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Sorry, misunderstanding. I meant a good job on writing that way, not Ambergris in particular. What's that thing called again where you make a statement unclear by making it ambiguous to which of two things you're referring? I keep doing that lately, but I can never remember the word.
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# ? Sep 3, 2014 21:55 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 05:47 |
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Cardiovorax posted:Sorry, misunderstanding. I meant a good job on writing that way, not Ambergris in particular. What's that thing called again where you make a statement unclear by making it ambiguous to which of two things you're referring? I keep doing that lately, but I can never remember the word. Ambiguity.
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# ? Sep 4, 2014 00:03 |
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Cardiovorax posted:Sorry, misunderstanding. I meant a good job on writing that way, not Ambergris in particular. What's that thing called again where you make a statement unclear by making it ambiguous to which of two things you're referring? I keep doing that lately, but I can never remember the word. That's what I mean too. I'm not sure if he does a good job! I think sometimes he oversteps a little and tips his hand, and it becomes very obvious to the reader that he's arranging something artificially to create an effect. Like - there's a scene in Authority where the protagonist leaves a meeting, and hears a noise from the vent that might be a clunky fan, or insane laughter. The meeting was already unsettling and weird, and it didn't really need possibly crazy laughter chasing our protagonist out, so that beat comes off as an unnecessary contrivance, VanderMeer doubling down when he could've just stepped out of the scene with confidence that he'd already hit his marks. That said, a lot of imagery and mood from those two books really stuck with me, and I'll definitely read the third. I'm curious how it'll differ tonally from the first two, which were already quite different from each other.
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# ? Sep 4, 2014 00:10 |
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I read Acceptance fairly quickly (I'll need to go back and re-read the trilogy sometime in full) but what surprised me about it was how many answers it gave up. There's going to be a lot of ultimate unknowables but in the end we get a pretty orderly package of Area X is the leftover machine of an alien race, attempting to terraform Earth in a way that the phrase 'terraform' is inaccurate. Communication with Area X is impossible, but the way with which is communicates can be understood partially as the brightness and the transformations that result from it. The titles of each book are pretty big hints as to what the books are about -- Acceptance is about the need to allow Area X to exist without, as Control attempts to do, assign motives along the lines of 'enemy', 'invasion', 'contamination', etc. as such motives are alien to Area X I liked it, in the end. I still think Authority and Annihilation are stronger so far, but Acceptance is fairly anchored compared to the creeping strangeness of the first two books. I thought the moment when the director goes "loving hell i have no idea what i'm doing, i'm going to paint the phrase from the tower on this bricked up doorway and see if it gets me anywhere" compared to the moment in the second book when Control goes "holy loving poo poo Area X is leaking! aaaah god drat!" as a really funny anticlimax.
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# ? Sep 4, 2014 00:27 |
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PupsOfWar posted:Anyone ever read any L.E. Modesitt Jr.? There's a big pile of his stuff sitting in my local library and some of it sounds intriguing, blurb-wise. I can't see ever going back to it the way a more complex read such as Erickson, Bakker, Donaldson, or Tolkien would appeal to me though (and I dropped the Thomas Covenant stuff and have no desire to go back after the like third book, despite loving the sci-fi rehash Donaldson wrote of the ring of the nibelungen, with such fervor.) coyo7e fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Sep 4, 2014 |
# ? Sep 4, 2014 03:35 |
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PupsOfWar posted:Anyone ever read any L.E. Modesitt Jr.? There's a big pile of his stuff sitting in my local library and some of it sounds intriguing, blurb-wise. I read The Eternity Artifact and Viewpoints Critical (picked that one up in the airport) and thought they were pretty good. Apparently he's really prolific so I'm going to read more of his stuff. Also I just finished the second novel of The Laundry Files and was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting the nerdy in-jokes to be unbearable but they're a lot less cringeworthy than the stuff in the earlier Dresden Files novels, and Charles Stross writes the most accurate depictions of government bureaucracy I've ever seen in a sci-fi/fantasy novel.
