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My biggest issue with Abbadon's Gate is... well, Clarissa. The rest was actually pretty enjoyable, but the fact that she, somehow, drove so much of the plot to start with was really aggravating. Like in a lot of ways the story is about one of the most pivotal moments in human history... but the way it goes down is largely orchestrated by a dumb vengeful rich kid with a nonsensical obsession with the protagonist. Otherwise I actually enjoyed a lot of the stuff I suspect other people didn't have much patience for. Like Anna and her whole plot. Clarissa after she gives up is actually kind of fine too. But the way things got rolling was just too dumb. If you're reading the series now, keep going. Even if you don't end up liking 3 and 4 like some people don't, 5 is fantastic by any metric and you kind of need to read the ones leading up to it. Especially 3 at least. And honestly they're not that bad, they just have some issues, while the rest are pretty purely fantastic.
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Aug 21, 2016 20:06
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NmareBfly posted:It's worth noting that the audiobook narrator for the first three books absolutely nails Avasarala's line delivery. Unfortunately, they switch narrators on 4 and the new one's not nearly as good. I mean, I dealt with it. I love audiobooks as I have a fairly long commute. But I basically had to mentally translate what the guy was saying out of his goofy cartoon poo poo into human speech. He probably ruined some characters for me anyway. The original guy is back in 5. I vaguely recall reading somewhere that he just wasn't available for 4, so hopefully we won't have to deal with that poo poo again if they schedule things better because the original guy is legitimately one of the best audobook narrators I've ever heard. The contrast is staggering. anilEhilated posted:I think they just can't write villains. Claire is supposed to have a sympathetic turn somewhere but it just doesn't happen. 6's bad guy is even worse, that's some saturday morning cartoon poo poo.
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Aug 24, 2016 06:13
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Captain Fargle posted:Cibola Burn suffers terribly from the way they just give up on any kind of moral ambiguity. It sets itself up really, REALLY well with this fascinating situation where both sides are wrong and then just kinda pisses it all away. But then the plot ended up being driven exclusively by that one guy not just being a dick, but being dumb too. Kind of epitomizes the Expanse in general- a fantastic rich world full of incredible well realized ideas... and dumb unsatisfying villains.
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Sep 16, 2016 10:02
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I know the whole thread is a spoiler zone, but I'll warn anyway that this post contains major spoilers for... pretty much everything in the series released so far.Captain Fargle posted:Hey now! Errinwright, Nguyen and Mao Sr. weren't dumb! They were great. Probably not a coincidence that they were the villains in the best book in the series. Though I suppose it wouldn't have been much of a story if nothing had gone wrong for them. But yeah, they were the most reasonable of the lot. In Leviathan Wakes they unleash the aforementioned "stuff no one understands" on a minor population center essentially unchecked, which given the reasonable assumption at the time that it was a weapon designed to wipe out all life on Earth seems like a pretty foolish move on the face of it, without even getting into the ethics of the situation. (The casual hand-wave that they reprogrammed all their scientists to be sociopaths wasn't all that satisfying an explanation, even if a halfway decent short story followed up on that idea). Abbadon's Gate is full of the most frustrating antagonists. Clarissa Mao drives things early on, despite being such a ridiculous character, and then a bunch of confused people gently caress things up until Captain Ashford decides this poo poo is too scary and decides to risk wiping out humanity because he doesn't understand what's going on. Murtry's worldview was actually kind of interesting and made some sense... until he went off the rails and was willing to kill everyone including himself for the sake of loyalty to his corporation. Nationalism or religious fervor I get. But corporate loyalty? Marco Inaros... actually is one of the better villains in my eyes. He's mainly absurd because he happens to be Naomi's ex-husband which is just a weird coincidence, and too much of his story revolves around his relationship with her. The idea of a marginalized radicalized people having a splinter faction of extremists who plot terrible things is pretty plausible. And in the world of the Expanse, it's actually plausible that people in their position could do as much damage as they did. The main thing that strains credulity is the sheer scale of the devastation they were willing to inflict. Happily killing billions for political reasons? Though even that is sadly plausible. Actually, having gone over it like this I think the greedy corporate/political antagonists of the first two books are in some ways the least respectable. Murtry represented something interesting- an extreme reaction to an extreme situation- before he went literally crazy, and Abbadon's Gate was about people who didn't understand