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General Battuta posted:Marco is an unfortunately realistic villain and his downfall being 'everyone realizes he's full of poo poo and abandons him as he clings to increasingly unreal delusions of victory' was perfect. Didn't make him much fun to read about, but I definitely buy him as an apocalyptic smokescreen for Duarte. I don't know, Marco seemed pretty one dimensional. I mean a "realistic" villain is someone like Hitler as portrayed in The Downfall. Part of the reason that movie was critiqued so heavily is that it turned Hitler into a more human evil bastard by making the audience feel like he was a sad delusional old man. Marco just seems like a sociopath who does sociopath things because, gently caress it, that's what sadistic sociopaths do.
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Oct 10, 2017 19:51
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BraveJoe posted:Amos. Amos. Amos. It was right that the authors named no other main character Andy.
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Oct 30, 2017 16:26
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Yeah... I will probably still buy it, but my interest level just dropped significantly.
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Nov 21, 2017 17:37
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Ainsley McTree posted:I’m not necessarily opposed to that, but dying of old age offscreen in between books is a pretty inglorious end to a beloved character’s arc. Neither is the main protagonists jumping in age from their 20s in the case of Clarissa and their early to mid 30s for the rest of the crew to their 50s and 60s. Frankly speaking, you can only spin the near future sci-fi angel so far with, “the 60s is the new 40s...” Basically you are taking protagonists your readers are now invested in after multiple books, and putting them straight into an age bracket that, I’m guessing, most of your readers won’t identify with. At least that is how it appears without the book in my hand. And while that may work just fine artistically, it does not work well as a business decision. This is because, frankly, of guys like me. I don’t care how good a novel is, if I cannot relate to the protagonist in some fundamental way, particularly if there is an event that changes the character(s) from familiar and relatable to neither, I won’t finish the book and by extension will give up on the series totally. Edit I hate admitting I can be a superficial consumer, but when it comes to serialized genre fiction, I am. 
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Nov 21, 2017 22:08
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Lord Hydronium posted:Finally got around to reading Strange Dogs. Extremely She died in a freak fruit picker accident.
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Nov 28, 2017 18:21
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, in a good way. According to the authors' Twitter, it's just a "sneak peek" at the weirdness of the last books, so I'm looking forward to seeing where that goes. I wonder if we'll get any direct follow-up to the novella characters, though; I'm interested to know what becomes of
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ClassH posted:It just came out last night 3am. I listen to them in the car so will take a couple weeks, it's 20hours long. Is the audio version unabridged?
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Dec 5, 2017 15:45
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I feel terrible reading this book. Way to make everything seem pretty hopeless, guys. I feel like this is the Empire Strikes Back, but instead Luke says yes to Vader, Han Solo dies while being frozen, Leia has her legs and arms chopped off, the rebel fleet blown up, Admiral Ackbar surrendered, and the only resistance to the Empire is a computer glitch on the Death Star and Sand People insurgents on Tatooine.
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Dec 7, 2017 16:41
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Kegslayer posted:Just finished it. This book was depressing and left the reader with a sense of hopelessness through most of it; however, it was at least “realistic” from a socio-political perspective, unlike the last book that totally had some weird idealistic view of how humans who are attack indiscriminately to the tune of billions of deaths by a much weaker asymmetric opponent would react.
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Dec 8, 2017 01:11
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Sarern posted:The time jump was a risky shift. I do like that they get to pursue one of their recurring themes: the old techniques won't work in the new situations. Here is the thing about the time skip. I sort of feel like it was half assed in the sense that baring a couple mentions of characters being old and creaky, Holden and Naomi’s “I am too old for this poo poo” retirement, and Clarissa being almost dead the characters are doing the same poo poo. This includes incredibly physical poo poo like getting in and winning hand to hand fights with a myriad of much younger people, including marines, while being outnumbered and climbing 5 decks under 5g loads like they did in their mid-30s. If you think about it this context, its completely unbelievable. Also, not that I care overly much, but I cannot imagine that SyFy is too happy about the time skip because they are going to either have to artificially age everyone OR re-cast assuming the show makes it that far. quote:Should I pick up Strange Dogs? I've seen some comments about it in the thread. I've only read the Amos novella, which was fun but not essential. I recommend reading all of the novellas because they are good and highlight what the authors do best—in my opinion—which is world building. In the case of Strange Dogs specifically as it relates to PR you have some foreshadowing of Deurte’s God Emperor medical treatment that helps you imagine what this might be. It also gives you more insight potentially into both what happened on Laconia immediately following BA and the PM creators. Re: Darkness of the novel As far as I can tell there was nothing hopeful at all in the epilogue. The only hopeful thing in the entire novel was the
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Dec 8, 2017 16:50
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Syzygy Stardust posted:Duarte’s greatest crime is the naming scheme for his ships. To be fair, it is far better than the USN’s navy scheme. My grandfather was a retired 30+ USN officer, who tried his damnedest to get me into the naval academy when I was a kid. I am being perfectly serious when I say that 17 year old me finally told him to stop because I hated the names of USN ships. Now if the USN had a naming scheme like the Royal Navy, I might have been stupid enough to say yes.