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# ? Sep 4, 2014 03:42 |
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PupsOfWar posted:Anyone ever read any L.E. Modesitt Jr.? There's a big pile of his stuff sitting in my local library and some of it sounds intriguing, blurb-wise. I quite like some of his SF stuff - The Parafaith War in particular, and also the loosely-linked duo Archform Beauty and Flash. I've also read some of the Imager fantasy stories, which are kind of interesting in how the magic components are integrated into the society.
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# ? Sep 4, 2014 06:16 |
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Cardiovorax posted:I also appreciate that sort of thing on principle, because the explanations authors come up with are never quite as good as the mystery you've built up in your head, but it can be really annoying when the author's hiding the wrong bits from you and arbitrarily makes his characters act stupider than they are to keep up the suspense. I've never read Vandermeer, although I've been interested in his Ambergris stories for a while now (on the basis that mushroom cyborgs are awesome.) Do you think he does a good job on it? Finch was good, 3/4 of The stories in City of Saints and Madmen were great, and I couldn't get through Shriek. Just don't go in expecting a Bas-Lag substitute like I did and you'll be happy.
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# ? Sep 4, 2014 06:25 |
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Hobnob posted:I quite like some of his SF stuff - The Parafaith War in particular, and also the loosely-linked duo Archform Beauty and Flash. I've also read some of the Imager fantasy stories, which are kind of interesting in how the magic components are integrated into the society. Yeah, a lot of the interesting bits with Modesitt's fantasy books are how (like previously mentioned) most of his protagonists are some sort of craftsmen, and a huge part of their story is, as often as not, them being scientists and discovering ways to use the magic in that world to do things better, more efficiently, safer, faster. Sometimes (but not always) this includes war, however, and discovering increasingly brutal and efficient methods of killing/moving/managing/supplying/using armies. His magic is pretty much an analogue for the advance of technology - in his Imager series they're practically one and the same - Imaging is used to create or use increasingly delicate and sophisticated machinery or architecture or proccesses that would normally require much more sophisticated equipment or techniques or materials than would ever be normally available in that sort of setting. His books often also generally also revolve around the politics and repercussions of the things the main character discovers and how it ends up changing the world in some way. His books aren't the /best/, and are definitely somewhat repetitive, and his main characters are always a little bit too perfect and smart and amazing, but they're so.. different from the normal sort of fantasy book, and are interesting enough that I have pretty much read all of his stuff anyways. At the same time I've never actually recommended them to someone, because they're so.. weird and I can see a lot of people thinking they're bad.
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# ? Sep 4, 2014 11:35 |
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Wolpertinger posted:Yeah, a lot of the interesting bits with Modesitt's fantasy books are how (like previously mentioned) most of his protagonists are some sort of craftsmen, and a huge part of their story is, as often as not, them being scientists and discovering ways to use the magic in that world to do things better, more efficiently, safer, faster. Sometimes (but not always) this includes war, however, and discovering increasingly brutal and efficient methods of killing/moving/managing/supplying/using armies. His magic is pretty much an analogue for the advance of technology - in his Imager series they're practically one and the same - Imaging is used to create or use increasingly delicate and sophisticated machinery or architecture or proccesses that would normally require much more sophisticated equipment or techniques or materials than would ever be normally available in that sort of setting. His books often also generally also revolve around the politics and repercussions of the things the main character discovers and how it ends up changing the world in some way. Yeah this is a great summary of Modesitt's fantasy.
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# ? Sep 4, 2014 13:55 |
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Wolpertinger posted:Yeah, a lot of the interesting bits with Modesitt's fantasy books are how (like previously mentioned) most of his protagonists are some sort of craftsmen, and a huge part of their story is, as often as not, them being scientists and discovering ways to use the magic in that world to do things better, more efficiently, safer, faster. Sometimes (but not always) this includes war, however, and discovering increasingly brutal and efficient methods of killing/moving/managing/supplying/using armies. His magic is pretty much an analogue for the advance of technology - in his Imager series they're practically one and the same - Imaging is used to create or use increasingly delicate and sophisticated machinery or architecture or proccesses that would normally require much more sophisticated equipment or techniques or materials than would ever be normally available in that sort of setting. His books often also generally also revolve around the politics and repercussions of the things the main character discovers and how it ends up changing the world in some way. Pretty much. I really liked his books ten or so years ago, and they are often quite interesting, but he does repeat himself. I do like how he doesn't mind making villains of his MCs or how he doesn't have a 'favorite' in his nations (E.G, he doesn't mind MCs that contradict everything the last thought, etc). I think his worst work were the singer ones.