anything flailing about in panic, so naturally the antagonist is going to be foolish. The first two books had rich and powerful people in a safe stable system loving with incomprehensibly dangerous things for... a bit more profit and power. But I guess even that is more or less true to life. You know, this is a drat good book series. I hadn't really considered some aspects of the larger structure until I tried to justify my offhand comment with detail like this, but the whole thing hangs together remarkably well. The antagonists' motivations are the most important thing for making a story believable to me, and nitpicks aside (individual characters often go off the rails here (looking at you, Clarissa)), what the antagonists represented in all these books... pretty much makes sense. Even if they're frustrating at times. The best antagonist in this respect is honestly the protomolecule. I'm always wary of aliens that aren't alien enough or are dumb or contrived in some way for the sake of the plot (like any alien that's capable of interstellar travel, but wants to do something so comparatively petty as subjugate the Earth), but the protomolecule pretty much makes sense. It's just an automated probe set up by absurdly advanced aliens to construct an FTL gate. Everything it does makes sense from that perspective. The portrayal of it as a being with a (coopted human) consciousness that can understand it can't complete its mission, but with nothing but a drive to complete its mission anyway is horrific, tragic, and pretty drat well realized. It starts off behaving in really mysterious horrific ways, and the story takes its time to soak in the terror of the unknown... but eventually there's a payoff and it all makes sense. Season 2 of the TV show is going to be great if they fold the first two books together well. Caliban's War was pretty drat fantastic, with its chief flaw being that it kind of repeated a lot of the story beats of the first book. Smashing them together like they seem to be doing will (hopefully) work out great. Eiba fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Sep 17, 2016 |
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Sep 17, 2016 03:24
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Reading too much into names time! Babylon's Ashes and Persepolis Rising are an interesting pair of names. Ancient cities with very different connotations. I had assumed Babylon's Ashes would be about the Earth, as the old center of culture and longest established human civilization was recently set on fire. If that were the case Persepolis Rising would be a contrasting vibrant new empire drawing from the same traditions- some sort of political resurgence of Earth. But that doesn't seem like the most natural plot arc, nor does it fit the connotations of "Persepolis" well. Persepolis, the capital of the Persian Empire, has traditionally been the "other" in the Western tradition. The bad old decadent east invaded the good young individualist west in the Persian wars with the Greeks. If humanity is the Greeks, then perhaps the Persians are alien. Persepolis Rising would represent a massive ancient world going through an upheaval and then turning its attention to some bickering upstarts on its fringes. Perhaps the Aliens, or whatever destroyed them, will be the ones rising. If that's the case, perhaps Babylon's Ashes represent the ruins of the aliens, rather than Earth. Perhaps the destroyers fill in for the Persians having destroyed and then taken over the realm of the aliens/Babylonians. (The Persians didn't destroy Babylon, but we're being poetic here.) Though I suppose Persepolis can be both Earth and The Other if we're viewing these things from the perspective of Belters/Frontier people. That would be a neat twist. One thing that I don't think would be rising in a book called Persepolis Rising would be anything significantly new. Not a Belter/Frontier state, nor the rogue Martian military. At least that would go against what I feel the connotations of Persepolis are. The authors could be poetic to the point of nonsense, as they have been in the past. (I still don't really get Caliban's War as a title, though know who Caliban is and I read up on what it could mean.) Obviously I could be 100% off base here, but it's fun to speculate. Personally I hope the story continues to be exclusively about humans. The aliens have been done well so far, but I like how they're dead and they pretty much just provide a stage for a human drama to play out.
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Sep 29, 2016 05:07
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Captain Fargle posted:I made the joke on Twitter that the next book after it is gonna be called Alexander's Wrath. Platystemon posted:“Dandelion Sky” was a great name and they should have stuck to it.
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Sep 29, 2016 05:56
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ZombieLenin posted:So I don't know why this didn't bother me the first time I read Abaddon's, but it's bothering me now. At least that's how I remembered it. I may have been rationalizing at the time. It doesn't really make a ton of sense. If it was going to use its godlike powers to protect itself, you'd think it'd just wink every object out of existence that didn't display the appropriate security code or whatever (or freeze it in place if maximum speed was the only thing it could affect). Though that would make for a very short and pointless story.
