General Battuta posted:

Ah, the month is almost over! I'll never be this famous again!

I think it's important to leave a wall between writer and reader so that the reader has room to interpret the text without the author drooling all over. But whatever gently caress that, I'll talk about some poo poo.

I'm curious how many people picked up on/cared at all about the more subtle threads in the book. I tried to bury the plots of other novels in the story, then make Baru resolutely ignore them (because she's so focused on her goal). Part of the idea was to reward rereads, part of the idea was to seed future stories that would be interesting, but mostly I wanted the novel to illustrate that the world was bigger than Baru.

Just off the top of my head:

Heingyl Ri's plan to take over Aurdwynn.

The true identity of the actress in the bar (this one's super easy).

Exactly which vengeance-crazed individual killed Duke Sahaule, and why Baru presumes it was done!

Xate Yawa's motives throughout the novel (pretty explicitly revealed), and the identity of her backer.

The fate of Xate Olake's daughter with Tain Ko.

The identity of the man with the iron circle that Tain Hu mentions, although it'd be a mad stretch to guess this one just from the textual evidence.

Exactly what brought down the Tu Maia heartland.

The scientific error that drives Masquerade eugenics.

I'll try to remember if I dropped any other threads!

Peel posted:

quote:

There was a patient in the Rainbow Room.

Cosgrad Torrinde, Hesychast, stood over the vivisection table. He’d painted the lines of incision on the subject, first across her scalp, then down her torso (to check the spine). He’d diagrammed the plan of his surgery on sketch paper. Heated and bathed his instruments.

He lifted the scalpel. He —

He hesitated.

The woman on the table smiled at him, halfway wry, halfway forgiving, all impossible. Sapian had shattered nearly every functional joint in her body and yet she kept her cheer. The stitches that had saved her life (a temporary reprieve, admittedly) had been done without any ether or anesthetic.

She was a ruin. She was smiling. The colossal tumor that swelled up from her right temple displayed creases and complex structure under the alcohol wash. A throbbing spiderweb of veins clogged her shaved scalp.

“It’s strange,” she said, in really terrible Aphalone, “to cut a waking body. I know. I know you want to drug me. But that’s not your plan, is it? You need me conscious.”

“I don’t want to do this.” He felt the ridiculous, laughable wish for little silver eye-shields on his mask, so that he could blink. Those Judiciary riot masks had lenses, didn’t they? He should get a lensed mask. “I’m not sure I can do this.”

“Give me the scalpel,” the woman suggested. “Bind yourself to this table.”

She wouldn’t even be able to stand. Probably. “You’ll kill me.”

“I’ll make you live forever,” she said, and then, in a voice with (Cosgrad chose his words carefullly, to master himself) extreme and troubling physiological effect, she said NA U VO AI E HAS AH ATH

Cosgrad smiled behind his mask, and felt terribly sad. To listen to her any longer would be dangerous; if she had the art he feared, she might be able to program his flesh using even subtle signals. Gestures. Small sounds.

“I don’t see any evidence of immortality,” he said. “You don’t respond to hypnosis at all. Coaxing and icon splitting don’t suggest that you contain multiple sets of memories or personalities.”

UNDIANATH she said A UT LI-EN

“I hear you, even if I don’t believe you,” he said, chilled, for just an instant, by the superstitious thought that old Undianath the sorcerer surgeon was in there, with a flock of other minds. “But I do agree that the tumor is obviously potent. It blocks your pain response. You haven’t felt any of it? None of it?”

“I can feel it.” She tried to shrug but the bones were broken. What happened beneath her skin made Cosgrad wince. “I’m not moved by it. The pain is asymbolic. Like watching water boil. You know it happens but you do not feel it. And it has been that way since I took the life into me and it grew.”

Cosgrad disciplined himself. With a firm tug he tightened the brace that kept her skull in place and set to work. The first incision split the rind of the tumor and the flesh inside was red-black.

“If I damage it,” he murmured, “will you feel all the pain again? I don’t want that.”

“No,” she said, shortly, and then, a little later, as he completed his dissection, “but thank you. You’re a kind man, for a monster.”

“You know I can’t send you home.”

“It’s all right. Before I went out on mission I had a seed taken, to grow in my child. I will live on in her; this body I am now, here, this is just a branch to be pruned.” She made an impatient motion with her eyes. “Proceed, please. I’m tired of being afraid.”

Cosgrad reached up to the ceiling and pulled down the truth impaler.

