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Duarte’s greatest crime is the naming scheme for his ships.
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Dec 9, 2017 18:22
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Putting definite articles in your ship names is terrible since now you’ve gotta say “the Laconian ship The Gathering Storm” Pretty excited for Duarte to literally become a Dragonball villain or turn into a gigantic philosophy worm.
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Dec 9, 2017 18:50
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Next book is 4000 years later and Duarte keeps cloning Holden.
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Dec 9, 2017 18:51
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I'm about half way through the book and I'm skimming to avoid major spoilers, but I agree with those who said the 30 year gap doesn't really fit. I get that they needed a skip to make Duarte's empire building realistic, but the characters don't show any signs of aging aside from a passing remark or a description like grey hair or creaking knees. Clarissa is described as wearing a TACHI uniform, which at this point in the series must be a 40+ year old jumpsuit. The stuff between Bobbie and Holden also feels contrived. How do you live with someone for 30 years and not realize that they are a half-full sort of person, then get mad at them for it? Anyway, it's way better than BA's. I'll take Space Rome/USA over Space ISIS anyday.
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Dec 10, 2017 12:55
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Syzygy Stardust posted:Duarte’s greatest crime is the naming scheme for his ships. To be fair, it is far better than the USN’s navy scheme. My grandfather was a retired 30+ USN officer, who tried his damnedest to get me into the naval academy when I was a kid. I am being perfectly serious when I say that 17 year old me finally told him to stop because I hated the names of USN ships. Now if the USN had a naming scheme like the Royal Navy, I might have been stupid enough to say yes.
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Dec 10, 2017 17:19
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Every year I remember how infuriating the dialogue is in these books, it's somehow made worse now that it's coming from characters in their early to late 60's
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Dec 10, 2017 23:46
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Rocky start but this book was good.
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Dec 11, 2017 04:23
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If Laconia has 100 ships in their navy why, other than plot contrivance, would they only send two to occupy the slow zone?
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Dec 11, 2017 05:18
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Professor Shark posted:I'm about half way through the book and I'm skimming to avoid major spoilers, but I agree with those who said the 30 year gap doesn't really fit. I get that they needed a skip to make Duarte's empire building realistic, but the characters don't show any signs of aging aside from a passing remark or a description like grey hair or creaking knees. Clarissa is described as wearing a TACHI uniform, which at this point in the series must be a 40+ year old jumpsuit. I do not think they actually did; at least not as long of a time skip. For example, since the Laconian ships are proto-molecule Deus Ex Machina anyway, why couldn’t it have been 3 or 5 year time skip. It is not like they had to backwards engineer anything, they just needed to turn on the PM creator’s orbital “construction platforms.” Maybe they needed the time skip to do the whole ”universe has changed” thing and to ensure the Transport Union was well established for plot reasons? Still you could have easily gotten away with only fast forwarding a decade or so rather than 30 years. General Battuta posted:Next book is 4000 years later and Duarte keeps cloning Holden. After ZombieLenin fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Dec 11, 2017 |
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Dec 11, 2017 16:19
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Just finished it, enjoyed it though not quite so much as the earlier books. It’s interesting to see basically a space 4X playing out, as the universe gets stranger and stranger. Also with the video game references, all our favourite characters are in an RPG whereas Duarte is apparently playing either Civ or SMAC.
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Dec 12, 2017 05:41
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Wasn't Alex like 50 in the first book? I seem to recall him being appreciably older than the rest of the crew.
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Dec 12, 2017 08:15
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Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:Wasn't Alex like 50 in the first book? I seem to recall him being appreciably older than the rest of the crew. More or less. And Singh tells Holden that he’s the same age when Holden got kicked out of the navy. That would make Holden 40 or so when the series started (and a very old junior officer when expelled), which is nonsense. Internal consistency falls apart in this one.
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Dec 12, 2017 13:05
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I thought Holden was in his mid 20s when he got kicked out, then another 6-8 years had passed between LW and BA, putting him in his 60s here. You're right though, timeline has always been pretty nebulous - what year is it even in PR? Timeskip itself was clearly written with the tv show in mind and it gives it an easy out to conclude the series on. By the time BA rolls around it'd likely be in at least season 5 which is starting to get pretty long in the tooth for a show of this type. Ageing actors doesn't seem to be too difficult in the chance that it turns into a runaway success by then either. But based on the life expectancy of 120+ these guys in their 60s are probably closer to their 40s or 50s physically which seems pretty reasonable.
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Dec 12, 2017 13:54
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acumen posted:I thought Holden was in his mid 20s when he got kicked out, then another 6-8 years had passed between LW and BA, putting him in his 60s here. You're right though, timeline has always been pretty nebulous - what year is it even in PR? I'm pretty sure the Expanse books have never named a specific year. I think the TV series has, however.
