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Collateral posted:Surely if was all in on his theme he would just dramatically state: "If..." "Molon labe." The rebels then do come and take them. Edit: Laconic page snipe.
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Apr 6, 2019 06:47
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I was legitimately shocked when Amos went down. It was so sudden and non-pivotal and the kind of thing you expect him to power through and then the top of his skull gets taken off and its barely even remarked upon in the chaos and its exactly the type of death he'd expect. I'm glad he's still around, but it's sort of a cop out as he was basically a robot anyway.
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Apr 6, 2019 14:36
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Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:I was legitimately shocked when Amos went down. It was so sudden and non-pivotal and the kind of thing you expect him to power through and then the top of his skull gets taken off and its barely even remarked upon in the chaos and its exactly the type of death he'd expect. It seems like they're doing some Turing test stuff. If the zombie has Amos's memories, acts like Amos, thinks like Amos, and interacts like Amos, is it Amos or just a good imitation? Would his friends be able to tell? I'm a little nervous about how they'll handle it but I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with it. Hopefully it won't just be a cop out.
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Apr 6, 2019 14:48
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Honestly the best redemptive arc of the series is Elvi's consistent "this motherfucker" reaction to encountering Holden.
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Apr 7, 2019 00:48
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Just finished last night and am very satisfied. Is there supposed to only one more book?
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Apr 7, 2019 04:48
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They forshadowed Amos's death and reserection by stating the repair drones where milling about looking for something to do while she wondered into the cave. but I was totatally cought off gaurd when. Duerte loving Tetsuo'd Cortazar.
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Apr 7, 2019 07:30
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yeah, i'm convinced Winston isn't lobotomized at all, though what he's now dealing with cognitively may take months or years to sort through before he can, say, hold a conversation, or engage in strategic planning.
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Apr 7, 2019 13:08
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Same. I think Winston Duarte is still in there, he's just suffered a vast shift in perception that's taking a lot of getting used to. Like maybe the protomolecule part of his brain isn't fried just rebooting (as they kinda foreshadowed with a line about how all the protomolecule tech they find isn't destroyed by the Goths, just turned off) and he constantly perceives the world in that weird "cloud of probability and math" way it appears to rebooting baseline human brains during the earlier lost time blackouts. He really is a loving dumbass though, in hindsight the Laconian project was never going to work. As someone else said, all they managed to do was luck into turning on a 3D printer that gave them good ships. Laconia wasn't unbeatable because of some inherent superiority to their ideology, they just got lucky and managed to rule for all of 4 years. That's honestly pretty sub-par compared to other dictators, even Hitler's thousand year Reich lasted longer than that and it had way more inherent flaws than Laconia.
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Apr 7, 2019 21:04
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Finished the book, and I liked it a lot. Definitely my favorite since 5. It'll be interesting to see what the focus of the final book is like. Everything's being set up for the aliens to be the final boss, but this series has always been about the people and human societies more than weird alien poo poo, and I doubt that'll suddenly change in the last book. Maybe some sort of big effort by the Roci crew to get all the different human groups working together for one big final push, like the end of Abaddon's Gate on a larger scale. For a moment I thought that Cortazar was going to give himself the Duarte treatment and become the big bad, but, well... Between this book and the last I really like how Laconia has been portrayed. I felt while reading the last book that they were coming across as way too powerful, but with this one we see they're really kind of a paper tiger. They have a few badass ships, but like a lot of other imperial powers, once they get past the shock and awe phase holding onto that territory becomes a whole different matter. All their apparent strengths have become weaknesses. Their entire basis for power projection is the Magnetars and Medina Station, and the moment they lose those the whole thing comes crashing down around them. Not to mention going around poking in PM tech; they've so thoroughly swallowed their own bullshit about being masters of the universe that they can't even consider that it could backfire on them. It's like that line in Jurassic Park about being like a kid who found his dad's gun. These are guys who found some 2 billion year old tech made by beings of incomprehensible power and killed by even more incomprehensible beings (sidenote, that bit near the end about how they discovered Laconia with a half-completed ship still in the construction platforms is a really cool image), switched it back on, and decided that made them unstoppable badasses. They might be intelligent people, but they were never smart.