The mechanism cupped her skull. With his breath held Cosgrad adjusted the screws to align her skull perfectly, perfectly, in the device’s sights. He still suffered something like a 40% failure rate, and even after running through a few hundred of the Abhuman Crimes inmates as test subjects, he couldn’t say why. Imprecision might be one answer. Variance between individual brains would be another, and that he couldn’t solve. Certainly there was an argument to be made for introducing the stylus slowly instead of traumatically, but Cosgrad was afraid that a slow entry would paradoxically do more damage, leaving ragged tears instead of a clean punch, and oh, stop thinking, do it, do it.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and fired.

The ripfire fuse detonated the explosive and the truth impaler fired a lance of sterile steel down through the top of her skull, piercing the brain, annihilating the specific areas that two centuries of phrenologists and surgeons had pinpointed as Falsehood Control. The backstop caught the rod and stopped it sharp, still lodged deep in her brain. There was no shrapnel. The rod did not go astray from its guides.

He checked her pulse. Stable. Probably the concussion would knock her out.

Patient’s ability to lie hopefully degraded, Cosgrad recorded.

She would lose so much else, too. Oh, the wit of her, that spark of laughing defiance, that would go — she would snarl and curse and behave like a child. All her civilization stripped away by the rod. Worse than lobotomy.

More necessary.

She blinked. Cosgrad yelped in fright. She was still awake. The impact and trauma hadn’t even knocked her out! She must be final stage, terminal stage, not even sleeping. His dissection of the Immortata implant had revealed massive cranial disruption, so perhaps it had actually knocked out her ability to lose consciousness somehow — somehow —

AIA U NA she said, and then “There are certainly a lot of things in my skull now, aren’t there? Ah, I can’t see. It’s a shame. You were so beautiful.”

Cosgrad unfolded his folio of questions. He blinked at them. They were urgent and important and impersonal. He was supposed to stay impersonal. He wasn’t supposed to get attached, ever, ever again. Tau-indi had been one mistake too many.

But.

“What’s your name?” he asked, instead.

General Battuta posted:

a crazed quest for horse vengeance

Peel posted:

_{(stolen via Battuta's own twitter)}

Affi posted:

Could you put up your different builds and uses for those builds? Like what different medics do you use and why? I know you've done a lot of this in the different posts but yknow gathering it in one place would be really cool.

I think I build my poo poo wrong. When given the choice of crit immunity I always take it basically. Because I'm terrified of crits and pretty much every infantry and assault gets extra conditioning too.

Engineers go one of two paths and don't touch the other crap and medics are just.. I have no idea what to do with them besides sticking a medkit on them and making them officers...

General Battuta posted:

Ditch the infantry and all that poo poo, don't worry about crits. Focus on teching up infrastructure systems like bureaucracy (to track food/population/labor and reduce corruption), ideology (to maintain loyalty over widely dispersed populations) and hygiene (to reduce attrition and unlock surgery). The goal is to rush for control of the market and gain control of all the factors necessary for the opponent's build to work. Engineering is great for keeping aqueducts and the like running but you should be sure it's secondary to good economics (and then you'll get a nice spiraling takeoff).

It's weak to rushes in the short term but your win rate will go way up and I guarantee it'll change the whole meta.

Fried Chicken posted:

I have to side with other reviews I've seen. This is probably the most depressing and nihilistic work of genre fiction I've read since Blindsight. Take Guns, Germs and Steel, and then add in the feeling of any hope or plan being crushed by the implacable gears of a great machine, where the only way to survive is to trample the weak and hurdle the dead as you are beaten into becoming what you are trying to overthrow.

This is Traitor Baru Cormorant

Enjoy

quote:

Jurispotence Xate Yawa ordered a bulletin posted on every door in Aurdwynn and read to the illiterate in every market and square:

General Battuta posted:

19th century's a bit premature. Torpedoes were in play during the Islamic Golden Age, and naval mines were around by the 16th century too. The Masquerade and Oriati are right on the edge of a transition towards cannon armament (which also happened in the late 16th/early 17th in our world), but right now the Masquerade's incendiaries are much better, and since they won the last war with firestarters they're doctrinally attached.

quote:

Nor is the Masquerade's scientific and economic knowledge super 20th century — it's again drawing a lot on the Islamic golden age, Indian Ocean trade circle communities, and financial gambits as old as Ancient Egypt

quote:

A lot of the research that went into the book involved creating situations that felt anachronistic but still made structural and technological sense, to show how our own narrative of history is shaped by the way we remember the origin of innovations and social mores (Taranoke's society is largely based on some tribes in the Amazon). Next book will be going even harder on the things-that-feel-unrealistic-but-totally-could've-happend!

quote:

Speaking of literate people (sorrrrry I couldn't resist), the sentence about putting up notices reads right like this, at least in my manuscript (maybe it got fumbled in page proofs?)

quote:

Thank you for the comments!

