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Hedrigall posted: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. Wait -- what's up with that spoiler? Why not -- is there no hope he will return to New Crobuzon? I want to read more about The Weaver, dammit. I'd second your recommendation of PSS and The Scar over Kraken -- both of those were really mindblowing reads. I enjoyed parts of Kraken, but other parts just left me feeling like I'd be better off reading a Neil Gaiman book instead.
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Sep 9, 2014 03:49
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McCoy Pauley posted:Wait -- what's up with that spoiler? Why not -- is there no hope he will return to New Crobuzon? I want to read more about The Weaver, dammit. Nah I'm just lamenting that (and there's no actual spoilers here) after you read the Bas-Lag books you'll spend years looking for anything else in fantasy that comes close and you'll be disappointed every time. Hopefully though China will return to the world one day 
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Sep 9, 2014 03:51
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Hedrigall posted:The Scar is Miéville's best book it really isn't, embassytown and the city & the city are both tighter and better executed. Plus the scar has mieville's most insufferable character ever (uther doul) front and center for most of it. Still a great book.
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Sep 9, 2014 03:51
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Hedrigall posted: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 I think I'll start with PSS first, then, and see how I like it. I have it lying around here somewhere, IRRC- just never got around to reading it. I'm aware it's probably his most critically acclaimed book.
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Sep 9, 2014 03:54
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regularizer posted: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've been reading this. It's pretty entertaining, although I do have some problems with the way gender is treated. While not quite trapped in the women as caregivers/men as destroyers dichotomy, there's still something of an alienation between the thought patterns of the genders showing up here which matches that old binary classification to some extent, which I find a little facile. The new arrival has all of the womanly intuition, which sometimes reveals very prosaic insights, that can apparently pierce mysteries the supposedly intelligent James Hook hasn't been able to in over 2 centuries. It's still a decent read, notwithstanding that problem, though.
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Sep 9, 2014 08:43
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The City and the City is really quite good and I would recommend it for getting into Mieville.
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Sep 9, 2014 13:05
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Anyone know anything about Yesterday's Gone? Getting edit: I love stories but am not very well read. Kraps fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Sep 9, 2014 |
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Sep 9, 2014 16:20
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Graham Joyce has died. gently caress everything.
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Sep 9, 2014 17:37
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drat, I ordered Echopraxia and I didn't notice the delivery window was from 7SEP - 27SEP. drat you media mail! Hope it gets here sooner than later. I guess I have an excuse to read Blindsight again though.
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Sep 9, 2014 22:35
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Lawrence Watt-Evans has another novel kickstarter going. This one's apparently a sortof steampunk-esque historical novel. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/217993880/tom-derringer-and-the-aluminum-airship
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Sep 9, 2014 22:44
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Cool. Jonathan Wood's Yesterday's Hero is out today! I picked it up back when it was first self pubbed, and it's a damned good book. It's a sequel though, so grab the first book as well. They both rock. Basically, lovecraftian horror meets urban fantasy meets a decent sense of humor meets a hero who's total training for his job is a lifelong love of Kurt Russell movies and you have an idea of the ride you will be on.
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Sep 10, 2014 01:20
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systran posted:The City and the City is really quite good and I would recommend it for getting into Mieville. I second this. It's not like any of his other books besides his love of cities (so much so that the book contains more than one!), but it's pretty close to being the modern world (since it pretty much is, just with two fictional cities in it). It's a fun neo-noir story. Readers might want to know, though, that it's sort of written as if it was translated from a Slavic language into English. It's not really very noticeable beyond some word choice, but it means that the tone is a little different from his other works.
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Sep 10, 2014 07:30
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systran posted:The City and the City is really quite good and I would recommend it for getting into Mieville.
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Sep 10, 2014 15:18
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Finished Echopraxia last night, it was very...Peter Watts. It's hard to pin down why I didn't like it as much as Blindsight, I just found it more difficult to read and the characters felt pretty flat. He seemed to go even more overboard on exhaustive description but despite that I never had a good visual idea of what he was describing. I don't know if this is my fault for making assumptions but the timeline wasn't quite I had imagined either. It was a good read though and I did like it, I just didn't enjoy it as much as Blindsight. Thank god for the Kindle dictionary during the almost masturbatory biology sections.
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Sep 10, 2014 19:16
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quote:He seemed to go even more overboard on exhaustive description but despite that I never had a good visual idea of what he was describing I had the exact same issue so it's not just you
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Sep 10, 2014 19:27
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Yeah same here. I had no idea what anything looked like pretty much the entire book.
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Sep 10, 2014 20:03
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Maybe it was a really meta attempt at agnosia? 