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# ? Sep 4, 2014 21:11 |
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syphon posted:He had this weird knack of writing his characters as craftsmen (usually the Hero decided to be a furniture maker or something mundane) which really made me want to start building chairs. So it's sort of like Use of Weapons?
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# ? Sep 4, 2014 22:34 |
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Clark Nova posted:So it's sort of like Use of Weapons? Ewwwwwww
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# ? Sep 5, 2014 16:45 |
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Clark Nova posted:So it's sort of like Use of Weapons? Hahah
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# ? Sep 5, 2014 17:05 |
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Clark Nova posted:So it's sort of like Use of Weapons? Well played sir
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# ? Sep 5, 2014 17:13 |
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I wish Ted Chiang would write more. I would fund a kickstarter for him to quit his day job, but I think he's said that he doesn't have enough ideas to write all that often.
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# ? Sep 6, 2014 18:06 |
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Blindsight: Alright so I just finished rereading it this afternoon so I can get started on Echopraxia, and I'm bugged anew by something that bugged me the last time about the Scramblers: One of them learned to hide itself from the view of one person, which is explained by the fact that it moves only during saccades. The scrambler stands directly in front of Siri but Siri doesn't notice a thing. How can this be, when moving during a saccade only prevents the observer's brain from detecting the movement? The creature would still be in plain sight as long as it's standing within the observer's field of view, whether the observer is focusing on it or not. Somebody could place an object in my peripheral vision during a saccade and it would still be visible to me even if I didn't see it move, and I imagine an object appearing in peripheral vision where there was no object an instant ago would be novel enough for the brain to take notice. Edit: Actually, I just remembered the classic cognitive psychology demonstration video of a guy in a gorilla suit going completely unnoticed as he walks through the background and now it makes sense. I imagine he would be even more likely to go unnoticed if he wasn't even perceived to be moving. Tiny Timbs fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Sep 7, 2014 |
# ? Sep 7, 2014 01:25 |
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Yeah, that's one of the examples Watts mentions both in book and in the one speech that was posted somewhere earlier in thread where he talks about some of the research and themes behind Blindsight/Echopraxia. (BS)The aliens seem to be able to somewhat more directly gently caress with peoples' minds as well which might be in part how they hide in plain sight It also gets mentioned again in Echopraxia which comes off as a little weird since it is under different circumstances, different characters but much the same tone in presentation. I suppose the case could be made that the protagonist in Echopraxia, being a biologist, is similarly familiar with the study and there's the whole ConSensus future super-Wikipedia everyone is plugged into. Personally I just found it to be one of the elements that makes Echopraxia come off as a little weaker; the characters kind of fall into generic molds from Watts' previous novels. The dialogue eases up a little from its predecessor at least. I didn't feel so much like people were simply talking in bullet points back and forth.
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# ? Sep 7, 2014 03:56 |
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darnon posted:Yeah, that's one of the examples Watts mentions both in book and in the one speech that was posted somewhere earlier in thread where he talks about some of the research and themes behind Blindsight/Echopraxia. (BS)The aliens seem to be able to somewhat more directly gently caress with peoples' minds as well which might be in part how they hide in plain sight It also gets mentioned again in Echopraxia which comes off as a little weird since it is under different circumstances, different characters but much the same tone in presentation. I suppose the case could be made that the protagonist in Echopraxia, being a biologist, is similarly familiar with the study and there's the whole ConSensus future super-Wikipedia everyone is plugged into. Personally I just found it to be one of the elements that makes Echopraxia come off as a little weaker; the characters kind of fall into generic molds from Watts' previous novels. The dialogue eases up a little from its predecessor at least. I didn't feel so much like people were simply talking in bullet points back and forth. I haven't started Echopraxia yet but I was hoping it wouldn't involve so much "Ugh how can you be so loving DUMB, here let me explain this complex scientific phenomena for you because you're a baby" I mean it makes sense as a narrative setup given what the characters in Blindsight are but it got a little grating.
