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Man, if the manuscript made the editor quit without notice, I'm kind of even more intrigued. What new and terrible things will Bakker write about? I'm waiting. 
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Jan 18, 2016 00:11
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A human heart posted:Have you considered reading The Bible, by God? The Vedas are better, if you want weird cultures and stories. Also it has one up over the bible because it comes from the one true religion
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Jan 24, 2016 12:01
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House Louse posted:I just read TDTCB and it's surprisingly good, for a 600 page first volume in a trilogy that's basically just a prologue. The world is vividly described, and I liked the Middle Eastern feel, even if the fantasy names are alphabet soup spiced with diacritics. I liked the characters, even the awful ones,* and the everlasting politicking rang true. The Achamian/Esmenet and Cnaïur/Kellhus relationships were intriguing. Kellhus is a monster, as horrifying as the Inochoros really. They both seem to stand outside the normal world, so I'm not sure if they would end up being allies or enemies. (I suppose the Inochoros is a Consult thing, like whatever Skëaos was?) The fantasy names are mostly like Bakker took up a book about ancient Mesopotamian history, skimmed it a couple minutes and later tried to give his characters names randomly chosen from a dozen different cultures mentioned in it. So in a away, even if they look strange to us, he uses names that could actually at one point have been real names. It's basically like a novel full of names like Steve and Susan, just published thousands of years in the future in Japan.  In my opinion, the names are certainly a step up from the dreck normal fantasy comes up with.
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Feb 7, 2016 17:55
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anilEhilated posted:Really? Because they feel random as gently caress, this is a book where you got Dunyadin, Xerius, Cnaiur and Esmenet in one place. Not really sure what puts that above standard fantasy fare. You could look this up on Wikipedia if you want, I'm sure they have a lot of articles about Mesopotamia and other ancient cultures. Esmenet: Sounds Egyptian Xerius: Sounds Persian Dunyadin: Probably a Tolkien-reference Cnaiur: I forgot, Hethites maybe? Probably not And this is just literally the first thing going through my head, many other names sound distinctively Babylonian or Assyrian.
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Feb 7, 2016 18:19
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I''ll take verisimilitude over factual accuracy any day. Doesn't matter if the names have perfectly justifiable roots in the ancient world, a lot of them feel like a complete mish-mash. It's odd that having put so much detailinto the exact kind f beard habits of the Three Seas, he then doesn't give the names much to distinguish them from each other. Most fantasy-novels don't even have that. Seriously, I sometimes skim fantasy novels to find something interesting to read and most of the time the names just make me giggle. As someone with an interest in ancient history, Bakker's naming scheme adds verisimilitude. Too bad it doesn't work for everyone, but welp. It would be boring if we'd all the same, right? 
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Feb 7, 2016 23:16
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I sometimes imagine how the movie-version of a book would look like, with the main protagonist being played by Bruce Willis. But doing this poo poo for the entire book would be a bit much, I think.
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Feb 14, 2016 11:48
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Boing posted:Norsirai and Ketyai are the two major ethnic groups in the story. Most of the people around the three seas are Ketyai, the vaguely swarthy Mediterranean/Middle-Eastern stand-in, including the Nansur and Conriyans and Ainoni and Kianene and so on. The people of the ancient North are the Norsirai, who are tall blonde blue-eyed Aryans. They were the major civilisation of Men for a long time, but their culture was mostly crippled during the First Apocalypse - especially Kûniüri, which took the brunt of it. The Galeoth, Tydonni and Thunyeri I think are the surviving Norsirai nations near the Three Seas, but as far as the actual North it's just the cities of Atrithau and Sakarpus that survived. You mean not-Ethiopia, right?
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Feb 14, 2016 14:25
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Mr. Soul posted:It's probably the sign of a lovely imagination but I do this with every book. I read a couple books by Joe Abercrombie and logen is tormund from game of thrones and Bayaz is the nazi doctor from American horror story season 2. Don't worry, I've met worse people. At one point I overheard a girl in a bookshop saying she can't read books with male protagonists because she can't identify with them and my reaction was like this:  So yeah, your imagination is still going strong compared with that person. Personally, I'm so bad at remembering faces and names I never even could replace people I read about in a book with actors, even if I wanted to. Case in point: I think I've heard about Joe Abercrombie at some point but the rest of what you said was just gibberish for me. Back on topic, if Kelmomas is one of the sons of Kellhus and I remember him correctly, I think he is just mad. That voice is basically his own insanity manipulating him.