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Apr 7, 2019 21:12
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Laconia is just more evidence for how pre-gates Martian society was just one massive mental disorder and confirmation that Mars delenda est, imo
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Apr 7, 2019 21:19
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Crazycryodude posted:Laconia is just more evidence for how pre-gates Martian society was just one massive mental disorder and confirmation that Mars delenda est, imo Admiral Nguyen is posting from the afterlife, I see.
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Apr 7, 2019 21:57
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I disagree, I think that Laconia is a reflection of post-Gate Mars. There was going to be a split in their society between people who weren't interested in terraforming Mars eventually because they'd gotten used to how things were, but overall I think that their notion of making a new start, that would be like Earth but without all the mistakes that have weighed it down, is a very normal thing to try and do. It's the planetary equivalent of "I'm not gonna be the kind of parent mine were to me." Once the gate network makes that basically pointless, I think that's when you see people like Duarte deciding the mistake Mars made was not pushing everyone around ENOUGH, and if they had, they would have completed the project and made Mars the perfect world they wanted. So now he's gonna do what Mars' government couldn't and show everyone what flexing your muscles can do and yadda yadda.
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Apr 7, 2019 22:02
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So is it Winston Do Art or Winston Do Art, Ey? e: or Winston Dwart
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Apr 7, 2019 23:12
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The audiobook pronounces "Do-art-eh"
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Apr 7, 2019 23:30
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Douwarté
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Apr 8, 2019 00:51
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Doort
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Apr 8, 2019 02:31
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Ah, Winston Dougherty.
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Apr 8, 2019 04:42
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Wirnstern Dirty
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Apr 8, 2019 04:57
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James "Lose Clean" Holden
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Apr 8, 2019 05:21
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Jim "Stupid, Sexy" Holden
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Apr 8, 2019 06:21
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Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:I was legitimately shocked when Amos went down. It was so sudden and non-pivotal and the kind of thing you expect him to power through and then the top of his skull gets taken off and its barely even remarked upon in the chaos and its exactly the type of death he'd expect. My opinion is somewhat colored by having re-watched the series recently, and the scene where Amos asks if Cotozar's conditioning can be reversed really stuck with me. He wants to know or figure out what he is, but doesn't know how to do it or even ask what's wrong.
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Apr 8, 2019 07:49
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Slamhound posted:I don't think it's a cop out, I think it's a feature. What happens if you make a robot copy of a robot? Amos has always been aware of his...condition? persona? self? and how he's different from everyone else. His change to a resurrected whatever-it-is-they-are acts as the meeting point between humanity and the PMs. He's at the extreme end of the human spectrum and that is exactly where the PM picks up. I thought it was pretty effectively unsettling how being resurrected didn't actually change him much. just finished the book last night. I noticed that about FrankenAmos, like he doesn't seem to have that cognitive stutter the two kids do. Every time they talk they pause for a second like they have to remember how to do Human Things.
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Apr 8, 2019 21:14
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Can we talk about Naomi Nagata getting her Yang Wen-li on? I kind of wish they spent more time on the Laconia campaign. My only problem with the book is not prettending the brat was a hostage to make the escape.
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Apr 9, 2019 20:55
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I thought they didn't know who she was at that point
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Apr 9, 2019 21:07
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Naomi certainly didn't, not until the video conference.