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# ? Sep 7, 2014 04:12 |
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The main character in Echopraxia is even dumber and more out of his depth, but he's at least cranky and proactive about it.
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# ? Sep 7, 2014 04:23 |
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GENDERWEIRD GREEDO posted:Blindsight: Wasn't part of the point that the Scramblers were detecting when peoples' saccades were, and it was only when they had to avoid two people at once that they became visible? So other direct brainfuckery should be plausible. And one of the other characters had an induced hallucination that she didn't exist or something IIRC? Sorry for being vague, my copy's at home.
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# ? Sep 7, 2014 05:10 |
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I just finished Echopraxia I think the whole "you are baseline and so dumb" thing was hammered in way too hard. Especially with the bicamerals it felt like everyone was just telling me how smart they were but it was rare to see much of anything. There were a few big things shown that made the bicamerals smart, but everything between that was too telly for me. The characters all felt pretty flat: Everyone was defined more by what augmentations they did or didn't have than by actual personalities. If I were giving Watts A LOT of credit I might say that was intentional to show how near-post-humans are very much not human, but I'm not going to give him that much credit because I need these characters to feel more like actual people for the story to feel real. Brüks being a biologist mostly just annoyed me. He was an inherently passive character that had "he's a biologist" attached to him so that Watts could throw in random biology details as the story went on. Watts tried hard to make him not come off as passive, and he actually didn't act very passive, but ultimately he still framed the book around a guy who was "in the way" of the main conflict throughout much of the story. I also disliked that this book was billed as showing us what happened on Earth, but it starts with one dude in a desert who gets whisked away on a ship, then returns back to the middle of the ocean (on the last few pages) before going back to the desert again. The way Watts describes ships and anything in space doesn't work for me. He uses SO MANY sentence fragments such as "A ship at L4. Spinning. Fast." He would do page-long descriptions of a ship, a shuttle, the bubble thing, Icarus, or any number of things and the descriptions never actually resulted in me having any real idea what anything looked like. Finally he had too many cool science things he'd read in publications that he jammed into the narrative, and again the notes section came off as superfluous and bragging about how cool his ideas were. If he wove the ideas into the narrative better then he wouldn't need to explain them as notes. I did still enjoy reading the story, and it's always nice to see scifi/fantasy that isn't 800 pages, but Watts tendencies kind of grate on me a little too much.
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# ? Sep 7, 2014 05:22 |
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Can we talk about Echopraxia a little bit? It was a heck of a good read but I feel like I need a synopsis of what happened in case I missed something. Who attacked the compound at the start and where did Valerie come from? What was she even doing during the whole book? Just getting some Portia samples? For that matter, what was anyone doing going to Icarus? Just going to investigate? What was with the 'clues' Brüke was hunting for at the end there? Dang do I love Watts but its a good way to make myself feel like a moron.
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# ? Sep 7, 2014 05:32 |
Nemesis Of Moles posted:Can we talk about Echopraxia a little bit? It was a heck of a good read but I feel like I need a synopsis of what happened in case I missed something. At the very beginning of the book, Valerie and a few other vampires break out of their secure facility, killing everyone inside. Explained later is that she either hacked or social engineered her way past a bunch of military security to obtain a bunch of military-grade zombies and a kind of assault aircraft. She attacks the Bicameral monastery and draws the attention of the baseline security forces that's hunting her down upon her and the monastery, who were forced to use their tornado engine as a weapon to defend themselves against the zombies. I think it's stated outright that Valerie did all this just to hitch a ride with the Bicamerals. She plays them, they play her. Portia ends up being everything to everyone and everybody gets what they want. Jim Moore gets more information on Siri Keeton (of varying degrees of reliability, heh). Valerie hacks bits of Portia into vampires to solve the Crucifix Glitch and the other thing. Bicameral monks sacrifice themselves to bring God back to Earth to kickstart the process that's alluded to with the epigraph text that talks about local maximums. Bruks is used by all factions, ends up being the carrier for Portia.
