's informed by it.

[Twelvefield]

I'm starting to believe that DE isn't a detective story at all. There are people who take on the role of being detectives, and there are crimes and puzzles to solve, but the game doesn't seem to be about any of that, not on its own terms. I have some ideas on what the true nature of the game world is (hint: mundane, very mundane, not the wild science fiction theories of other threads), but I need more time and space to figure it all and lay out my ideas in some way that doesn't take up a wall of text. Just half a haiku, really.

In a way, it's either unfortunate or unwieldy that DE needs a detective. However, without the murder mystery, who would go for this title? It would be like The Novelist videogame, a fine idea that is well-executed and has an intriguing foundation in sociology, psychology, and art, but nobody buys it.

[Sisyphus]

While the story has elements of hard-boiled fiction and nods to police procedurals, I think it is squarely in the realm of crime fiction. It is not a mystery and not a detective story, yes, but crime fiction doesn't require mystery.

[hoob]

The City & the City is something I think most people who enjoyed Disco Elysium would be into.

[Gilmore Girls Fanfiction]

Derrick Jensen's endgame series