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Feb 14, 2016 18:07
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Boing posted:What's amazing is how the later books and the short stories almost manage to make the Consult sympathetic. Bakker loves to start with comically sinister and then try to justify it through rational existential dread. Hilariously, this has the opposite effect on me. It managed to make the Consult look stupid in addition to being sinister. Existential dread just isn't something I can emotionally understand. Well I mean I do know that people fear that kind of stuff, it just feels silly to me.
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Feb 23, 2016 16:54
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Drogue Chronicle posted:It's not "existential dread" in our sense, it's absolute knowledge that hell is real, they will be punished, and they have a way to avoid it and do what they want without consequence. You can analogize it to some men in black coming to hook electrodes up to your nuts, forever, unless you kill enough people for their organization to collapse. That analogy would be wrong, though. The people they're killing and planning to kill are just unwittingly helping the MIB in this example. In fact, since they're planning on genociding nearly everyone, their punishment is actually fully justified and they're just digging in deeper at this point. They're genocidal bastards trying to evade their punishment. Libluini fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Feb 23, 2016 |
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Feb 23, 2016 18:00
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Boing posted:I find the notion of 'digging in deeper' pretty compelling. They've already sinned enough to be damned for good, so they're going all in on the sin and trying to sin hard enough to wrap round again into not being damned. The problem is, I can't really understand the logic of someone who first sins until he is damned and then just continues sinning because he will be punished anyway. I could understand getting regrets and changing sides in the hope of some small mercy after death, what I can't understand is doubling down on being evil just because. It's insane and selfish behaviour. What I would call stupid. Drogue Chronicle posted:That makes them evil, but quite rational. You said they were stupid. There's nothing stupid about avoiding pain. If they felt their punishment was justified, they would be rational and not stupid. If they'd accept that what they were doing was wrong and tried to change their behaviour, I'd call them smart. And honestly, I would expect every rational person to just suck it up and deal with the pain if the alternative is killing almost every person alive.
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Feb 23, 2016 20:53
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Boing posted:It's not just because, it's a legitimate attempt to scam the system and get out of being damned. Besides which, what you describe isn't exactly an uncommon criminal behaviour. Yeah and? I said I consider this behaviour dumb. Nothing you say contradicts this. The villains in this case are dumb assholes like many others both in fiction and real life and that's it. They're good villains because we know dumb evil people exist so we can empathize with the characters fighting this menace. They're however not exactly the brightest bunch I've ever seen. Dangerous and scary, sure. But they do things I consider stupid so I can't call them anything else. 
Libluini fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Feb 23, 2016 |
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Feb 23, 2016 21:14
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House Louse posted:E: Oh yeah, one other thing. How do Dûnyain inherit names? Because there could easily be a situation where they all have the same surname... come to think of it, if they never go outside Ishuäl, why aren't they all inbred to the the Nth degree? I've heard NASA made a recent study about this kind of thing. Turns out as long as you're really carefully planning everything out, you can have a healthy genetical base with something ridiculously low as ~80 people or even less. Now I'm sure Bakker didn't know about this when he started writing this series, but welp. It's still possible.
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Mar 23, 2016 11:28
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:A complete version of that preview chapter was posted. God am I pumped now: I'm so jealous of advance reading copies. The rest of us normal folks has to wait until August. After all that waiting for the second trilogy to finish, even more waiting!  At least it looks like the end is near.
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May 19, 2016 17:34
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Yeah, I could understand a new thread if this was one of those mega-threads with 500+ pages, those are unweildy as gently caress. But 5 pages? Nah, we're good.
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May 20, 2016 09:05
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A human heart posted:In the future all fantasy novels will include a wikipedia summary of the previous one, so that you can get to the action immediately In the future? I've had novels from the 80s and earlier with that gimmick. Well, obviously Wikipedia didn't exist back then, but the point still stands. For example, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn by Tad Williams came with lengthy summaries in every book after the first one. In Germany we even got an extra-summary, because the trilogy was broken up into four books. Edit: The summary in Der Engelsturm was basically a small novella on its own.
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Jun 17, 2016 10:16
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Abalieno posted:Uhm, the difference between scientists and philosophers is that scientists only talk to other scientists, whereas philosophers talk to all of US. Not where I live. German philosophers are more known for using impenetrable language to make sure only other philosophers can understand them. Also there are multiple science magazines you can buy at every street kiosk, while I can't remember ever seeing something similar about philosophy. Our scientists like people reading about science, it turns out. I don't know in what crap country you are forced to live, but over here the situation is reversed.