House Louse posted:

I don't doubt that's what I read, but I asked myself "why not only announce it?" Even if you don't take the "every door" thing literally.

quote:

The finest fantasy novel of intrigue I've ever read, with no close second. Not only a worthy epic of discovery, politics, and conquest, but a penetrating look at identity and power. Possibly worthy of being taught in the same classes that teach Chopin's THE AWAKENING or Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN. And, above all else, deeply emotionally investing.

If you've ever believed any judgment I've made on a work of culture in the English language, believe me: this is a powerful book.

General Battuta posted:

I say BAH-roo, if, uh, that makes sense? Soft a, emphasis on the first syllable.

General Battuta posted:

I say BAH-roo, if, uh, that makes sense? Soft a, emphasis on the first syllable.

Affi posted:

Well at least the trains ran on time.

DACK FAYDEN posted:

GB, I don't know if you play Magic at all, but I was watching a pro (LSV) stream and he started talking about books and said he really liked Lies of Locke Lamora, so I asked if he'd read TTBC and he said "that was one of the books I read on my last trip and honestly I think it was the one I enjoyed the most."

So I guess there's like 1400 people on Twitch who just heard it get recommended and hopefully at least one of them buys it!

quote:

As the firestorm burnt up everyone who’d trusted and believed in him, as the monsoon rain of rocket arrows and incendiary bombs lit his ships like screaming human skewers, Awoharo Abd tried his very damndest to die.

He had to leap into the sea, now. He absolutely, no procrastination, no excuses, no second chances had to die: if the Falcresti took him captive, which they would, and if they tricked him into admitting who he was and who had sponsored his fleet, which they could (being a nation of absolute loving snakes) then Awoharo would doom two hundred and ten million people in Oriati Mbo, the heart of the world, his beloved home.

“You’ll never take me alive,” he said, hiding under his ship’s toppled sails. You only got one chance to say a thing like this. It deserved a little rehearsal. “You’ll never take me alive. You’ll never take me alive. You’ll never take me alive! All right. gently caress. gently caress. Do it. Do it! Death and glory!”

Snarling in defiance he leapt out from under the sailcloth, his rapier loose in his back hand, and vaulted up onto his galley’s fighting rail. “You’ll never take me alive!” he roared, and then he made the terrible mistake of looking down before he leapt.

Beneath him, the sea burnt.

Blue-hot chemical fire drifted on the waves, vicious, viscuous, burning everything, cooking up a sautee smell of seawater and charred lumber and boiled fat bursting out through blistered dead skin and incinerated hair popped eyeballs chips of toenail off bloated severed feet bobbing across entire square miles of this flaming holocaust the crews of forty-one of Awoharo’s warships tossed into a loving wok and stir-fried —

Awoharo couldn’t jump. He couldn’t. Call him a coward and a traitor to two hundred ten million, but there are limits to courage, there are footnotes to the code of bravery: and fire is the first of them.

A sailor at the bow of Awoharo’s flagship leapt into the sea. “No!” Awoharo screamed, “stop!”

But too late, gravity had him, a graceful dive and he went down through the gel and up again, coated in flame, the Burn sticking to him everywhere even beneath the water, as if it smelled Oriati flesh and hated it, and it burnt even underwater, it fed on the air in his clothes. He screamed soundlessly because the fire was eating all the air that came out of him. He screamed with his face tipped back to the sky: and the Burn went down his throat.

Awoharo Abd rearranged his list of the worst possible ways to die, and with a sob of shame he stepped back from the rail. He could hang himself — or fall on his sword, if he could aim it right —

Or he could die in combat, like a proper champion.

Like bloody gulls the tall redsailed Falcrest ships circled the kettle where they’d corralled and massacred Awoharo’s fleet. Past the two enormous torchships, Abd could see the city of Treatymont, blackened stone and iron brooding against the high beauty of the far Wintercrests. There was nothing else to see: Falcresti warships, a Falcrest city, and Falcrest fire. Awoharo’s other ships had been sunk, all nineteen of his Syndicate Eyota fast-attack galleys, all twenty-three of the rebel Duke Unuxekome’s fleet. Nine Falcrest ships had annihilated forty-three of his. Abd had only survived for the same reason he desperately needed to die: the Falcresti knew which ship he was on, the Oriati commander, and they wanted him as prisoner.