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Dec 12, 2017 13:56
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I feel like they wrote into a weird corner by making Laconian tech too powerful. The offensive threat was fine but the ability to completely shrug off all the Sol system's firepower invalidated Trejo's point about wasting life.
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Dec 12, 2017 14:19
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Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:I feel like they wrote into a weird corner by making Laconian tech too powerful. The offensive threat was fine but the ability to completely shrug off all the Sol system's firepower invalidated Trejo's point about wasting life. It took damage. Read Drummer’s last chapter again. acumen posted:I thought Holden was in his mid 20s when he got kicked out, then another 6-8 years had passed between LW and BA, putting him in his 60s here. You're right though, timeline has always been pretty nebulous - what year is it even in PR? You’re right, it’s Singh’s claim that he’s the same age that has to be off by a decade.
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Dec 12, 2017 15:03
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Syzygy Stardust posted:More or less. And Singh tells Holden that he’s the same age when Holden got kicked out of the navy. That would make Holden 40 or so when the series started (and a very old junior officer when expelled), which is nonsense. I did the math on this once. In the first book he (Holden) would have been around 33 or 34. Though prior to actually doing the math I had assumed more like 38. This is part of the reason the show casting was disappointing to me—not that the actors aren’t great or don’t do the characters justice. It just seemed the crew in the show was way to young for not just their actual ages in the book, but for their perspectives as well.
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Dec 12, 2017 16:37
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The casting is definitely just the Hollywood thing of always having young attractive people in starring roles. But being the only child with half a dozen parents who all love you with presumably even more information and education at your fingertips than we have today would probably help your maturity and perspective quite a bit.
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Dec 12, 2017 16:43
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Well that was bleak. There was some mention of frustration at people getting on with their lives that felt kind of like the feeling of the world going on like normal after Trump got elected. I liked the time skip. The Sol System is kinda played out in this setting, and you need a skip at least that long to make its irrelevance plausible. Not just with regards to Laconia, but for all the other colony worlds to develop into somewhat interesting societies of their own. I feel like Duarte kind of got things handed to him with how perfect Laconia was to his plans, rather than having his faction be an organic progression of the prior political system like the initial Belt/Earth/Mars divide had been. I guess Marco got things handed to him too, but Duarte handed them off so I was willing to give it a pass... but Duarte is just as arbitrarily lucky. So that's not satisfying either. It's still a good story, and seeing people react was the real meat of it, and, if you're into various ways of dealing with hopelessness, it was pretty well done. There was nothing in the general reaction that was as jarring as the way people reacted to the destruction of Earth, so that's a plus. Everyone made complete sense this time around. ZombieLenin posted:Maybe they needed the time skip to do the whole ”universe has changed” thing and to ensure the Transport Union was well established for plot reasons? Still you could have easily gotten away with only fast forwarding a decade or so rather than 30 years. I don't think our characters being old was all that inconsistent. If some things were incredible feats of strength for someone of that age, I'm happy to put it down to future medicine being better at keeping people fit longer. And most of their feats, especially in the fight scenes, weren't physical so much as having a better tactical sense thanks to their experience. The ladder climb at the end was the most physical thing they did, and I can believe Bobbie of all people would keep herself fit enough to endure that. All the random belters with her managed it too, just not as fast.
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Dec 12, 2017 21:03
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Should’ve crushed all the random Belters under the mighty hammer of macrogravity Duarte is best viewed as the result of book 1-2’s insane Protogen megalomania combined with Martian envirofascism. “We must think very long term and organize our society for same” is Mars; “the protomolecule should be used to enable radical change” is Protogen.
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Dec 12, 2017 21:45
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Oh yeah, his actual ideals are a nice product of existing ones. I like how much a product of Martian society he is. My (minor) issue is that I like history. And my understanding of history is that it's pretty much shaped by the average movement of masses of people in response to their environment. The Expanse was a great exploration of that. The initial premise was set up by the geography of the solar system, and things developed in an interesting way as new unforeseen geography opened up. But now history is being controlled by one man who got absurdly lucky and it doesn't really feel like history to me. It's nice that Duarte himself mentions that he doesn't like the Great Man theory of history, but history is getting Great Man'd hardcore here and it's less satisfying than seeing people react to more "natural" developments. I guess it's not just Duarte that was a product of Mars. His whole mutiny was something of a mass movement produced by the sudden shock to that society that the Ring Gates brought. But no matter how plausible and interesting his movement, the fact that he can then submit the rest of humanity to his will thanks to a lucky break is... unsatisfying from a certain perspective. But that is admittedly a nitpick. It's a plausible enough development in the world that's been created and I'm interested to see where things go from here.