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Oct 12, 2016 23:38
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PriorMarcus posted:So... was no one else disappointed when it turned out that the Protomolecule creators had been killed off by an even more powerful and unknowable alien race? It felt kind of unnecessary to trade one for the other.
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Dec 4, 2016 20:55
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acumen posted:That's from Cibola Burn though?
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Dec 4, 2016 22:17
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Collateral posted:Miller mentions it several times as the entire purpose of the investigator. Plus the eldritched eye of an angry god thing. Was it explicitly aliens? If so, I would be disappointed and my poor memory is probably trying to protect me.
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Dec 4, 2016 22:34
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Milky Moor posted:I've heard it wasn't a tabletop game, not initially. It was a play-by-post online RP game with Holden, Amos, Alex, Naomi and Shed all being player characters. Apparently Naomi's character was originally a lesbian, and they were griping about her relationship with Holden.
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Dec 5, 2016 20:51
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ZombieLenin posted:Sure, okay. But again you are taking about people migrating because of economic conditions to a boom economy. These people, by in large, were migrating to developed cities in the United States where they new a large number of industrial jobs were available. Mars isn't literally going to stop existing, people will still live there. But its whole drive, the whole core of its culture was the terraforming project. Motivated people on Mars worked on terraforming it. That was a goal that dominated everyone's life from birth to death. One of the short stories about Bobbie's cousin really drives home how entirely omnipresent the idea is in everyone's life. That's how it competed with the Earth despite having a fraction of its population and none of its biosphere. Now the terraforming project is pointless. Motivated people on Mars who want to make a new world... are going to have a much, much easier time through the gates. So they'll leave. And what will Mars be left with eventually? What type of people will remain to work on the terraforming project? And if not for the transforming project, why live on Mars? It's down a deep gravity well without any more resources than asteroids have. They're not all literally flying away this very second, but they can all see the writing on the wall. As a nation, they've lost their reason to exist. There is no parallel to anything in human history, because there's never been any sort of project-nation before. It'd be like if there was an island nation where everyone was working on a moon rocket- that was the whole point of living there. Scientists and engineers from around the world went there, and raised their kids to work on the project too, for generations. And then someone else discovers a magic portal to the moon. What's life going to be like on that island? Who cares if they're super rich and filled with the greatest infrastructure on Earth or whatever, it would destroy them. Edit: Inspector 34 posted:I do think in this scenario Mars would still play an important role as a staging ground for trips through the gate, but that wouldn't require the same amount of laborers as a terraforming project. I can't remember if they talk about that at all or if it was just all just doom and gloom and people whining about the Martian economy. It's full of a ton of smart people who know about biospheres but that's not going to last long if they all just... leave. And even if it finds a new niche as "university planet for biosphere experts" that's a long, long way down from the lofty mission it used to have of launching a thousand year project to recreate the loving Earth. Eiba fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Dec 10, 2016 |
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Dec 10, 2016 09:10
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mossyfisk posted:I never understood how Belters could ever have an economy in this setting. Everything they do is based around cargo shipping, yet they suck at it. Why would you give your shipping contract to belters who have to burn at 0.5G or whatever, when you could get an Earther crew who can go at 1.2G? They just can't, you know, walk and live and stuff in 1G. Plus, for all the shipping they do, the belt is mainly useful for the easy to access raw materials. Microgravity mining. Honestly I don't know why they're becoming obsolete. You'll always want 0G industry and mining and stuff. All the other planets are down deep wells after all, it'd be silly to send raw materials up from those planets.