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Jul 7, 2016 19:13
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Nevvy Z posted:Counterpoint, Kelmomas is loving awesome. I can tolerate Esmenet but I hate this little fucker. For some reason he makes me think of every evil child in movies/fiction ever and I always hated this cliché. Hypocrisy posted:I really enjoyed reading him slowly destroying everything he has wanted or hoped for culminating with him destroying the White Luck Warrior's Unerring Grace. Sorweel's part was more about a really stupid kid slowly learning he didn't know everything while other people do the hard work. Serwa was more impressive, since she not only survived a lot of torture, but also in the end destroyed those stupid Nonmen-fuckers after said giant removed the gag from her mouth so she could use sorcery.
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Sep 8, 2016 08:52
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Nevvy Z posted:I just got to the part with Proyo and Big K... To be honest, that stuff doesn't even face me anymore, I just roll my eyes, suppress my disgust, and read on. It's basically a Bakkerism at this point. poo poo like this and Sorweel masturbating to Serwa and Moenghus Jr. loving is in all his books. It's like with Robert Jordan and his weird spanking fetish. Some authors just have this one weird thing you start to notice after reading their books for long enough.
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Sep 9, 2016 15:17
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Kuiperdolin posted:The No-God appears in a whirlwind and Bakker does this thing where the POV obliquely describes an Inchoroi technological device he does not understand (like the elevator in Golgoterrath or the Heron Spear which is apparently not a spear but some kind of beam weapon). I've read the whirlwind-descriptions and this is quite obviously not caused by a helicopter.
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Oct 4, 2016 13:03
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To even think of a helicopter in connection to this, you must be the stupidest human being alive. I'm sorry to be so harsh, but that's literally the first thought popping into my head when I read this.
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Oct 4, 2016 13:20
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Collateral posted:Does this series get better? I am halfway through the warrior prophet and the entire book seems to be characters telling other characters how much they absolutely love Kelhus. Like thiiiiiiiiis much. Or crying because other characters are telling them "Nu huh I love Kelhus the mostest." Yeah, it adds a lot to the dread presented by Kelhus. It gets even better later!
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Jan 18, 2017 18:37
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Collateral posted:It's like Richard read that GQ article about PUAs and made a character based on their bullshit claims. Sure you can read micro expressions but if you don't have any context you very likely pull the wrong string and get stabbed in the eye. Which never happens, apart from the one character who portrayed as mad/crazy (loving the brown brown earth eh?). That stuff sounds good in theory but it really doesn't work, humans are super contrary. All your questions will be answered, just continue onward. Let Bakker's bear trap embrace you! Boing posted:The second trilogy ('trilogy') addresses pretty much all of those things, and represents a big shift in tone, but I think honestly if you're not enjoying the books so far you might not enjoy the next ones either. I was hooked pretty much from the beginning because I'm a sucker for cool world building and introspective philosophising. To be honest, I liked the first trilogy the best, the second is, while overall still good, bordering on farce sometimes. Also from my viewpoint the series basically is sci-fi.
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Jan 19, 2017 22:40
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Number Ten Cocks posted:I bow before the collective horror of SA before too much reality, but I did predict something like the whale mothers role for female dunyain because it seemed the logical outgrowth of their philosophy applied to our current reality. It's faster to breed your super race if you divide roles like that, I just wasn't sure Bakker would have the balls to do it. Kudos for that, even if the physical sexual dimorphism went into WTF LOL territory. If you predicted this wet dream of perversity, you are one sick motherfucker. I was incredibly disappointed by Bakker, my respect for his knowledge went down by like 75% by this one plot point alone. I mean, he is obviously showing the Dunyain as flawed and ultimatively stupid shitheads, so I didn't lose all respect, but that klunker of pseudo-science was hard to swallow. I rolled my eyes so hard I got a headache and had to stop reading for the rest of the day.
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Jan 21, 2017 00:02
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Boing posted:As for the 'men are objectively better than women' thing - Bakker clearly doesn't think this. The metaphysics of Earwa is basically "what if all that proscriptive bullshit in the Bible was real" and seeing the kind of hosed up world it produces. If you do certain things you get sent straight to hell and, welp, that sucks for you and it's not fair, but that's the way the world works. Women should shut up and know their place because only men have pure souls. Like us, the people of Earwa followed the scriptures and believed these things for a while, but gradually began to think of those concepts as unfair - unlike us, that poo poo is all real and men really are better and you can go to hell for being a slut. Which is a chilling existence. It's also ultimately self-defeating and doomed, since the people in Earwa are basically trapped between being exterminated by the consult (or worse) and being send to hell for effectively resisting.
