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A human heart posted:Can you provide some examples of this guy's good writing and philosophical ideas? I loved Prince of Nothing and I even loved Neuropath, I count it among my favourite books. It gets a lot of flak for being pointlessly dark and gruesome, like this: Popular Human posted:The best part of that is when you read Neuropath and discover that passage wasn't Bakker being '2Xtreme!' for the sake of showing how horrible his villains are - that's Bakker showing restraint. But I don't think Bakker is a weird sex creep who keeps letting in show in his fiction. I think he's got a really good idea of how to freak out the human brain and he's really good at communicating utter abhorrence. Not in a horror way that spooks you and creates that atmosphere of dread, but in a way that makes you feel deep-seated visceral and moral disgust. And that's the point - the Inchoroi and the Black Demon Seed and all the poo poo in Neuropath, aren't supposed to be scary in a Lovecraftian "this is beyond human understanding" way, but in a very specific "this is what repulses the human brain" way. The terrifying body horror isn't just there, it's there to juxtapose with how the characters (like Shaeonanra and Esmenet and that girl from Neuropath) who want it, who exult in it at the time, precisely because that contrast is so shocking to us and hard for us to deal with. I lump that kind of criticism in with the kind of criticism PoN gets for its "Kellhus as Mary Sue" thing - it's a surface reading that doesn't give him enough credit. Bakker is extremely intelligent, very well-read in philosophy and psychology, and in all his books is constantly trying to hammer in a very specific neurophilosophical point - that the human mind is not transcendental. You might not think you want to cut up your own body or gently caress a weird rear end sex alien, but you are not in control. You are not so smart. Everything that makes up your will and your being and your identity can be tweaked and toyed with, and this is what totally terrifies him so much that he keeps writing books about it. I really like exploring the parallels between PoN and Neuropath. Both are about puppet strings - everyone has them, and everyone is pulling on other peoples' puppet strings all the time, but once you see the strings, freedom and identity and humanity no longer makes sense. Kellhus sees all the strings, and uses them, and so he makes people love him, he forces loyalty and submission with utter certainty because he knows the outcome - but what he's doing isn't mind control, he's just saying words, which is what everyone is doing all the time. Somehow it feels like he is taking away peoples' freedom, but only because he knows more. Neuropath is the extension of that principle into plausible near-future neuroscience - all your loves and fears and cognitions are just part of a system, and we may well get to a point where we are in control of that system. Feeling love because of years of affection and closeness, and feeling love because a machine directly manipulates your brain into feeling it, can be exactly the same emotion. It seems very different because of ~science~, but it's exactly the same thing as Kellhus is doing with his voice and his expressions - he knows how to make you feel, and he can push the necessary buttons to get you there. It also makes me think of pick-up artists, who we think of as really creepy because they operationalise and map out "the art of seduction", but are really just giving desperate nerds scripts to follow when talking to other people, to say the same things that come naturally to other people. Somehow knowing what you're doing is creepier than just winging it, and there's no real reason for that except that humans don't make sense when you look too closely. "You only care about the buttons that you see" keeps coming up in Bakker's work in some variation or another. We're constantly pushing each other's buttons, it's totally normal everyday stuff, but we never feel as if our freedoms are impinged upon because of it. So what makes it different when the buttons are pushed on purpose? It's definitely not a book I would recommend to everyone. Not just because of its weird dark gruesome stuff, but because it takes a certain kind of philosophical open-mindedness to really appreciate (or the kind of cynical psychological education that means you've already come to this conclusion). Popular Human posted:I was browsing the old thread and I just remembered we decided the No-God was a helicopter. Those were good times. WHAT DO YOU SEE WHUP WHUP WHUP WHUP I really want to know more about this
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Jan 22, 2016 22:33
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I think the non-Mongol is supposed to be a non-Scythian really
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Jan 23, 2016 09:56
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anilEhilated posted:See, I'd have an issue with this one because it's entirely possible to have a psychological education and not come to this conlusion. Neuropath just feels like Bakker trying to preach this as One True Way. What's your take on it? I ask because I really buy into the idea and it seems to follow from all the premises of modern science, I'd be curious to hear why you disagree.