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Dec 10, 2016 19:53
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Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:Was Dawes on the genocide train from the jump? The character really grew on me based on Jared Harris' work on the T. V. show, so I hope he doesn't get lynched. Like, I'm trying to imagine it. Say China ruled the world and was loving with the livelihoods of the people around me and we were all scared if our way of life was going to survive or not... how hosed up would stuff have to get before a nuke going off in Shanghai wasn't something that would reduce me to tears at the incomprehensible tragedy of it? I know the whole point was that each side stopped seeing the other as meaningfully human, but... I still don't get it. Hitler made more sense, 'cause the Holocaust wasn't a propaganda point. It was something he was quietly doing because he thought he had to, and if it bothered ordinary Germans, they could pretend they didn't know about it (even though they obviously did), and concentrate on the "good" stuff he was doing for Germany. I guess the obvious comparison is people celebrating on 9/11, but even that is several orders of magnitude smaller scale. Or those weirdos online who were bizarrely triumphal when the Japanese tsunami happened because of Pearl Harbor generations ago. I guess... some people just can't comprehend mass tragedy? Most people? I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around any of it, but I guess it's not necessarily unrealistic. I guess I would have expected more hand wringing at least from someone like Michio Pa, if not other Free Navy supporters. Because holy poo poo a ton of people died... every time they mentioned the state of the Earth, especially when they gave numbers, I couldn't help but get overwhelmed and tear up. It was loving horrific.
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Dec 15, 2016 04:19
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wellwhoopdedooo posted:How is the fact that we dropped a nuke on Japan, then we dropped a bigger one on them, and we didn't even really need to, the war was essentially over at that point, we just wouldn't accept anything other than unconditional surrender and they didn't want to give that, not the obvious comparison? But if something like that can get wrapped up in a lot of other things, I suppose the destruction of Earth could feel the same to Belters (except for the "saving lives overall" part, as more than half of humanity might be dead by the end of this). It's still hard to imagine, but that comparison helps- especially the fact that I didn't think of it and had it in a kind of separate mental box is probably exactly how people would justify accepting the horror and moving on. Even if one legitimately believes the atomic bomb was justified, that just makes the point even more clearly that death on that scale can be justified if it's what "needed to be done." Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:If anything, the authors have vastly under-estimated the rage that would exist. Consider the non-ironic calls to nuke Mecca after 9/11 (which killed .0001% of the population). James Holden's This Ganymedeian Life notwithstanding, Earth is going to want blood. It's probably a good thing that the actual elected government died off leaving the civil service in charge because the politically expedient move would be straight up belter genocide. Even strategically, your best bet to kill a pirate navy is to eliminate its support faculties, which means a methodical campaign of total war where you occupy or destroy every settlement from the core outward. Marco's genocide was so unprecedented in its scale, you'd think there would be commensurately extreme emotional reactions, but instead people more or less get on with doing what they think they need to do. I don't know if that's a weird reaction, or a plausibly mundane one.
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Dec 15, 2016 07:09
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I loved a lot of details in the latest book. One I was just thinking of was the scene with Alex in the bar when things were going well with that woman (whose name I forget). Things are going well, they're all drunk and she's flirting heavily with him, and he thinks he might be in for a fun time that night, so he slips off to the bathroom and gets a packet from a dispenser. And it turns out it's anti-narcotics because they're going to be doing something everyone needs to fully consent to. And when she sees it she's like, "aww yeah." It was both a funny twist, and another heartwarming example of modern problems being unremarkable basic decency in the future.  Pyzza Rouge posted:Anyone short of Duarte taking out Avasarala would feel... inadequate. Returning to his home system with superweapons, achieving a bloodless surrender, then executing his biggest political rival would be a hell of a way to start book 7, and set a contrast to Marco's sloppy space-rock-genocide-then-war strategy. It's kind of odd how the Belt and Mars and every other group has been wracked by incredible internal conflict (the Free Navy split from the OPA, and itself spawned Pa's Pirate fleet; internal divisions in Mars's navy are what set this whole hosed up series of events off) while the Earth has been, if not physically unscathed, remarkably politically stable. I wonder if it's a testament to how precarious the new institutions are on the frontier, or a lack of imagination from the authors, or simply the fact that the Earth is in a defensive/reactive position, and dissenting factions haven't been able to do anything because Earth in general can't do anything. In any case, I would be surprised if we didn't end up seeing serious unrest on Earth before the end of the series.