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Apr 9, 2019 22:16
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Holden and Amos were the only ones who knew who she was at the time, and really the Laconians probably know enough about Holden to call his bluff if he threatened to kill a kid. Amos they probably would've believed, but who knows what his thought processes or motivations were looking like at the time. So it probably worked out for the best
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Apr 10, 2019 00:06
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I mean the entire ending of the book is coincidences / fanservice so you can gripe about anything in that sequence starting with the Teresa "hey do you still have that ship" moment(s). But they earned it; this is one of my favorite books but only with the weight of all the previous work hanging over it. The Amos death was a gut-punch executed extremely well, because the best version of Amos dying is it just happening with no fanfare. Even understanding and believing the repair drones hint, the decision to not make Amos a POV character for this book along with only hinting (strongly) at who the character was made it an arguable possibility that he was fully dead. I read that chapter as a "well it's bedtime after this" and fumed during my bedtime routine. Also, there's a Medium article to be written hypothesizing about the show existing influencing various aspects of the books since. That Amos moment really stuck because I happened to stop reading for the night when it happened, effectively forcing it to sit with me like a 7 day break between episodes of a TV show. That coupled with the sheer speed the book churned through An Actual Multi-Stage Space Battle Campaign might speak to what they learned dealing with a TV show. It's a very fertile topic for theorizing but also I don't care. The book kicking off unceremoniously with Avaserala's death with the meat of the commentary just being the processing in people's heads was extremely true to how the books Work, and it's clear to me that they made sure they didn't do the books any disservice as a medium. I can't shake from my brain how Easily this book can be adapted to television, though.
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Apr 10, 2019 23:41
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i will admit that I spent a considerable early stretch of the book expecting Avasarala to appear from the shadows on her hover-scooter at any moment
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Apr 11, 2019 01:57
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I wouldn't be surprised if the girl Holden talks to in the prologue ends up being a POV character in the finale so we get a bit more of that big dick Aversarela family energy and a final look at the Sol system.
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Apr 11, 2019 05:14
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Pretty decent book. I felt like the Naomi chapters took a bit to get going. But overall solid with a very impactful ending. Now Book 9 just needs to land the bird. I had a few structural quibbles with it, like... the italicized paragraphs during the Siege of Laconia, I thought they were, like, flashbacks to things Bobbie had once talked about given Naomi's thoughts immediately before it, and how often each chapter would begin with the lines/paragraphs of the chapter previous.
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Apr 11, 2019 08:06
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We don't just have book 9, there are 3! More short stories planned
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Apr 11, 2019 15:17
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One thing I'm confused about So, the gate builders made a system and brought a star to the brink. Then they moved the gate so when it went it would nuke the center. I got it so far. So then why? The attack was against the goths, not the builders, why would that attack set off the trap? Or did I miss it and it was the goths? Also, one other thing, how did they make THREE donager class ships when Mars only made one? how does a rag tag team of separatists make three? dont get me wrong I loved the imagery but found it a stretch.
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Apr 12, 2019 09:06
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Regarding the second point: I think Mars had a couple, and the Donnager was the first one launched.
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Apr 12, 2019 09:15
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Regarding the first point, I though it was more likely the Goths were the ones who set up the trap. After the Romans were gone all their stuff was lying there, able to be adjusted as desired. Or maybe the Romans had set it up for reasons of their own. E: spoiler tags
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Apr 12, 2019 14:02
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Mars had like eight or more of them at the height of their fleet (pre-Caliban’s war). Remember, the Laconians also stole 1-2 (one of which got eaten by a gate).