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Jan 24, 2016 16:39
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anilEhilated posted:Depends on what you mean by premises of modern science, I guess. I have a mere bachelor in psychology but if that taught me anything it's that we have absolutely no loving idea how the mind works and all our theories stop working at different points. Neurology and brain chemistry don't fully explain identity; similarly while you can manufacture and manipulate social constructs, you cannot effectively predict responses to them on an individual basis without knowing about the person's experience (which tends to be moderately difficult to impossible). I haven't finished Neuropath, but in the fantasy books a lot of the stuff Kellhus does seems implausible - particularly the way he convinces Achamian smells more of plot contrivance than actual manipulation, the buttons he's pushing working because the author wants them to. You make it sound like you object to the idea of prediction being possible in practice, when really all Bakker needs is for it to be possible in principle, and explore the implications of it. It makes sense if you think of it as a sci-fi conceit. Nobody writes a sci-fi story and shows second thought in their writing about how "well, probably this method of FTL travel I wrote isn't really that plausible". You just set it up as the premise for the story and move on with it. Wheeee posted:The prose is not transcendent of the genre, Bakker is no Wolfe, but it does exceed most examples in the genre including goon favourite trashbins such as Sanderson and whoever writes those Dresden books. Glad you're liking it. I also dig Bakker's prose for how introspective and thoughtful it is. Conversations are broken up line-by-line while the POV character reflects on their past and their feelings. It's slow but I really respect seeing that inner life so thoroughly. Darkrenown posted:Sure, the reader can see Kellhus is awful, but everyone in world seems to love him (aside from the Byzantium prince who just seems to hate him because he's so popular) and he's great at everything. Isn't that normal for a mary-sue then? Even Emo-Conan who started out hating him and resisting him falls for him in 2 books or so. Akka gives away his magic-secrets and is still besties with him when he comes back from being tortured and finds him screwing his wife, I didn't get to where Akka sees he's the devil, so it's nice he finally does, but I don't think I'll read any more. Kellhus isn't a character through whom the author is living some kind of power fantasy. He's a plot device, a force of nature. If Prince of Nothing was a scifi story, he'd be the AI cyborg terminator. The point is, yes, that everyone loves him, because that's his power. His control over others is what makes him scary, and what drives the actual main characters into ever-deepening grief and ruin as they submit to his whims. Sorry if all this comes across as me sounding like an apologist, but I really dig these books and I want other people to see them in the same way that I do.
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Jan 24, 2016 23:46
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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. Then there's the Scylvendi, who are their own distinct ethnic group I think, and the dark-skinned Satyothi, who live mainly in Zeüm (not-Japan) and don't show up until the second trilogy.
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Feb 14, 2016 13:22
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StrixNebulosa posted:But what really got me about this book is how it evoked that HR Giger-esque atmosphere of eldritch horrors almost despite itself. That scene near the end where the face removed itself - brr. The Consult seem almost comically sinister so far, and yet that scene paid off handsomely. 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.
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Feb 23, 2016 15:53
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Libluini posted:That analogy would be wrong, though. The people they're killing and planning to kill are just unwittingly helping the MIB in this example. 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.
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Feb 23, 2016 18:17
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Libluini posted: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. 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.
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Feb 23, 2016 20:56
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The second trilogy has a very different tone and theme (so far) to the first - and I feel like I strongly preferred the first. The themes are very human - it's all about free will and religion and culture and things like that, whereas the second trilogy takes a very objective approach and gets much more into the world and its history and its metaphysics. Which is interesting, but those aren't the parts I liked most about the first. Still definitely worth reading though, if you like what Bakker does in general. I liked damnation much more when I interpreted it as a social construct - sorcerors are damned because the holy book says they're damned, and religion is of course a product of Men who were scared of sorcery and its power, so they used religion (not just the Tusk, but its general thrust) to subdue them. Kellhus manages to be a liberator who shows people the truth even as he manipulates his way into their hearts. The second Boing fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Mar 15, 2016 |
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Mar 15, 2016 20:26
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The Ninth Layer posted:Any opinion on the audiobooks for this series? My books are in storage, considering trying an Audible reread. I like them a lot. The guy starts off sounding pretty dry and it's hard if you're unfamiliar with Bakker's fantasy names, but he gets really into it. He does an excellent Cnaiur-as-Arnold-Schwarzenegger.