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Dec 22, 2016 18:24
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My favorite "twist" so far, and the thing that gives me most hope about the things between the gates, is how they handled the protomolecule mystery. Here's this crazy weird goop that turns people into zombies and repurposes them in horrific ways... and its original destination was Earth. Clearly it was an attack, or some attempt to wipe out life on Earth before it could evolve past the stage of bacteria. There's all this hand-wringing insecurity about this malevolent extra terrestrial force and what it means. But as it turns out it was just a mindless automated gate builder, doing its mindless automated gate building thing. It was never an antagonist. There wasn't any sort of destructive purpose or threat behind any of its actions. It was just an uncaring unthinking force. And the good bit was, it looked like a threat. Like an attack. But in retrospect all of its actions make sense simply as an automated constructor. So I trust that these things between the gates are similar. Not attacking aliens or a weapon gone rogue, but some sort of industrial accident with an otherwise understandable, entirely mundane "motive". At least that's what I hope. It's pretty clear that this series is never going to go "the real enemy was space aliens!" at least. Humanity is its own enemy. All wounds are self inflicted, facilitated by the illusion of otherness. This is a good series.
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Dec 28, 2016 04:58
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Milky Moor posted:I'm digging the first point. I forget the name of the economist guy, but he was basically my favorite character on that side. He kept undercutting Marco's theatrics, but at the start he was right behind him with a plan. A plan that required them to get building right away. Once it became clear that Marco had his hands full fighting a war (that Earth wouldn't have been able to wage, were it not for the Rocinante taking out that one control ship, it seems), he became super agitated about the lack of infrastructure inevitably leading to belters starving, and smuggled himself out in crates to have secret meetings with Michio Pa and so on. He was basically the Sim City guy saying, "You can't cut back on infrastructure spending! You will regret this!" but with an incredibly compelling point. The other thing I disagree with that review about really strongly is the idea that "tribalism is bad" is somehow a juvenile message. Like, yeah, we teach our children this... because it's really important. And it's not at all natural for us. Tribalism is how we're built. Us vs. them is our default mindset. We need something like a society to teach and pressure us to resist it (or to expand our "tribe" to all of humanity). It's a message that's very difficult to get across without coming across as naive or overly simplistic, so I respect any solid attempt at really getting at what this message means. And Babylon's Ashes, though it had major tonal problems with how people reacted to the attack on Earth, did a pretty respectable job on this theme. The guy even says his favorite part is Prax's story, and he's right, that's the strongest part of the book- in part because it's the payoff for Holden's silly, earnest, naive, hopeful media campaign. The turning point for Prax is watching Holden's video, and others like it. Prax was the perfect stand-in for the type of person who doesn't want to get involved. He had a lot to lose, he was doing pretty good work anyway. There's no reason for him to get involved. If you care about his story, and you care about how brave his actions were, all the more so because he himself is not inherently brave, then you can appreciate the "let's all get along/tribalism is bad" "childish" message of this book. That said... It would have been more plausible and more powerful if people on the Earth were out for blood. Or if the not-so-bad people in the Belt were more aghast at what happened to the Earth. I can only imagine this is somehow setting up meaningful human conflict in future books where individuals and smaller organizations loving hate Belters (in a very active way and not the "who cares, gently caress 'em" attitude that used to prevail) for their collective guilt in the greatest crime in human history by several orders of magnitude.
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Jan 4, 2017 07:31
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Platystemon posted:Weren’t the ships crewed by rebel MCRN sailors at that point? And even then, after Duarte left the Free Navy never had a single victory over an inner planet navy ship. The Free Navy should have been a hollow threat, outside of their capability as terrorists, and they definitely were. It was an interesting scenario, and I think it played out plausibly. ... Except the whole "holy poo poo literally billions of people are dead" bits. I, having grown up in a flawed 20th century nation state, could not help but cry when reading the statistics in this book that I know is fiction. I can imagine people justifying this to themselves, and people ignoring it and getting on with their lives... but I can also imagine people being reduced to a blubbering mess, or being filled with unquenchable rage and hatred. I've posted about this already, but I'm still trying to pinpoint exactly where the issue is, and I think it might be that. The reactions we saw were plausible, but they should have been part of a wider range, and the total absence of grief and rage was really jarring.