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Apr 12, 2019 14:03
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Sarern posted:Regarding the first point, I though it was more likely the Goths were the ones who set up the trap. After the Romans were gone all their stuff was lying there, able to be adjusted as desired. There are a lot of possibilities here, but I think that system was a Roman creation (probably one of many, since they're one time use) that could be used to nuke their own systems infected by Goth mindfuckery, giving specifics to the visions Holden got quite a few books back. Also, we have no evidence the Goths are capable of or have any interest in manipulating matter on our plane of existence in an ordered fashion, like delicately balancing a star to nearly implode. Their style also isn't setting intricate traps that require nuanced counterintelligence-backed strategy. They just seem to get pissed when you gently caress with the laws of physics in certain ways and smack our reality around in response. This line of thinking seems to have been encouraged by the way this book dealt with the prisoners dilemma and the Roman/Goth metaphors -- basically, the humans are being dipshits at worst and full of hubris at best to think our logic and history applies to this enemy whole cloth. (I'm still using "Roman/Goth" here because it's easier to type.) What the Goths are interested in and are tinkering with is the nature of consciousness with the pesky forms of life that are pissing them off. They kept trying the same mind-attack that worked on the Romans until they realized it wasn't, and are adjusting the attack. This puts a ticking clock on the humans to figure out what the gently caress to do. Now that I'm already longposting, I'd like to put down some broad poo poo that's been rolling around in my head for a while, coming into more focus with this last book: the series is doing some very interesting work exploring degrees/a spectrum of morality and perceptions of others, ie the Romans/Goths/and the reactions of humans as they learn new information. We know how humans are. We are emotional creatures wrestling with how to have a functioning society that still values a set of ideals. We're on a moral spectrum, some people with a strong moral compass and others complete assholes. I say this just to set up the rest. The Romans were Alive, possibly a hive mind, and with a consciousness similar but different to ours. Elvi made the realization that they might not have any concept of childhood. As a result, the Romans seem to be alive but not truly appreciating Living, which colors the way in which they manipulate life with their tech. To the Romans, life is just life to them, to be broken down and reorganized for whatever purpose. It's fine, this new or different thing they made is still alive, right? It's not dead! They're still creating beautiful, fascinating things. And to many humans, the way the protomolecule works is morally abhorent. To people on the Cortazar end of the spectrum, it is beautiful and the only frontier that matters. To guys like Duarte who are between the two, it's dangerous but if we can understand it safely, we can use it as a tool. The Goths are the farthest along the spectrum, their approach to life as we understand it is like dealing with a pest. We are watching them experiment with consciousness in real time, because their version of "being alive" is far removed from anything we can conceptualize. They don't give a poo poo, at this point cannot be understood, and so are seen by everyone as a threat. No one is arguing otherwise. Yet. The Goths, from our perception, create nothing. They only destroy. Explorations of morality and ethics are the blood flowing through the entire series, and they've been toying with it through human characters. Avasarala, Mao, Errinwright, Cortazar, Amos, it's everywhere. It's why Amos getting droned is full of such fascinating possibilities; his morality exists on a very specific equilibrium. From the viewpoint of good theme work, how he changes or doesn't and how his crew reacts to it will speak to the ultimate thesis statement of these novels, whether directly through plot or through metaphor. grilldos fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Apr 12, 2019 |
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Apr 12, 2019 15:45
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Our universe is the equivalent of TV to the goths. loving with physics causes the equivalent of static, resulting in the equivalent of smacking the TV set. Consciousness breaks are turning it off and on again.
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Apr 12, 2019 16:47
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The neutron star trap was set up by the builders. They probably understood what they were dealing with a little better than humanity and figured out that the Goths existed in the space between the Rings and that their presence was preceded by virtual particles becoming hydrogen atoms in the system they were attacking. Much like the antimatter bombs, the gamma blast was likely supposed to "hurt" the Goths if they stuck their tendrils through that ring. EDIT: The builders likely didn't intend to disintegrate two Rings and irradiate the slow zone, they probably would have moved the other Rings out of the way if the trap was sprung. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Apr 12, 2019 |
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Apr 12, 2019 17:37
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Optimus_Rhyme posted:Also, one other thing, how did they make THREE donager class ships when Mars only made one? how does a rag tag team of separatists make three? dont get me wrong I loved the imagery but found it a stretch. Mars had a bunch of Donnager-class ships available during the war with the Free Navy and that was 30+ years ago book time, so presumably they built (and subsequently scrapped) more in the interim.
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Apr 12, 2019 17:59
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grilldos posted:There are a lot of possibilities here, but I think that system was a Roman creation (probably one of many, since they're one time use) that could be used to nuke their own systems infected by Goth mindfuckery, giving specifics to the visions Holden got quite a few books back. My prediction for book 9 is https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Force_of_Nature_(episode) The Goths are intellegences from a different dimension harmed by the gate wormholes. Probably the immense energies required are taken from their plane of existence so they fight back. The conclusion will be for humanity to decide to return to Sol system or remain in distant systems cut off from each other, relegated to relativistic travel. The lessens for humanity will be they can't depend of the roads being built for them.
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Apr 13, 2019 05:58
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