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Jan 21, 2017 00:05
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I gave Bakker about four to five books long the benefit of the doubt, but I'm now fully convinced he is only writing like this for pure shockvalue. Basically the fantasy equivalent of slasher movies. Edit: This means after a certain point thinking about this is just wasting time. It's like wondering why there are no Trolls in Troll II.
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Jan 21, 2017 00:21
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Number Ten Cocks posted:Im not talking about physical breeding into whale mothers. I'm talking about generational size and the undesirability of grating right that reduce birth rates. The advanced sexual dimorphism is absurd, I agree with that. You'd pick a cutoff age for assessment, keep the smartest and strongest and keep them constantly pregnant, kill the rest. Same for the men, but they spend their time in training and thought not hindered by pregnancy or infant rearing. You're better off with 15 kids per generation and women doing no meaningful training than 3 kids per generation and something closer to equality. Two 140 IQ parents need to have A KOT of kids to get a yield of 130+ and start moving that mean you're regressing to. This is impossible, won't work and if you find a Dr. Mengele to implement this it will end like all Nazi science: An absolute disaster.
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Jan 21, 2017 00:25
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Welp, my book came yesterday. Today I am finished. My first reaction:  No let's put my thoughts into a mini-review:As I've heard, Bakker is planning to churn out even more books, so the story not ending shouldn't be a surprise, but still. Is writing good endings too hard for authors nowadays? The book ends in a cliffhanger so steep, it wraps around to itself, turning into a Möbius strip of suckage. But apart from the ending, the bad philosophy and the other Bakkerisms ("Death comes swirling down"), the book was actually good. It also was a rather painful experience to read, since it shows Bakker could be so much better if he just took his head out of his rear end, but oh well. Wishing for people to change is a fool's errand, so back to waiting how this turns out. Though at this point I'm almost sure Bakker tries to go down the road of Jordan and just write book after book after book, with the true ending always teasing us from afar. Anyway, I've read books from authors who actually could put a good end into their books, regardless of how they were placed in their insane fictitious universe time line, so Bakker really has no excuse. But! Reading The Unholy Consult is still worthwhile, just for the sheer madness Bakker puts in there. Most of it is stuff you probably already expected, but Bakker is throwing us some mean curveballs here. It's also incredible impressive how Bakker, at the very end of his second trilogy, decides to end it with a cliffhanger so brazen, it makes you feel physical pain. Now that's bravery. It's also completely insane, but that's Bakker for you. And because I don't want to write an entirely spoiler-free post, don't read this if you want the Unholy Consult unspoiled: Kellhus is killed by an evil child. The evil child becomes the No-God and kills everyone. The End.
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Jul 8, 2017 14:44
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The Ninth Layer posted:I haven't finished it yet, but I was under the impression that TUC was wrapping up this story arc but wasn't ever planned as the final book of the series. Well, then either your impression was utterly wrong, or Bakker should look up the meaning of "wrapping up" in a dictionary, because holy hell was that a jarring ending.
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Jul 8, 2017 16:05
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Number Ten Cocks posted:It's always been obvious that the Second Apocalypse is mirroring the First in its broad strokes. Kellhus' ancestor was not the ultimate victor. Now that I'm reflecting on this, yes. You could say the Second Apocalypse has some similarities to how the first one went, if you ignore like 80% of what is happening. (Of course, I may be unfair since I've already read the Unholy Consult.)
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Jul 8, 2017 17:46
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Cardiac posted:The Consult really comes across as a bunch of blundering morons in the end. Also, given UC what is left of the Consult is basically the Dunyain and a shitload of Sranc they seem like less of a threat compared to the past . Of course, humanity have been basically drained of resources by The Great Ordeal so there is that plus that the presence of the NoGod means no reinforcements. The Dunjain-leaders of the New Consult explain this: Back during ancient times, the Old Consult basically threw countless people into the sarcophagus, without any success. Only by pure accident did they luck out when they threw that Norsirai-prince who was related to both Seswatha and Kellhus into it. The Black Carapace connected, and the No-God suddenly came to life. This time, the new leaders knew that by waiting, the new "pilot" for the No-God would arrive on his own account. They plans then were messed up when Kellhus first invaded with a demon army, declared himself King of Hell, and started killing them. Then Kellhus son, the little poo poo, killed his father. The leaders of the New Consult then just had to throw that little monster into the Black Carapace, since they knew it would work as long as one of Kellhus' line was in there. So to answer your question, they couldn't wake the No-God without Kellhus or one of his children in it. And the best way to make the revival go off without a hitch was to just wait until Kellhus shows up, convince him to join their side, and presto: New No-God. The fact that the first Apocalypse only happened because of a lucky accident is one of the curveballs I was talking about.