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Jan 12, 2017 00:33
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Honestly, even the way things went down isn't the issue. Crisis mode Earth under Avasarala's iron fist would probably act the way it did. People like Prax just getting on with their lives in the outer planets was totally plausible. The issue for me is that we didn't also see less cool heads. There was no hotheaded advisor who lost their family who advocated letting Ceres starve before Avasarala tut-tutted and put him in his place for being counterproducitvely vindictive or something. And there was no one in the belt who was horrified at the human tragedy. The worst we got was Holden's embarrassing accidentally racist dad, which might have been a cool scene in isolation, but seemed like a commentary on a way less charged situation. It came across as commenting on the real world rather than the inconceivable scenario in the book. Looking at it this way, I'll say it's a failure, but not a fundamental failure- the only issue was that we didn't see more perspectives, and in an incredibly busy book I can believe they just didn't have room for them. They should have made room though, and I hope they explore the incredible trauma and what comes of that in later books.
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Jan 14, 2017 00:42
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shirts and skins posted:Am I the only one here that loving hated Cibola Burn? God, the characters were annoying. Nemesis Games and Leviathan Wakes are still my favorite, this one feels average (and average in this series is very good). I mean, I liked it, but I feel that's a minority opinion. I thought the premise was really cool with the brutal clusterfuck of scientists/colonists/refugees/terrorists/corporate security all being frustratingly human on an incredible alien world, and so I probably forgave some of its weaknesses like that scientist lady lusting after Holden for the first half of the book.
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Jan 31, 2017 07:41
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^burtle posted:I've read the first two novels and novella, was considering starting the third but I'm curious, do we know if there is a planned ending for this, or are we just in open universe (ala Star Wars EU) now?
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Feb 6, 2017 19:26
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Don't they consider themselves belters? Did the term come up during Prax's section in the latest book with the Free Navy occupation? I can't remember now. In any case they're definitely outers, as opposed to inners, and call under the "natural" purview of the OPA. Though thinking about it now the gas giant moons aren't super well developed locations in the books, though you'd imagine they'd be at least as developed as the Belt, and we get hints that they are. I hope the show ends up giving a neat picture of Ganymede like it did for Ceres last season.
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Feb 19, 2017 01:18
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Arcsquad12 posted:Watched the first episode of the series. I take it that the stuff happening on Earth is from Caliban's War, or another book? Really surprised at how close the adaptation is sticking to the plot of the original, with only a few things (like Holden being on the Cant before Naomi and not being an XO already) being noticeable changes. The casting is also pretty drat good, for the most part. Miller and Alex look just like I thought they would, if a little younger. Holden looks like a grizzled Jay Baruchel. The only two I wasn't quite sold on were Ade and McDowell. McDowell I always thought of looking a bit like McCallister from The Simpsons, except Belter skinny, and I'm pretty sure Ade was black and part NIgerian. Guess they didn't want to mix her up with Naomi, who looks the part, but could stand to be about a foot taller. Oh, and whatever they thought they were doing with Havelock. The stuff happening on Earth in the TV show is all original material. Nothing that happens in Caliban's War is moved up, but we get to see what some of the characters from that book were up to a bit early. Which is great, because you can never have too much Avasarala. Collateral posted:Isn't Miller supposed to be a washed up, late middle aged and severely depressed in the books? His nose would be really red, and his eyes yellow + bloodshot due to the advanced alcoholic liver disease that is heavily implied.
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Feb 25, 2017 22:39
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Yeah, Marco's a loathsome character, but is he a bad one? I mean maybe, in that his scenes were often more frustrating than interesting, but I felt his general incompetence and success despite having only mediocre skill kind of worked. It underscored how fragile humanity is. One angry fucker with some modest technology can kill billions. The fact that it didn't require a unique genius, or even basic competency in a bunch of areas, was kind of the point. Once he hit Earth, he would get a following of people who were awed by the act. You'd expect that to fall apart when they figure out who he really is and well, that's what happened. Also, from the TV thread: Number Ten Cocks posted:Bobby is going to Earth to give BS testimony at a peace conference. I wonder who we know on Earth who might attend a peace conference, is totally zen, and famously falls for transparent BS.