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May 26, 2016 10:02
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General Battuta posted:even if Bakker's understanding of neuro/psychology is pretty 101. I always wonder why people say this. None of the neuro/psychology in his books leaps out at me as being especially wrong, but I've not read anyone who digs as deep or as well into the philosophy of neuroscience or the psychological problems with freedom.
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Jun 30, 2016 08:29
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I know a lot about neuroscience and psychology and I loving love Neuropath, it's one of my favourite books e: Also that doesn't actually mean that his psychology is bad, merely that his grasp of it is uncomfortable, which it sure is Boing fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Jun 30, 2016 |
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Jun 30, 2016 12:50
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General Battuta posted:The short version is that I was a social neuro oh god why I am in a phd program what's wrong with my life guy at NYU for a while, and Bakker deals with neuroscience and psychology in a very basic way. He's interested in the psychological ramifications of the illusion of pure agency, but nothing he writes about is really grounded in the specifics of science. He writes about psychology the way gurus write about quantum theory. I say this with good confidence because I just reread all the PoN books, and Kellhus' capabilities are pretty Freudian. He imputes subconscious desires and fears from facial microexpressions, reveals them, and uses them as levers. He's capable of modulating his own voice and expression to create emotions through feedback. He analyzes structures of tradition and belief and figures out how to exploit them to ratchet up his own authority. And that's...pretty much it. The Probability Trance is awesome but pure fantasy. The problem with all of this is that it's a very old conception of how social neuro works, individual-to-individual or individual-to-crowd effects, and twenty years of brutal and often depressing research suggests that Kellhus has completely overlooked the very area he needs to master - the real 'darkness that comes before', the unconscious brain subsystems that deal in primes, statistical prototypes, and preconscious framing. I can see where you're coming from. I don't agree with your thesis that Bakker's fear can be reduced to a conservative fear of the unknown. I also don't agree that BBT having been "obvious for decades" undermines the point. The idea that we are Just Brains is more profound to me than you make it sound, and even though it's an easy conclusion to reach for anyone who's studied it, it's deeply unintuitive and hard to think about, and I attach a lot of value to fiction that can explore the ramifications of that. Yes, you can be compelled to do things while believing that they're volitional. I don't think that's the end of the point he makes - the point is that there is no difference between compulsion and volition. You can try and look at his books as being about mind control - whether explicit (Neil's Machine, the Cants of Compulsion, Inchoroi pheromones or whatever the gently caress) or implicit (Kellhus's words) - but in all of them he emphasises the thin line between making someone do something, and how they normally do that thing. Some of these feel like abhorrent violations of our will, and others don't. Why is it different? I still don't have the answer, but Bakker tries to pull those concepts out. I don't think it's purely a philosopher's terror - or at least, that's not what I get out of his writing. I think it's the best kind of sci-fi, which thinks about the way the future's going and makes you confront the issues that will come up in time. What is the difference, really, between mind control and a friendly chat? Both are a way for someone to influence your cognition and affect and behaviour in a direction that they want. Right now we ignore that - and yet we do have a vague sense of discomfort about the mind control exerted by advertising, by clickbait, by gamification, all of which sidestep our normal resistance mechanisms to some degree. Sure, you can't fall for it if you don't want to - but really good advertising can sidestep even that. And where is the line between that and the forms of social interaction that fall within our normal routines? Hell, I want more books that focus on this, because it's criminally underexplored, even if it's emergent from only the core principles of cognitive science. It's interesting that your criticism of Neuropath is the total opposite to what usually gets me riled up in this thread - which is "Of course brains don't work that way, the human mind is totally privileged and I wouldn't fall for these psychological tricks, why would you write a book about it?", yet you say "Of course brains work that way, it's so elementary as to be common knowledge, why would you write a book about it?". I have literally just picked up Peter Watts's Blindsight, so I'm going to read that and come back here. Although my favourite thing to compare Neuropath to now is actually Altered Carbon, and that might serve your point more than mine. Neuropath is about a society just on the verge of realising that we are Just Brains, and the horror that results from the gradual and pessimistic realisation of this truth. Altered Carbon is about a society that has long since realised it, and everything is more-or-less fine. Humans have discovered immortality but it hasn't changed the ability of humans to be dicks to each other; it's solved some problems and created loads of others and in general people just go on, and brush the philosophical implications under the rug. It's kind of refreshing - even though it makes a distinct effort to avoid the neurophilosophy of things like the Star Trek Transporter Argument, it just focuses on the social tremors caused by that technology.