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# ? Sep 7, 2014 06:51 |
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I just finished Alias Hook, which is an excellent take on Peter Pan from Captain Hook's perspective, where he's trapped in Neverland by a curse/Peter's assholeness, forced to lose crew after crew of pirates (who are all ex-lost boys, called back to Neverland as adults) to group after group of Lost Boys led by Peter. After 200 or so years trapped there, an adult woman shows up and is found by Hook, who thinks she might be a way for him either to die or leave Neverland. It's written super well and I think it's far better an adaptation/use of source material than Peter and the Starcatchers, which I loved as a kid. I also just started The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter, a sort of alt-history victorian mystery novel where the main character is a woman leading a double life as her brother the detective. It's definitely worth a read since I can't put it down, and it's the first book in a new series.
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# ? Sep 7, 2014 11:33 |
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Amazon has Neuromancer for kindle on sale for $1.99 if for some reason you haven't read the primer to modern cyberpunk. It almost comes off as a little cliche because so many of the concepts of the TECHNOFUTURE have been universally incorporated in sci-fi media since.
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# ? Sep 7, 2014 12:08 |
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I liked Echopraxia, but I was confused with the whole crazy sequence when the Portia slime mold attacks the Bicamerals and Jim Moore after he asks it about Siri. The sequence of events that I remember is: slime mold does connection protocols from Theseus -> Those two Bicamerals go chasing after Valerie and get lost? -> Jim Moore asks it about Siri -> Siri from the ending of Blindsight is shown -> The slime mold instantly reacts and attacks them with a tentacle and reconfigures the passageways to block them in with Valerie -> Bruks breaks them out (or tries to) with his turbolaser before they launch Icarus right into the sun I was getting the idea that the slime mold was sucking up transmissions and picked up Siri's Blindsight manuscript but it confused me. or was it a scrambler trap or something?
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# ? Sep 7, 2014 19:37 |
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darnon posted:Amazon has Neuromancer for kindle on sale for $1.99 if for some reason you haven't read the primer to modern cyberpunk. It almost comes off as a little cliche because so many of the concepts of the TECHNOFUTURE have been universally incorporated in sci-fi media since. Thanks. Haven't read it, picked it up on the cheap to add to my queue of books to read.
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# ? Sep 7, 2014 20:34 |
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0 rows returned posted:I liked Echopraxia, but I was confused with the whole crazy sequence when the Portia slime mold attacks the Bicamerals and Jim Moore after he asks it about Siri. The sequence of events that I remember is: You have the jist of it by my understanding, I think the slime mold isn't really fully explained regarding its relationship with Siri. Its clearly Scrambler and it rode the matter beam thing back. It could have intercepted Siri's communications, or infected Siri's little escape pod on the way out. I'm not really sure to be honest. The only other thing is that the Bicamerals hunting for Valerie are killed by the mold I believe. I have no idea why Valerie or the mold attacked at that moment either I guess. I agree with the criticisms leveled so far, the book kinda feels like Blindsight But Somewhere Else. I enjoyed it a lot but I would have preferred the book to be set on earth during the vampire apocalypse, or basically anything other that 'practically baseline human goes off into space with super modified mentalists then investigates mysterious alien entity only to escape while said super beings die'.
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# ? Sep 7, 2014 21:15 |
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:You have the jist of it by my understanding, I think the slime mold isn't really fully explained regarding its relationship with Siri. Its clearly Scrambler and it rode the matter beam thing back. It could have intercepted Siri's communications, or infected Siri's little escape pod on the way out. I'm not really sure to be honest. at the end of blindsight siri can't reacquire the icarus telematter stream implying that icarus was already destroyed by the time he launched in the pod meaning that anything that rode the beam back had to do so before that point in blindsight
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# ? Sep 7, 2014 22:54 |
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andrew smash posted:at the end of blindsight siri can't reacquire the icarus telematter stream implying that icarus was already destroyed by the time he launched in the pod meaning that anything that rode the beam back had to do so before that point in blindsight Oh right, yeah. It's been a while since I read Blindsight to be honest, maybe I'll read it again now. Is Watt's other series any good? The one about fish people manning underwater power systems and stuff. I read the first one ages ago and seem to remember nothing much of note happening.