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Mar 12, 2017 12:19
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Number Ten Cocks posted:But really, rewatch the scenes where Naomi and Holden confront Prax, there's some good stuff in there. Like, we get it dude. You can elicit a reaction, piss people off, all that. You indeed have that power. What would it take for you to maybe not do that? The show is doing a nice job laying the groundwork for future twists, (better than the books for obvious reasons), but if people don't figure it out on their own what's the point of posting about it?
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Mar 22, 2017 21:29
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So discussion in the TV thread has me wondering again, how bad is living on Basic? I get that no one wants to do it, but I always assumed it was fairly comfortable, but last time it came up in the TV thread people said that it was more slums and squalor. Can anyone remind me of times the quality of life on basic was referenced in the books? I know Holden's parents seemed well off thanks to their tax shenanigans, and the Churn was mainly about people outside the system and all the shittiness there wasn't about Basic at all. Did Cortazar have a particularly lovely upbringing? He grew up on basic, right? Was there anything else that gave us an insight into what it was like? I always thought Basic was more an issue for people's mental well being, rather than having them suffer materially, but no one else seemed to think that way last time it came up.
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Mar 29, 2017 03:09
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The protomolecule is just an alien method of FTL travel. It builds a gate. That's it. It's not a weapon, nor even a terraforming device. Slap some of this goo on a rock and sling it towards a planet orbiting another star and let it do its thing, and sooner or later there will be a new star system to explore from your hub station. I like how terrifying and hostile the protomolecule seemed when it was in fact such a totally neutral thing.
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May 26, 2017 19:03
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Zartosht posted:That's what the one particular piece of PM humans encountered was intended for, but it seems a bit silly to think that's its the only thing the aliens used it for. If it can build an interstellar gate, it can probably build just about anything you want it to.
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May 31, 2017 11:53
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They kind of made non-Holden characters actual people. I agree it was nice how chummy they were from the start in the book, but in the show they all have their own perspectives and they don't perfectly line up at first. Watching them come together and become a family is pretty nice. Don't get me wrong, a lot of the drama is still contrived and obnoxious, but you can enjoy the show more if you keep an open mind about why they're doing it at least. But for instance Amos being attached to Naomi casually threatening to kill Holden is actually a good way to introduce how creepy his character is. Eventually he'll be threatening to mess up other people on Holden's behalf, but starting out on the receiving end of it gives it some satisfying perspective later on. Eiba fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Nov 2, 2017 |
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Nov 2, 2017 07:39
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jng2058 posted:I'm a little concerned by the fact that the exact same crew seems to be doing the exact same thing 30 years later. It seems like there should be more crew, some of the old crew should have left or died, or something. Seems odd, is all. I'd imagine the show isn't even aspiring to cover this material. I guess their best case is to cover until the end of Babylons Ashes. That'd probably be a good end point if they got that far.
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Nov 21, 2017 10:36
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jng2058 posted:Well, there's the possibility of obfuscation in that in the Drummer bit they only talk about "Captain Holden", but then in the Bobbie section they do mention that Holden is a he, which obviates the obvious route of making the captain be Naomi Holden or something. Could still be Jim and Naomi's son, I suppose, or other male relative. Probably still Jim, though. That said, now that I'm looking at it there is no explicit mention of Naomi, and while I'd assumed that the reference to Claire was just a shortening of Clarissa's name, I guess it could be a new character.
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Nov 21, 2017 11:14
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bitprophet posted:To be fair, Clarissa is a mechanic type, so I could easily see "her ship" being used in the sense where folks responsible for the upkeep of a vessel feel responsibility for it, even if they aren't the owner or captain. I just went and skimmed to the paragraph in question and as a whole it definitely seems to imply my reading and not "she's the captain", IMO.
