[0xcde4c3db]

Especially considering that there's a surprisingly on-the-nose analog in The Handmaid's Tale. I can't find the actual passage, so I might be mangling the details, but from what I recall there were printing companies that pivoted to printing prayers... only for the paper to be immediately recycled and used for the next order. The point of paying for it was basically to signal that one was pious and/or wealthy enough to not care about the waste.

[JNRowe]

Your recall looks to be pretty good ;)

"At the corner is the store known as Soul Scrolls. It’s a franchise: there are Soul Scrolls in every city centre, in every suburb, or so they say. [...] Ordering prayers from Soul Scrolls is supposed to be a sign of piety and faithfulness to the regime, so of course the Commanders’ Wives do it a lot. It helps their husbands’ careers. [...] The machines talk as they print out the prayers; if you like, you can go inside and listen to them, the toneless metallic voices repeating the same thing over and over. Once the prayers have been printed out and said, the paper rolls back through another slot and is recycled into fresh paper again."

Side note: I found the quote by searching my comment history¹ and then picking up the book, because that is faster than finding the text in the book without any hints. I really can't decide if that is good thing or not. Like some super weak version of Chiang's Remem²

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25672286

² https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth...

[aspenmayer]

Ted Chiang is a great writer, while not being showy. I like his writing for how easy he makes it seem to write compelling ideas into narratives. I found his short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others quite a good intro to his oeuvre. I quite liked the film Arrival, which is based on the title work of the collection.

I should read more of his work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stories_of_Your_Life_and_Other...

[Thorentis]

That book was surprisingly accurate in many details, but grossly inaccurate in who the perpetrators were. For instance, I think that analog better parodies the modern day virtue signalling than it does people praying.