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Dec 10, 2017 17:19
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Professor Shark posted:I'm about half way through the book and I'm skimming to avoid major spoilers, but I agree with those who said the 30 year gap doesn't really fit. I get that they needed a skip to make Duarte's empire building realistic, but the characters don't show any signs of aging aside from a passing remark or a description like grey hair or creaking knees. Clarissa is described as wearing a TACHI uniform, which at this point in the series must be a 40+ year old jumpsuit. I do not think they actually did; at least not as long of a time skip. For example, since the Laconian ships are proto-molecule Deus Ex Machina anyway, why couldn’t it have been 3 or 5 year time skip. It is not like they had to backwards engineer anything, they just needed to turn on the PM creator’s orbital “construction platforms.” 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. General Battuta posted:Next book is 4000 years later and Duarte keeps cloning Holden. After ZombieLenin fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Dec 11, 2017 |
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Dec 11, 2017 16:19
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Syzygy Stardust posted:More or less. And Singh tells Holden that he’s the same age when Holden got kicked out of the navy. That would make Holden 40 or so when the series started (and a very old junior officer when expelled), which is nonsense. I did the math on this once. In the first book he (Holden) would have been around 33 or 34. Though prior to actually doing the math I had assumed more like 38. This is part of the reason the show casting was disappointing to me—not that the actors aren’t great or don’t do the characters justice. It just seemed the crew in the show was way to young for not just their actual ages in the book, but for their perspectives as well.
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Dec 12, 2017 16:37
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Kassad posted:It's a battleship that can tear giant space stations apart in a second and can survive a direct hit from a nuke with only minor damage I am not buying it. Not when you really think about it. Get that thing close enough to a planet you can throw near infinite tungsten slugs at a percentage of c at it. In fact, I don’t really care what it is made of. Nukes are pointless with the amount of rail gun fire being leveled at the thing. Unless it has the mass of a planet or is somehow made of stable degenerate matter, the kinetic force alone from those railgun slug impacts would have atomized the ship. Now you can Deus Ex Machina hand wave the proto-molecules ability to reconstitute itself into a structure from an atomized state, but what you cannot do is explain how atomized animals can be reconstituted into their living form—Dogs of War or no. So at a very minimum, unless all of those railgun slugs were being destroyed somehow before they hit their target, which they clearly were not, at a minimum every living thing on that ship should have died. Anyway, this is why some suspension of disbelief is necessary when reading this type of science fiction and I am okay with that. What I was less okay with is the bullshit political and economic stuff from the last book(s). The rich middle-class inhabitants of Mars would not be the ones flocking to the colonies. It would be teaming masses from Earth. The belt would have been crushed by the militaristic government that took power on Earth after Marco’s attack, Deuarte would have been hunted down, and a participant in the genocidal attack on earth would not be handed political control of anything by Earth and Mars.
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Dec 13, 2017 20:59
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General Battuta posted:If you can shoot it, it can shoot you, and with the intrinsic advantage of gravity working in its favor. You can't throw infinite tungsten slugs when your glaringly obvious launch point can be attacked from outside its own effective range. Of course, that would require the use the magnetic weapon on the planet, which wuld defeat the purpose of trying to capture the system. Of course assuming you could get close enough to use it. quote:The kinetic force of all those railguns is striking a ship built on technology which can arbitrarily enforce a maximum local speed limit and convert kinetic energy into radiation. Yes in an area outside of regular spacetime. But sure this a potential Deus Ex Machina that explains the ship’s survival while being bombarded by railguns. Maybe the ship creates this un-space around it? Unfortunately this runs up against the actual description of the battle where the railgun slugs are clearly impacting the ship with full force and causing damage. The only thing the ship seems to be doing is repairing itself, which is fine, but assuming it is the same kind of tech on the PM-kid-super soldiers, slamming hundreds of Tungsten slugs traveling a 1/5th the speed of light into the ship would have the same effect as putting those PM super soldiers into a ship’s drive plume. In other words the kinetic force alone would make a nuclear torpedo feel like a flea bote. quote:You can call that 'implausible' It is implausible. Efficient fusion drives capable of the 1 g constant acceleration needed to efficiently travel the solar system is not. Note the “near” future tech in the books is not the Alaistar Reynolds light hugger. The expanse ship are not capable of constant thrust which enables the approach of relativistic speeds, which btw would only be 2.2 hours of acceleration at 1G. All that said, when a series takes a jump to describing gods like alien tech suspension of disbelief is required. I am totally fine with that! Like I said I am more uncomfortable with utterly implausible descriptions of human sociological interactions and social behavior.