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Nov 21, 2017 18:30
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Well that was bleak. There was some mention of frustration at people getting on with their lives that felt kind of like the feeling of the world going on like normal after Trump got elected. I liked the time skip. The Sol System is kinda played out in this setting, and you need a skip at least that long to make its irrelevance plausible. Not just with regards to Laconia, but for all the other colony worlds to develop into somewhat interesting societies of their own. I feel like Duarte kind of got things handed to him with how perfect Laconia was to his plans, rather than having his faction be an organic progression of the prior political system like the initial Belt/Earth/Mars divide had been. I guess Marco got things handed to him too, but Duarte handed them off so I was willing to give it a pass... but Duarte is just as arbitrarily lucky. So that's not satisfying either. It's still a good story, and seeing people react was the real meat of it, and, if you're into various ways of dealing with hopelessness, it was pretty well done. There was nothing in the general reaction that was as jarring as the way people reacted to the destruction of Earth, so that's a plus. Everyone made complete sense this time around. ZombieLenin posted:Maybe they needed the time skip to do the whole ”universe has changed” thing and to ensure the Transport Union was well established for plot reasons? Still you could have easily gotten away with only fast forwarding a decade or so rather than 30 years. I don't think our characters being old was all that inconsistent. If some things were incredible feats of strength for someone of that age, I'm happy to put it down to future medicine being better at keeping people fit longer. And most of their feats, especially in the fight scenes, weren't physical so much as having a better tactical sense thanks to their experience. The ladder climb at the end was the most physical thing they did, and I can believe Bobbie of all people would keep herself fit enough to endure that. All the random belters with her managed it too, just not as fast.
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Dec 12, 2017 21:03
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Oh yeah, his actual ideals are a nice product of existing ones. I like how much a product of Martian society he is. My (minor) issue is that I like history. And my understanding of history is that it's pretty much shaped by the average movement of masses of people in response to their environment. The Expanse was a great exploration of that. The initial premise was set up by the geography of the solar system, and things developed in an interesting way as new unforeseen geography opened up. But now history is being controlled by one man who got absurdly lucky and it doesn't really feel like history to me. It's nice that Duarte himself mentions that he doesn't like the Great Man theory of history, but history is getting Great Man'd hardcore here and it's less satisfying than seeing people react to more "natural" developments. I guess it's not just Duarte that was a product of Mars. His whole mutiny was something of a mass movement produced by the sudden shock to that society that the Ring Gates brought. But no matter how plausible and interesting his movement, the fact that he can then submit the rest of humanity to his will thanks to a lucky break is... unsatisfying from a certain perspective. But that is admittedly a nitpick. It's a plausible enough development in the world that's been created and I'm interested to see where things go from here.
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Dec 12, 2017 22:04
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I can understand someone feeling the bullshit death battleship defeating the combined fleet of all humanity is something outside the frame of what they're interested in. I'm almost there myself. Like, maybe that's not what you signed up for when you started the Expanse and that's a fine thing to be disappointed by. To call it implausible when we've had magic bullshit alien tech centrally driving the story since the third book is kinda silly. Magic bullshit aliens have been breaking physics for a while now. They're literally gods. That's part of this setting. Perhaps that's dumb, but it means the bullshit death battleship is 100% plausible. Because please for the love of god bullshit plausibility arguments are so boring. Call it dumb and unsatisfying and get over it. Edit: Wow, this was a terribly whiny post to start a page with. Sorry about that.
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Dec 14, 2017 04:01
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A significant timeskip was good for the story. Besides Laconia building up, it let us have more advanced colonies, let Earth rebuild and gave us an interesting and fairly well developed Transport Union. I actually quite like the initial conflict of Drummer trying to run the Transport Union as... a transport union, but due to the geography of the human universe she was actually de facto the leader of humanity. I also really liked the fact that they mapped out the whole ring gate system and that it was spread over such a tiny portion of the galaxy. Space is huge!
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Dec 14, 2017 18:58
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Edit: Ignore this.
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Jan 25, 2018 06:53
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ZombieLenin posted:Yes and no. I expect all sci-fi to come with some hand waving deus ex machina; however, I expect that hand waving to result in something where I can say, “hey, if alien death rays work like they are explained, then yes it will rip that guy apart molecule by molecule.” I'll re-emphasize though: if you want to call it a dumb development, I've got no issue and can see where you're coming from. That four month old post was inspired by a pedantic need to clarify the difference between "dumb" and "implausible".
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Mar 4, 2018 05:13
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Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:But for the eternal god-king bit. Wait a minute. Hear me out. Eternal god-queen Avasarala? The technology exists.
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Mar 31, 2018 04:36
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