Tennessee here: what the chicken-fried fuck is wrong with these people?
I think we're watching some idiots who are trying to move the overton widow by pulling on it, but they're mostly succeeding at cutting their hands up really badly.
The Night Circus and The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
Go in cold, do not spoil! Enjoy with a warm beverage. The readers are phenomenal.
The Laundry Files series by local hero Charles Stross, in which it turns out that P=NP, the Great Old Ones can be summoned in polynomial time, Cthulhu ate America via regulatory capture, and the world is suffering from the magical equivalent of global warming. Our protagonists have to mitgate all of this on a British civil servant's salary.
The Quantum Thief trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi, in which Our Regular Subjects have become a problem.
My god, they're making furbys:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/openais-expensive-smart-speaker-will-use-moving-parts-to-seem-more-alive