Libluini fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Jul 8, 2017 |
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Jul 8, 2017 18:18
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Cardiac posted:One would think that simply just kidnapping one of the kids should be enough. You don't think enough like a Dunyain: Sure, they could have kidnapped one of his kids straightaway, but then they would have needed to fight the full might of Kellhus' empire anyway. And battles are messy things, you can never be 100% sure that you're the winner when the dust settles. From their viewpoint, waiting until Kellhus shows up personally makes more sense, since they must have assumed they could have suborned his entire empire in one fell swoop by taking him. Bonus points for luring and then crushing the might of his empire right at their doorsteps, thus making sure they can win regardless of the outcome of their little talk. And abducting his kids was always on the table anyway, as you can see by the Dunyain clearly having "Kill Kellhus" as their plan B. They probably wanted one of his other kids, though. They must have been surprised when a pesky little eight-year-old Anasurimbor showed up right in front of them. Bagging a little kid must have been like a godsend for them. No dealing with a strong, dangerous adult like Kellhus' other kids.
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Jul 8, 2017 19:04
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Rime posted:I think I've asked this before, but is there any reference to humans being present in Earwa before the ark crashes? Now that we know the Inchoroi didn't build it and were not the masters, it leaves the question of who did and who is. We've seen, twice now, groups of humans gain absolute control over the ruins there, and the sarcophagus of Mog-Pharau is clearly seeking something unique in humans. A genetic key? There were tons of references to humans in Earwa before the ark. Essentially, humans roamed (and probably still roam) the wilderness far to the east of the huge mountains making up the eastern border of Earwa. The Nonmen raided those tribes to get slaves. The Nonmen then basically bred them to be their pets -the human slaves the protagonists meet in The Great Ordeal are basically proto-human, since their intelligence has been bred out of them until they were barely human anymore. There's also references to a great shaman being born in the far east, uniting the human tribes and invading the Nonman-mansions at the border after the war against the Inchoroi seemed to be over, and all of the aliens were believed to be dead by the Nonmen. All the modern humans in the setting are descendants of those invaders, while the original humans all either perished, or faced a fate worse then death in the surviving Nonman-mansions.
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Jul 12, 2017 11:37
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Collateral posted:The inchoroi of the books are not the pilots of the ark, they were altered to their current form. The implication is that they were as human as the rest of us, but altered to beat the nonmen. The other question being, "Which Humans?" Like Ani and Rime said, you are completely wrong with this. Funnily enough though, this means you don't need to spoiler your spoiler!
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Jul 14, 2017 10:02
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Collateral posted:I didn't spoiler it?? 
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Jul 14, 2017 18:03
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At this point, I'm just hoping we get an end someday. I really don't want him to go  actually, have another trilogy for the real real ending when his "last" book is finished.I know things change, but when a second trilogy suddenly turns into a quintology, followed by the author announcing several more books after that, I get flashbacks to A Song of Ice and Fire. Someone should tell those dumbass authors it's not forbidden to put an end somewhere. I mean I vividly remember reading multi-books series with some good endings in the individual books themselves, so why do I feel like every modern author is addicted to cliffhangers now?
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Jul 19, 2017 18:57
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General Battuta posted:I guess he's also got an interesting take on narrating set piece battles. Very Homeric This, and it reminds me of the time when I read Die Niebelungen. The way the final massacre is listing every dumbass one both sides dying reads a lot like what Bakker puts forth when describing battles. Germanic poetry apparently really liked tallying up battle stats down to the individual length of guts getting ripped out of people.
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Jul 23, 2017 20:02
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genericnick posted:Nah, Skinspies are several hundred years old. They were the reason the Mandate were groping in the dark. But Skinspies were the only piece of bio engineering done since Sil died, as far as we know. Considering all that sneaky bullshit that happened during/before the first apocalypse, I'm now not so sure that was just common human stupidity + infighting anymore. Maybe they had skinspies all along, which would explain all those acts of "treason" hampering the first crusade against the Consult.
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Oct 2, 2017 10:04
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Rime posted:It was at no point clear to me that Kellhus was possessed and not just his usual insane self. I'm getting the feeling Bakker wanted this to sound like him being possessed by great spirit / passion, and not literally controlled by something else. As in, the possessor was an aide, not a master.
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Nov 29, 2017 08:01
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What next book? According to the last one, everyone died. I honestly thought Bakker was done with this poo poo now. 
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Dec 23, 2018 21:35
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