“Well, Kindalana,” he whispered, looking at his rapier, “you were right. It was a trap. I love you, I’m sorry, and please give Tau my apologies.”

So much for helping the people of occupied Aurdwynn liberate themselves. So much for Baru Cormorant, the great hope of the people.

So much for the seed of immortality growing in Awo’s back. It would never carry his soul down through millennia. He’d sold himself for nothing.

Awoharo Abd put up his rapier and advanced down the length of his ship, calling out in challenge. A squad of enemy marines roped aboard from the rigging of a Masqurade frigate: behind them, the sleek ship caught its own ropes on fire in the sea of flame, and now she tried to pull away, sailors pouring jars of their own stale piss on the catchfire.

“That’s right!” Awoharo taunted. “Some Navy, fighting with your own bottled piss! I bet you drink it too! Come on, take out your little knives! Have at you! Have at you! I am Awoharo of the House of Abd, master of ships, champion cat gambler, and I challenge you to mortal up-fuckery!”

Six Masquerade marines stared back at him. Red masks stuffed with chemical filters against the smoke. Armored bodies webbed with grenades and devices. Eyes invisible behind dark inhuman lenses as omniscient and indifferent as krakenfly eyes. Awoharo beckoned to them. You could get a good death, swordfighting: you could take them on one by one until at last they had to shoot you with their crossbows. Awoharo had ten years under a swordmaster and three years real fight experience. He may have been born a merchant, but he’d learned how to bleed.

The marine with the black slash of an officer across his mask yanked a gas grenade off the rip ring at his chest. The mechanism failed. The grenade’s chemicals didn’t burn, nothing happened. “Good one!” Awoharo jeered, leaping over bodies, kicking aside splintered wood, nimble and free with his rapier. He’d dance around these brutes, he’d poke them to death, quickfooted, hadn’t Kindalana loved his dancing? “Don’t be embarrassed! Happens to the best of us! Come on over here, I’ll show you a weapon that works!”

The marine officer stepped back, shrugging. He said something in Aphalone so muffled by his mask that Awoharo heard it only as a low sinister diagnosis. Like a doctor pronouncing the patient dead: to the patient’s face.

The rest of the marines walked straight at Awo, shoulder to shoulder, crouched a little against the roll of the ship.

“Sophisticated loving tactics!” Awoharo bellowed, as a huge sheet of fire roared up across the sea behind him, a slick of cooking oil catching alight. “Come on, form an orderly queue, who wants it first, my blade is lined with moral fiber and if I prick you you’ll realize what a thug you are! Form a — ”

The first marine proceeded straight onto his sword.

Awoharo stabbed the marine in the eye and the point of his faithful rapier skittered sideways off the marine’s steel cheek, sticking in his shoulder rig where the man grabbed the blade in his glove and hooked it on steel knuckle claws and twisted til the rapier bent.

“gently caress,” Awo said, in bemusement.

He went for his belt knife. The marines were too quick. The first punch hit like a shot of tequila and Awo went down on the pitching deck under stamping feet and steel truncheons. For a few moments he felt like the lead drum at his own funeral.

When they let up he threw his last defiance at them. His last weapon.

“Ayamma,” he whispered, and then, shouting into the face of the man cuffing him, into the indifferent red masks and the sea of burning corpses and the whole tyrannical loving design of Falcrest and its faceless Emperor, shouting with all he had left, the secret terrible bargain he’d made, “I am a thousand lives, you poor fools, it grows in me, a-ut lien, I have the immortata, the cancer grows!”

“The gently caress is he saying?” the marine asked his officer.

“Tunk superstition,” the officer growled. “This one goes straight to Apparitor.”

He dropped a bag over Awoharo’s head, shoved a gas grenade inside, cinched the bag shut, and yanked the grenade’s ripring.

At least it wasn’t the fire. At least it wasn’t the fire.

Poldarn posted:

Another question from the peanut gallery:

Do you have a HEMA background? Cause I do and your swordfight scenes were legit.

RiotGearEpsilon posted:

Hey, as long as I've got you in the thread - are the Clarified at all inspired by / derived from the Dunyain from the Second Apocalypse sextet?

General Battuta posted:

Answers

General Battuta posted:

All the alleged genetic superiority will get explored more, I hope, but claims of superhumanity should be evaluated critically!