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Dec 12, 2017 22:04
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I don’t agree that it’s (just) a lucky break. He spotted that Mars was doomed, deliberately searched early probe results to find a promising opportunity that no one else saw, arranged to steal the protomolecule as a potential key to operating alien technology, and recruited the scientist he needed to make it happen. Sure, there was a chance he’d fail to get to to work, but it was a reasonable gamble given the stakes. The unbelievable part is convincing that many people to go along without it leaking.
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Dec 12, 2017 22:58
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Don't great men occasionally get lucky and take over large chunks of humanity? I am not a historian but it seems like it's happened now and then, especially when a major technological edge develops.
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Dec 13, 2017 00:05
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General Battuta posted:Don't great men occasionally get lucky and take over large chunks of humanity? I am not a historian but it seems like it's happened now and then, especially when a major technological edge develops. Holden twice refers to the Laconians as conquistadors.
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Dec 13, 2017 00:14
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And really, could it be possible for one Great Man to direct the future of humanity if he had access to something like the protomolecule? And, if so, wouldn't that basically be horrific?
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Dec 13, 2017 00:14
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Just finished it. I liked it a lot more than the last book, though I find myself again hoping that next book we’ll deal with the ancient aliens, which I assume are actually just robotic remnants of the opposing group. I was surprised when they gave dimensions to the gate empire- 1000 ly, a little dot in the galaxy. Space is BIG!
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Dec 13, 2017 01:50
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I actually really liked Duarte's characterization, the authors did a fairly good job in Strange Dogs and the new book setting him up as a plausible potential undying Plato-ish philosopher king/tyrant. One of my few complaints is actually how little he appeared in the real meat of the story. I was hoping for a lot of personal intervention from him in Medina that demonstrated how this brilliant monster actually governed. The other thing that rubbed me a little bit the wrong way was how quickly Earth and Mars surrendered. They lost a quarter of their fleet to one ship and then lost their sovereignty forever? I guess maybe the population of an entire solar system entering some fever state for a few minutes simultaneously might have a somewhat jarring effect though, so it's not *that* bad.
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Dec 13, 2017 01:54
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So how exactly does one battleship wipe out an entire solar system's defense force?
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Dec 13, 2017 07:39
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It's a battleship that can tear giant space stations apart in a second and can survive a direct hit from a nuke with only minor damage 
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Dec 13, 2017 09:05
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Arcsquad12 posted:So how exactly does one battleship wipe out an entire solar system's defense force? The same one way one molecule hijacks life on a planet to build an inter dimensional gate to a place outside normal space-time.
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Dec 13, 2017 13:22
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Arcsquad12 posted:So how exactly does one battleship wipe out an entire solar system's defense force? Their guns don't work on it, its guns work really on them? Doesn't seem too crazy. "Our spaceship is invulnerable" is a lot more powerful than "our oceangoing battleship is big." A ship can threaten to bombard your coast. Once the Laconians have control of space in Sol, though, there's nothing they can't kill. You can say "gently caress you we' won't surrender" and resist, but you need to accept that the Laconian ship can drive up to your biggest population centers/strategic targets and remove them, and it won't stop. Unconditional surrender was the only option...especially because it leads to occupation, and then you can start making their lives difficult.
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Dec 13, 2017 19:12
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Yeah, the Laconian’s can’t actually occupy earth or Mars, just blockade or destroy stuff in orbit or cities on the ground. Coopting the colonies and controlling trade are the ways to actually rule long term.
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Dec 13, 2017 19:50
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Kassad posted:It's a battleship that can tear giant space stations apart in a second and can survive a direct hit from a nuke with only minor damage I am not buying it. Not when you really think about it. Get that thing close enough to a planet you can throw near infinite tungsten slugs at a percentage of c at it. In fact, I don’t really care what it is made of. Nukes are pointless with the amount of rail gun fire being leveled at the thing. Unless it has the mass of a planet or is somehow made of stable degenerate matter, the kinetic force alone from those railgun slug impacts would have atomized the ship. Now you can Deus Ex Machina hand wave the proto-molecules ability to reconstitute itself into a structure from an atomized state, but what you cannot do is explain how atomized animals can be reconstituted into their living form—Dogs of War or no. So at a very minimum, unless all of those railgun slugs were being destroyed somehow before they hit their target, which they clearly were not, at a minimum every living thing on that ship should have died. Anyway, this is why some suspension of disbelief is necessary when reading this type of science fiction and I am okay with that. What I was less okay with is the bullshit political and economic stuff from the last book(s). The rich middle-class inhabitants of Mars would not be the ones flocking to the colonies. It would be teaming masses from Earth. The belt would have been crushed by the militaristic government that took power on Earth after Marco’s attack, Deuarte would have been hunted down, and a participant in the genocidal attack on earth would not be handed political control of anything by Earth and Mars.