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Sep 10, 2014 20:17
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I only really had trouble picturing what the Crown of Thorns looked like. Then again, I pictured the Bicameral monastery as a monolithic building shaped like the Tower of Babel with the vortex engine thing in the center, which is not at all what the satellite picture on the website shows, so odds are I'm just a big retard.
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Sep 10, 2014 21:00
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A friend of mine was talking to some authors about replicating pieces from their books (knives, masks, etc). They both basically said that the whole idea is that the reader fills in the blanks, so there isn't a "wrong" interpretation of it, the author just gives a basic idea of what something looks like and your imagination takes the reins. So, barring making a mistake like the people bitching about "Why'd they make that little girl black in the hunger games movie?", there's no "wrong" way think something looks.
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Sep 10, 2014 21:02
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:A friend of mine was talking to some authors about replicating pieces from their books (knives, masks, etc). I agree with that, and I haven't read Echopraxia, but I think the problem they are describing is that they actually can't form a picture at all with the way it's written. I've had that happen to me with authors before, where the words are there, but they're just not sufficient to make the picture come alive in my mind.
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Sep 10, 2014 22:02
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Hell, I suspect I have some kind of weird brain problem because I can never really picture the people I read about in novels but it never detracts from my enjoyment of them in any way. More likely though it's just that the author doesn't usually spend an awful lot of ink describing their characters' appearance, and so it never sticks in my head. This is probably an arrangement both the author and I are fine with.
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Sep 10, 2014 22:07
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I don't care what the people look like, I meant the layout of the ship and other things watts spent a lot of space describing
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Sep 10, 2014 22:10
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:A friend of mine was talking to some authors about replicating pieces from their books (knives, masks, etc). I get what you're saying but Watts spends a lot of page space on descriptive elements alone. If anything its almost too much, you get conflicting shapes and ideas, its just a big jumble. For some reason I was able to fill in the blanks with Theseus and Rorschach but many elements of Echopraxia were just impossible to visualize. I probably would have been better off if he tried less even.
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Sep 11, 2014 00:40
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Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi posted:
I'd say it's a decent book but not for "getting into Mieville" because it's not a whole lot like his other novels. Yeah it's a little surreal but it's not exactly going to set you up for going straight to Perdido Street Station afterwards. The Gunslinger posted:I get what you're saying but Watts spends a lot of page space on descriptive elements alone. If anything its almost too much, you get conflicting shapes and ideas, its just a big jumble. For some reason I was able to fill in the blanks with Theseus and Rorschach but many elements of Echopraxia were just impossible to visualize. I probably would have been better off if he tried less even. It sucks when fiction authors are poor at explaining their complex ideas. Sometimes you read it, fail to visualize what the hell they're talking about, and then feel like an idiot when really it's just the author screwing up. Gregory Benford is really guilty of this in his Galactic Center Saga. Tiny Timbs fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Sep 11, 2014 |
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Sep 11, 2014 00:47
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Yea, it seems like a common problem with sci fi authors. Either they suck at writing sex scenes, or they suck at describing things.
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Sep 11, 2014 06:08
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Man, I don't think I can remember a sex scene in an SF/Fantasy genre book that wasn't awful on some level. And I've been reading this nerdy crap for well over 30 years now. The only arguable exceptions would be scenes that were deliberately awful for comedic reasons.
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Sep 11, 2014 10:07
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Dear god Watts' stuff about vampires in this book is just so...bad. In Blindsight they were menacing and better than humans, but nothing too crazy that would disrupt the illusion. I'm halfway through Echopraxia and they just come off as physics defying comic book characters they do everything SOOOOO much better than normal humans. I think Watts should write some Twilight fan-fiction before he writes another book in the setting or I swear they'll start glittering in the sunlight and trying to have romantic relationships. I think the only thing I've enjoyed about them is the fact that he detailed their place in society as basically lab rats/slaves while in Blindsight it wasn't really that touched upon.
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Sep 11, 2014 10:10
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BadOptics posted:Dear god Watts' stuff about vampires in this book is just so...bad. In Blindsight they were menacing and better than humans, but nothing too crazy that would disrupt the illusion. I'm halfway through Echopraxia and they just come off as physics defying comic book characters they do everything SOOOOO much better than normal humans. I think Watts should write some Twilight fan-fiction before he writes another book in the setting or I swear they'll start glittering in the sunlight and trying to have romantic relationships. I think the only thing I've enjoyed about them is the fact that he detailed their place in society as basically lab rats/slaves while in Blindsight it wasn't really that touched upon. Unfortunately, it gets worse. The ideas in the first novel are much cooler than what we got from Echopraxia.