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# ? Sep 7, 2014 23:07 |
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The first rifters novel is a lot of set up for the second where more plot stuff happens. Otherwise my recollection of the first is mostly Watts musing about the psyches of the horribly broken people that he's stuck on the bottom of the ocean and then an AI nukes the sealab they were living in as they were escaping. You could probably read the second without remembering much of the first if you need more crushing Wattsian depression in your life. The third is kind of the Echopraxia to Blindsight of the rifters trilogy. A lot of reinforcing the ideas of the first two, everything goes to poo poo, and it gets up to a lot of weird sexual torture stuff that was hinted at in the second. And, like Blindsight, all three are available for free on his website, so the most you have to lose is time and all of the joy you have in life.
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# ? Sep 7, 2014 23:58 |
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Burbridge moaned and shifted. “My legs …” he groaned. “Can you feel them?” Redrick stretched out his arm and, examining, ran his hand along the leg below the knee. “Bones …” wheezed Burbridge. “Are there still bones?” “Yes, yes,” lied Redrick. “Don’t worry.” Actually, he could only feel the kneecap. Below there, all the way down to the heel, the leg felt like a rubber stick—you could tie it in knots.
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# ? Sep 8, 2014 00:05 |
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darnon posted:weird sexual torture stuff Yeah this is the biggest hurdle for the trilogy. Tough to read. Not as bad as, say, Dragon Tattoo, but... tough. E: new topic: I just finished Redshirts and loved it. Also really enjoyed Lock In. Should I go for Old Mans War next? CaptainJuan fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Sep 8, 2014 |
# ? Sep 8, 2014 02:23 |
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Charlie Stross mentioned that Hannu Rajaniemi is moving to California in his blog today. Presumably he's going to do something with Silicon Valley. Less science more books, Hannu! (I kid, I kid.)
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# ? Sep 8, 2014 16:32 |
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How's Kraken by China Mieville? I've never read anything of his but someone pitched it to me as "Neil Gaiman and Harry Potter meet HP Lovecraft" which was pretty intriguing. I ask because I read mixed reviews of it but I have heard he's a fantastic writer.
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# ? Sep 9, 2014 03:17 |
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Captain Mog posted:How's Kraken by China Mieville? I've never read anything of his but someone pitched it to me as "Neil Gaiman and Harry Potter meet HP Lovecraft" which was pretty intriguing. I ask because I read mixed reviews of it but I have heard he's a fantastic writer. It's ok. I dunno, if you haven't read China Mieville before I guess it's an alright place to start. It's more grounded than some of his other books.
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# ? Sep 9, 2014 03:31 |
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GENDERWEIRD GREEDO posted:It's ok. I dunno, if you haven't read China Mieville before I guess it's an alright place to start. It's more grounded than some of his other books. Does he still have his thesaurus turned to 11?
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# ? Sep 9, 2014 03:33 |
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Wouldn't start with it myself. Maybe Embassytown?
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# ? Sep 9, 2014 03:36 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 05:47 |
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Captain Mog posted:How's Kraken by China Mieville? I've never read anything of his but someone pitched it to me as "Neil Gaiman and Harry Potter meet HP Lovecraft" which was pretty intriguing. I ask because I read mixed reviews of it but I have heard he's a fantastic writer. It's one of my least favourite of Miéville's books — he's my favourite author though so it's still one I like a lot. It's not bad. It's darkly funny and a bit satirical. If you've never read China Miéville I'd instead recommend Perdido Street Station and/or The Scar as a starting point*, because Kraken is "A good take on ideas I've read before" whereas the Bas-Lag novels are "Holy poo poo I've never read anything like this before!" (edit: and you never will again ) *The Scar follows directly after PSS in the same world, but it's pretty much standalone, and moreover it's better. The references to PSS are only a few paragraphs here and there and it doesn't spoil the previous book. The Scar is Miéville's best book, and it's the book I discovered him through, and it's the book of his I've re-read the most. Hedrigall fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Sep 9, 2014 |
# ? Sep 9, 2014 03:38 |