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canis minor posted:
Guns features a prince of alt-Camelot attacking his usurper brother by finding the only accelerant that works inside that facet of the multiverse and giving an army of extradimensional roughly-humanoid troops assault rifles. His son, the perspective character of the back half of the series, studied computer science in 1970s Berkeley and puts together a sentient AI whose physical machinery is a planet-sized maze of obsidian circuitry. It is hinted that the cosmic force backing the hand of alt-Camelot and empowering its royalty is a much, much more advanced expression of that basic idea. So that cover isn't actually all that unrepresentative of the book's contents is i guess my point 
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Jul 10, 2016 21:00
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| # ¿ May 20, 2024 07:19 |
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Marcus Bull's Thinking Medieval is a great, short academic book that I really like because it focuses specifically on the little differences of weltanschaung between now and the Carolingians to paint a picture of them as complicated sophisticates who may as well have been aliens for how mutually intelligible a people who believe themselves living in the downward arc of history is to us today. Like, as an example, in Carolingian Europe there was no real conception of the authorship function, because for the most part "being worthy of adding to the literary canon" was a property they confined exclusively to the been-dead-300-years set. Einhard, a courtier of Charlemagne, wrote a biography of the king, and that was a fairly radical act of literary impertinence b/c saying a living dude deserved to be written about in any serious way was basically saying that he (or any living human) was as good as the Church fathers or Roman emperors or (gasp!) Jesus. And Einhard's biography was just passages from Seutonius with the serial numbers filed off, because he considered himself basically unworthy of original composition--the idea of glorifying someone by writing down true facts about them, stating original opinions, (or glorifying yourself as a writer by being eloquent or clever) just... wasn't really there.
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Dec 15, 2016 04:26
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