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Jul 1, 2016 11:56
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Earwa is a really cool world and it would be awesome to see it realised on screen, but the actual story of the books is so introspective and thoughtful that they'd probably need a narrator or constant expository dumps or something.
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Aug 26, 2016 13:54
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The Great Ordeal, being the first half of the big climactic revelation of the series, left me with more questions than answers, and I just really want to know what Bakker has in store for the last one, because what the gently caress is with that head on a pole thing
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Sep 30, 2016 14:32
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I don't think it's as straightforwardly pop-fantasy as that, this is Bakker, he has something way more hosed up in mind. Someone explain the helicopter thing to me because I've heard it a dozen times in this thread and I don't get the meme
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Oct 4, 2016 10:03
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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. Yeah the Dunyain don't really make sense but Bakker is honest enough to roll with that and explore it as the plot unfolds. e: and yeah the Dunyain face reading is not possible in reality but you can roll with it since it's possible in theory if you accept the conceit that events have strictly defined causes and that a sensitive-enough superintelligence can stochastically find those links. It's not meant to be 'look how cool this guy is with his mind reading', but 'look how our primitive notions of agency and free will fall apart when we are confronted with sufficiently advanced prediction systems', which you wouldn't raise an eyebrow at if this were sci-fi. Boing fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Jan 19, 2017 |
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Jan 19, 2017 18:19
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I suspect that what Bakker is trying to hammer home is that the Dunyain simply aren't human anymore. They can barely hybridise with regular humans, they've developed some much greater sexual dimorphism, they're wired in completely different ways. The unrealistic part of that is that it's only been 2000 years of breeding and actual speciation probably takes much longer (without genetic engineering or some Earwean Lamarck crap). We've bred some pretty weird fuckin dogs over the course of human civilisation but I think they're still one species, even if the logistics of a chihuahua loving a great dane are prohibitive. 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.
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Jan 20, 2017 23:58
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Dienes posted:Weird question, but, are all the Atrocity Tales prequels from before Darkness That Comes Before? They seem to both take place in the distant past before the First Apocalypse, so they are technically prequels, although not directly so.
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Jan 22, 2017 16:53
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R. Scott Bakker & The Prince of Nothing: Better than Eating and loving a Radioactive Leper
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Jul 8, 2017 00:56
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:"World-building" is a moronic cargo cult concept. A milieu is only as interesting as how it's presented, in prose, verse, etc. I think his prose is actually really good and gets better as you go through the books. He has a poetic descriptive style that I never get bored of: The False Sun posted:The attendant reappeared, pale, eyes anxious unto rolling. A raggish shadow lurched beyond the threshold behind him, a movement that would have been limping were it not balanced leg for leg. At the last instant Shaeönanra turned to watch the mighty Titirga’s face… If not world-building, what do you call the sweeping grandeur and richness of history of (for example) the world that Tolkien describes? It's certainly more interesting and compelling than the  "world building" of someone like Rothfuss, whose contempt for thinking through anything beyond the immediate scene means he does not build an actual world at all.
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Jul 22, 2017 14:54
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:That excerpt is ridiculous, and merely another of the repetitive, tiresome doom and dread that already wore thin in the first few chapters of The Darkness That Comes Before. The chopped sentences are almost macabre as the atrocities Bakker describes. No, no, no, and no.