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Dec 13, 2017 20:59
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NG was bad
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Dec 13, 2017 22:55
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Also I've decided that the main characters being in their mid-to-late 60's is dumb so I'm head-canoning it so that they're in their 40's
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Dec 13, 2017 22:57
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ZombieLenin posted:I am not buying it. Not when you really think about it. Get that thing close enough to a planet you can throw near infinite tungsten slugs at a percentage of c at it. In fact, I don’t really care what it is made of. Nukes are pointless with the amount of rail gun fire being leveled at the thing. Do you think railguns have any effect on the slow zone security station, when the magnetic super weapon couldn’t crack it? Do you think the power level of the magnetic super weapon on that ship implies anything about the power level of the defenses? Does the fact that the security station changes colors in reaction to outside forces and the ship changed colors in reaction to nukes affect your answer? Given that BA demonstrated that Martian tech could react fast enough to a railgun hit to automatically vent core, why can’t prototechnology detect and do some sort of deflective or absorption effect on railguns? Some of the PDC rounds used in the final battle might have started life as railgun impacts from the first battle. Syzygy Stardust fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 23:06
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ZombieLenin posted:I am not buying it. Not when you really think about it. Get that thing close enough to a planet you can throw near infinite tungsten slugs at a percentage of c at it. In fact, I don’t really care what it is made of. Nukes are pointless with the amount of rail gun fire being leveled at the thing. If you can shoot it, it can shoot you, and with the intrinsic advantage of gravity working in its favor. You can't throw infinite tungsten slugs when your glaringly obvious launch point can be attacked from outside its own effective range. The kinetic force of all those railguns is striking a ship built on technology which can arbitrarily enforce a maximum local speed limit and convert kinetic energy into radiation. You can call that 'implausible' if you want, but from the beginning this series has been built on 'implausibly' efficient fusion engines and space biology.
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Dec 13, 2017 23:35
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I keep waiting to hear about the genetic engineering for 110+ average IQs necessary for Belter civilization to make sense. I’m not sure the initial filter and individual accidents or controlled fertility among the dumber offspring is enough to set and maintain a high enough mean to maintain that level of technology and risk management.
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Dec 13, 2017 23:50
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General Battuta posted:If you can shoot it, it can shoot you, and with the intrinsic advantage of gravity working in its favor. You can't throw infinite tungsten slugs when your glaringly obvious launch point can be attacked from outside its own effective range. Of course, that would require the use the magnetic weapon on the planet, which wuld defeat the purpose of trying to capture the system. Of course assuming you could get close enough to use it. quote:The kinetic force of all those railguns is striking a ship built on technology which can arbitrarily enforce a maximum local speed limit and convert kinetic energy into radiation. Yes in an area outside of regular spacetime. But sure this a potential Deus Ex Machina that explains the ship’s survival while being bombarded by railguns. Maybe the ship creates this un-space around it? Unfortunately this runs up against the actual description of the battle where the railgun slugs are clearly impacting the ship with full force and causing damage. The only thing the ship seems to be doing is repairing itself, which is fine, but assuming it is the same kind of tech on the PM-kid-super soldiers, slamming hundreds of Tungsten slugs traveling a 1/5th the speed of light into the ship would have the same effect as putting those PM super soldiers into a ship’s drive plume. In other words the kinetic force alone would make a nuclear torpedo feel like a flea bote. quote:You can call that 'implausible' It is implausible. Efficient fusion drives capable of the 1 g constant acceleration needed to efficiently travel the solar system is not. Note the “near” future tech in the books is not the Alaistar Reynolds light hugger. The expanse ship are not capable of constant thrust which enables the approach of relativistic speeds, which btw would only be 2.2 hours of acceleration at 1G. All that said, when a series takes a jump to describing gods like alien tech suspension of disbelief is required. I am totally fine with that! Like I said I am more uncomfortable with utterly implausible descriptions of human sociological interactions and social behavior.
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Dec 14, 2017 01:34
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ZombieLenin posted:Of course, that would require the use the magnetic weapon on the planet, which wuld defeat the purpose of trying to capture the system. Of course assuming you could get close enough to use it. No, just shoot it with railguns or missiles. Anyone attacking you from a planet is shooting from the bottom of a barrel: you're up top and you can drop poo poo on him. You are untouchable. A deus ex machina is the appearance of a god or godlike force to resolve the crisis in a story by exercise of arbitrary power. Science fictional technology in a science fiction book that has always run on - yes, equally silly - magic fusion engines and causality-violating gates is not a deus ex machina. When something happens in a work of fiction, in general it is more interesting to try to understand why, rather than to shout 'this cannot happen!' and declare the fiction compromised.
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Dec 14, 2017 01:49
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