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Sep 11, 2014 10:23
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Yeah, Watts really harped on the 'BASELINES ARE SO INFERIOR' poo poo a bit too much in Echopraxia. I found it funny that he gave an explanation for the utility of consciousness, but apparently it gives no advantages.
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Sep 11, 2014 10:39
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Neurosis posted:Yeah, Watts really harped on the 'BASELINES ARE SO INFERIOR' poo poo a bit too much in Echopraxia. I found it funny that he gave an explanation for the utility of consciousness, but apparently it gives no advantages. Weird, I had the opposite reaction. I actually like the fact that the main character was a baseline, made him more relatable. In Blindsight Siri was just a shell, and he was so used to dealing with post-humans that nothing really phased him. To me it was neat to see the Bicams and stuff from a more grounded perspective, really drives home just how alien and messed up they are. Also, towards the end, didn't Valerie explain to Bruks that even though individual baselines are relatively dumb, compared to the Bicams/Vampire, that there's probably some kind of non-conscious uber-smart hivemind that's developed from them via Heaven and the superinternet they have? IIRC, Moore also hints at that, at certain points. Talking about the hive mind that directed the military or whatever he worked for and that no one was sure where it came from or how it came about, just that it was there and everyone pretty much just trusted it would work because it was so beyond them. I just finished Echopraxia last night, so I'm still trying to mentally stitch everything together in my head. Just so I'm clear: The whole thing was a plot by Valerie to ultimately free the vampires? The Bicams just wanted to meet God, they didn't really have any goals past that, right? I was confused about several things. Like who the gently caress manipulated/orchestrated Bruks into being there? At the end the book made it seem like it was Valerie, because she wanted him to be the incubator for Portia and thus would be the key to freeing her fellow vampires. But then Bruks kills Valerie? The Portia/Nega-Bruks in his head says that he's now smarter than vampires and specifically says that he outsmarted Valerie? I don't get it. Was it saying that basically Portia was like "gently caress this" and started doing whatever it wanted? Or did Valerie somehow plan for herself to get killed? Also, who orchestrated the Sengupta connection? Was it again Valerie? I think Bruks mentions afterwards that he suspected Sengupta and her attack on him was purely for the purpose of distracting Moore so Valerie could sneak up on him and to the five finger death touch or whatever. But how the gently caress could she predict all that? How would she know they'd end up at that Gyland? How would she know that Bruks would make that call to Heaven at just the right time to reveal to Sengupta that he was responsible for her wife's death? I can accept that the Vampires are stupid-smart and can do incredible things that seem almost clairvoyant, but this just strains credibility to me. Similarly, how she was basically reading his mind afterwards. He'd think something and she'd respond as if he said it aloud. Like, I realize it was more Watts saying "she's so smart she can just predict his thoughts" but come on, she would have to basically be running a full Bruks simulation in her head or something. I mean, don't get me wrong, overall I really enjoyed the book. I didn't have much trouble visualizing the Crown of Thorns. At the beginning it was a little vague but after a while of reading the various descriptions and flipping back to the illustration at the front, it clicked and I had a pretty good mental image of the ship. Anyone think he'll do another novel in this universe? Technically, Moore is still alive, at least the last time we saw him (albeit possibly brainwashed/possessed by Portia) and the book doesn't actually show the Vampires taking over Earth, just the sort-of beginnings of that process.
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Sep 11, 2014 14:52
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Shnakepup posted:Weird, I had the opposite reaction. I actually like the fact that the main character was a baseline, made him more relatable. In Blindsight Siri was just a shell, and he was so used to dealing with post-humans that nothing really phased him. To me it was neat to see the Bicams and stuff from a more grounded perspective, really drives home just how alien and messed up they are. There's a whole mess of superhuman intelligences, now. There is the emergent networked intelligence you mention, which was fleetingly referred to, and there are also machine intelligences like Theseus, who are only referred to in Blindsight, who don't even get a mention in this book. If Theseus is any guide, they may be somewhat benevolent. And yeah, there's still the big dangling plot thread of Siri's return (I choose to believe it really is Siri because I think anything else would poo poo on Blindsight and be too depressing even for Watts) and Moore.
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Sep 11, 2014 15:09
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Neurosis posted:I choose to believe it really is Siri because I think anything else would poo poo on Blindsight and be too depressing even for Watts. Yeah, that was definitely a pretty crazy idea to bring up. I comforted myself by remembering it had come from Sengupta, who was super paranoid and making huge assumptions and leaps of logic from very little data. Though, I wonder what the whole thing was with the fact that Siri's voice apparently sounded like a woman in the recording? The way it came across in the text, it made it sound like that was an important detail, but then it's never mentioned again. The only thing I can think of is that either a)Portia had also infected Siri and had already taken him over, or b)maybe Siri had split into multiple personalities from the trauma of the whole situation, and the personality dictating the story is a female one. Thus the whole "imagine you are" scenarios.