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Jul 22, 2017 19:26
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*in BravestOfTheLamps voice* You make a good point but have you considered that your opinion is wrong and mine is right 
Boing fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Jul 22, 2017 |
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Jul 22, 2017 21:30
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I like the subtle and not-so-subtle ways the third-person descriptions change between POV characters, because you get into the heads of the major players in the story and appreciate the world from their unique perspectives.: So you're saying there are characters. Bakker's books are all about exploring differing psychologies. Some are human and relatable, like Achamian and Esmenet. Some are tragic and interesting, like Cnaiür and Inrau. Some are bombastic and outrageous, like Xerius and Conphas. And some are totally alien, like the Dûnyain and the Nonmen and the Skinspies and the Ciphrang, and it's interesting to see their thoughts and personalities expressed on the page, and how those manifest their culture and behaviour. There's a lot of thought put into it and he's very good at thinking through the implications of everything he writes. : You fail to realise his philosophy is merely a superficial aesthetic and has no value.Bakker is fundamentally deeply concerned about what happens to human identity and our folk psychological notions on the bleeding edge of technology and scientific understanding about what it means to be human. His stories probe that bleeding edge by introducing story elements (like those alien psychologies) that stretch our assumptions about intentionality and self-knowledge, and forces us to confront moral questions that arise naturally from violations of those assumptions. : But you haven't said anything objective about why it's good, because art can be jhudged onb obrhjectvive mnerits tyhat nlks sonvslsnt[a a@\,[',faI'm really bored of your gimmick.
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Jul 23, 2017 00:46
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:- The ways the third-person descriptions change between POV characters And yet it's done well, better than any other genre author I've read and many "serious literary" authors. BravestOfTheLamps posted:- Different psychologies Why do you assume I've mixed them up? Get over your linguistic prescriptivism. BravestOfTheLamps posted:- "Bakker is fundamentally deeply concerned about what happens to human identity and our folk psychological notions on the bleeding edge of technology and scientific understanding about what it means to be human. His stories probe that bleeding edge by introducing story elements (like those alien psychologies) that stretch our assumptions about intentionality and self-knowledge, and forces us to confront moral questions that arise naturally from violations of those assumptions." Such as the very first chapter, where we're introduced to a character with the gift of pattern recognition to the degree that it unravels human free will. This mirrors contemporary trends in neuroscience and machine learning that show it's perfectly possible to create machines that know us better than we know ourselves, that can predict our actions before we have even thought of them. This is nothing new, and even though the idea of an AI that knows what we will do is chilling, we're kind of settled into that idea by now. But Kellhus is an AI so realistic, he walks and talks like a man. The control he exerts is indistinguishable from the control that every other man exerts; and so we are forced to ask, what is the difference? He simply nods and understands, and says the things we want to hear - and he makes us love. It's scary, but it's also exactly the actions that someone takes when they make us love in a "natural" human way. So we have two situations, one virtuous and one morally flagrant, and yet the action taken by the agent are the same in either, and we try to find why one offends us and the other does not. The difference is not in the intent - it is in the absolute foreknowledge of the outcome. Which is weird. In fact it's absurd, and it forces into light the contradiction in our existing moral frameworks, and how they can't possibly survive the future in which science opens up the human mind and starts loving around with it. You ignore the interesting parts of the book in favour of complaining about black demon seed constantly, which shows you aren't really engaging with the text on anything more than a superficial level.
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Jul 23, 2017 01:41
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 I've already said I really enjoy his prose and writing style. I'm perfectly happy to discuss the themes and trappings and relative merits of the book, as well as its flaws, and the similarities and differences between it and other works. This is the thread for that. But you're just trying to assert to people who like the book that they don't like it, please knock it off.
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Jul 23, 2017 12:39
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Readers are drawn to Bakker because of his prose. If they were really into just the intellectual content of the books, they'd be reading philosophy and science instead of overlong fantasy novels.  Have you considered that medium and message can interact to produce an experience that is greater than the sum of its parts? Or are you ideologically committed to regurgitating inane literary dogma at every turn?
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Jul 23, 2017 23:46
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kcroy posted:I guess I'm saying that I'm disappointed that the magnate, which has access to insane sorcery, hasn't done a better job of politics. Maybe they don't feel it is important - their only goal is dealing with the consult. Don't forget that sorcery is a sin and any idiot with a chorae is a deadly threat to a sorceror, so it's hard for a small school like the Mandate to have much significant sway in politics. Sorcery is 90% about destroying things but they're also very fragile, so it's not like their insane power helps them win friends or make alliances. They'd be hunted down as soon as they used it against the Three Seas.
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Aug 15, 2017 15:07
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