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Between this and City of Stairs* it was a good year for Goon written Fantasy with bureaucratic female protagonists. Such a good book. I assume we hold back on spoilers until mid-month? *ok, published 2014. I just read it his year.
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Oct 5, 2015 10:40
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Burning Rain posted:Is Robert Jackson Bennett on the forums, too? Spiny Norman, but he hasn't posted in a long time.
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Oct 6, 2015 06:37
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Yeah, but don't forget who is the source of everything we hear about the Masquarade. Of course Baru paints it in the darkest colours, while also at the same time having swallowed a lot of their thinking wholesale or having to make a conscious effort to not fall too deep into the Masquarade thinking structures (which I found a really, really well done characterization). And they do a lot of evil poo poo over the course of the book, but we've only seen a island right after "peaceful" conquest and one on the verge of rebellion. I'm sure in more settled provinces people live a nice life with a lot of upsides once they are used to the fascist ways. Probably something for book 2 that's set at least partly in Falcrest. Also, even if there weren't any upsides to the rule of the Masquerade, it doesn't seem like people have really that much say or choice in it. We've just seen what happens to rebellion, and they control lives as thoroughly or more so as the SED did in Eastern Germany during their height. Either you go with the program or you disappear. We expect them to have enough positive sides to make up for all the poo poo, so people won't rebel - but in reality many, many empires were real shitholes for all but a privileged few. Why did people bear the chains of the USSR relatively peacefully? North Korea? Spain under Franco? The various Juntas in South America? People put up with a lot of poo poo in the name of stability. Decius fucked around with this message at 13:27 on Oct 13, 2015 |
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Oct 13, 2015 13:13
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Exactly my point. You have a few big examples to show how you deal with rebellion, be it the 17th of June (1953), 1956 or 1968 - or the Fool's rebellion and the new rebellion - and you get of decades of people ducking down their head and keeping quiet, even if life is comparably bad - and aside of not having any freedom and the creepy 1984-like Homo Sovieticus engineering, the live of most people in the Maquarade is probably quite good - enough food and work if you keep your citizen score high enough.
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Oct 13, 2015 13:47
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