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Sep 11, 2014 15:32
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Continuing the Echopraxia discussion, can anybody explain to me why the Portia that infected Bruks was/seemed sentient? Wasn't the whole deal about the Scramblers/Portia that they're non-sentient? Is it the tampering from Valerie or just the fact that it copied the brain of Bruks and it became sentient in the process? Regarding Siri's fate, I doubt that Sengupta is right. Also, Siri's viewpoint extends to a time where his dad tells him that Heaven failed. Since Heaven is up and running by the time Bruks leaves Moore we can pretty much assume that Jim Moore is still alive after the meeting with Valerie. Why Valerie would let him live I have no idea though.
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Sep 11, 2014 16:06
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Anomandaris posted:Continuing the Echopraxia discussion, can anybody explain to me why the Portia that infected Bruks was/seemed sentient? Wasn't the whole deal about the Scramblers/Portia that they're non-sentient? Is it the tampering from Valerie or just the fact that it copied the brain of Bruks and it became sentient in the process? I think it wasn't necessarily that Portia had become sentient, rather that it had hijacked Bruk's own sentience and was splitting it apart. There was a line about how he was hearing voices and becoming schizophrenic. Portia was breaking him apart and dominating him. Plus, remember from Blindsight how Rorschach was more than capable of faking sentience, not to mention manipulating it. Was it ever confirmed that Portia came from Rorschach? That seemed to be the case, but then again it was so different from all the poo poo that went down in Blindsight, so it was kinda vague. Why didn't Rorschach do the same poo poo that Portia did, when the crew of the Theseus came a-knocking? I mean, some things are somewhat similar, like the camouflage and the insta-door/wall things that would close down. But I don't recall there being any kind of weird mind infection going on. Blindsight was all big on the idea that Rorschach was so powerful it didn't even need to get into you directly, it could just gently caress with your mind at a distance via magnetic forces and junk.
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Sep 11, 2014 16:18
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Regarding the transmission, I took the female voice as being caused by the filters sengupta used to clean up the transmissions to the point of actually hearing a voice. I think Bruks thought so too when he heard it, as he described as having any humanity ripped out by the distance and distortion. Plus theres no way of knowing what Siri sounded like before and maybe being a dehydrated corpse for 9,999 hours out of every 10,000 warped his vocal cords when he was transmitting Blindsight's manuscript.
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Sep 11, 2014 16:39
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savinhill posted:I just finished Daniel Abraham's new Dagger & Coin book, it was alright. There was some stuff I liked but I think my incorrect assumption that this was the final one messed with my expectations. The concept for the bad guys in this just works less and less for me the more it gets stretched out and the whole defeating them by inventing paper currency is very underwhelming and sorta nonsensical imo. And yeah, it's serviceable.
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Sep 11, 2014 22:13
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Shnakepup posted:Thus the whole "imagine you are" scenarios. "imagine you are siri keeton" is something that siri keeton had to do literally every day. He says as much in his flashbacks, particularly the ones involving chelsea. I don't think it's anything other than that.
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Sep 12, 2014 01:41
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Shnakepup posted:Was it ever confirmed that Portia came from Rorschach? That seemed to be the case, but then again it was so different from all the poo poo that went down in Blindsight, so it was kinda vague. Why didn't Rorschach do the same poo poo that Portia did, when the crew of the Theseus came a-knocking? I mean, some things are somewhat similar, like the camouflage and the insta-door/wall things that would close down. But I don't recall there being any kind of weird mind infection going on. Blindsight was all big on the idea that Rorschach was so powerful it didn't even need to get into you directly, it could just gently caress with your mind at a distance via magnetic forces and junk. Wasn't there a new personality appearing in the Gang of four somewhere towards the end? Portia also has the time sharing trick that the Scramblers have, so it's a pretty safe bet it comes from the same source. Portia was the simplest thing Rorschach could send via the telematter stream, while Scramblers were a more evolved form. Maybe it was just not deemed necessary for use against the Theseus? Alternatively, Portia infected all of them and it just took a while to establish. I hope that's not the case, as it would make most of Siri's character arc pointless. Plus the Theseus AI might have noticed that.
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Sep 12, 2014 08:17
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Reminder that Siri Keeton is awake for less than an hour a year during all of this. No matter how fast his posthuman half of the brain works, he's still not talking/transmitting very much.
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Sep 12, 2014 20:09
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Finally finished Tower Lord, that ending gave me a serious case of blueballs.
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