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Dec 14, 2017 01:34
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Eiba posted: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. 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.” Instead I feel like we are getting, “the alien death ray kills by ripping things apart molecule by molecule. Bod was hit by the death ray, which resulted in the instantaneous death of him as he was ripped apart molecule by molecule, and then of course his parents, sister, and best friend too back on earth... BECAUSE.”
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Mar 3, 2018 21:18
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uber_stoat posted:this got posted like a week ago but I just now saw it. speculate away! I hope it is a choose your own adventure.
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Apr 18, 2018 17:12
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GATOS Y VATOS posted:Fuuuuuuuuuuck I mean, the show is alright, but the books are not going away and are better.
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May 12, 2018 04:29
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Medlar posted:(or "accurate", i.e. traveling about the system at even a half-G would be a lot quicker than is represented). A little over a week at that speed you would be traveling in excess of 75% the speed of light.
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May 13, 2018 23:57
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Poopy Palpy posted:A week at 5 m/s/s only gets you to 1% of c. Yeah, you are right I was doing math in my head making bad assumptions. It would take roughly 700 days—still you’d be zipping around places in-system much faster than occurs in the novels.
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May 14, 2018 02:01
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I am offended anyone is giving Dan Simmons money.
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May 18, 2018 17:52
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I thought it originated as a literal pen and paper rpg campaign.
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Jun 7, 2018 17:19
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bitprophet posted:In addition, the flavor of the way Eros plays out was moderately different in the books, much more body horror and zombies and biological megastructures than "oh no some crystals". Not sure if it will have the same impact on someone who's not encountering the overall plot for the first time tho. At this point its all about the setting for me, as, in my totally subjective and minority opinion, the story has gone from “this has promise” to “good” to “are you loving serious?”
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Jul 6, 2018 14:30
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Far far better book than the last.
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Mar 30, 2019 17:32
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adebisi lives posted:It's like real life, the evil corporations and evil governments are working hand in hand to gently caress everyone. More like evil corporations tell the government the best ways everyone except the corporations can and should be hosed; the governments, of course act on that advice, because the governments know whose interests are really important. The only mistake people make in dismissing this is assuming corporations are monolithic in terms of power and influence, and do not get that some corporations are more equal than others. ZombieLenin fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Oct 4, 2019 |
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Oct 4, 2019 15:08
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pik_d posted:Looks like we're gettin some later-books stuff in season 6, maybe even the Strange Dogs kids?? Don’t watch the show. My unpopular opinion is that it’s pretty terrible. ZombieLenin fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Oct 17, 2021 |
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Oct 17, 2021 19:10
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CLAM DOWN posted:What?! CainsDescendant posted:I feel sorry for you MikeJF posted:Okay. I have been reading the books for a long time (since 2012). I would go into detail about how I think the casting was all wrong, especially Holden and Naomi, and list my other complaints; however, at the end of the day I concede that, when it comes to me, it’s a case of the television show and the creative sacrifices they had to make to convert the fiction into a new format, just don’t live up to what’s been in my imagination for a decade.
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Oct 17, 2021 22:14
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Grimwall posted:Well, I guess that's how it feels to end a decade long series. I remember only Malazan coming close in my personal experience and that series got steadily lost in the author's pretensions. Next, GoT? Heh. I literally just started the book; however I refuse to believe the authors left so many dangling and unresolved plot points as the Mazalan series did.
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Dec 6, 2021 16:30
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Beefeater1980 posted:I like Holden as a character; he’s like a chaotic good version of a Paladin. Don’t hate the TV adaptation of him although I imagined someone a bit more conventional-good-looking than model-good-looking. I like the character as well, though sometimes I struggle with the fact that it Holden were a real person, he’d be a homeless man, in prison, or otherwise a crushed and broken human far before the first Expanse novel. I suppose this can be said of most characters in novels such as these.
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Dec 7, 2021 15:21
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I am a little over half way through with the book and there is some very interesting stuff about the philosophy of mind, and for lack of a better way to say this, philosophy of history (or Spirit in Hegelian terms in this book—and I am pleasantly surprised. Maybe it’s just my educational background in this stuff, but I am not troubled at all by the notion of human beings becoming a ‘collective’ consciousness, or hive mind. In fact, there is a good argument to be made that, even though humans have mentally chauvinistic experience (our stream of consciousness is ‘ours’), that we are already a super organism that functionally acts like a collective consciousness. This is made possible through language itself—language already implies the social and collective nature of humans—and we examples of the output everyday. Human knowledge is collected, shared, and reflected on via the written word. Ultimately it’s what has allowed everything from science and human technology advancement to the homes and buildings we occupy. The notion of humans having a true non-chauvinistic collective consciousness is just the way we already exist with one layer removed.
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Dec 10, 2021 19:05
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Finished the book. So… The book was technically competent, and I agree with others in as much as I found that the first 1/2 of the book was slow. I found this weird because it was almost like the authors were still engaged in the world building process for almost half of the last book in the series, which is kind of odd. I really left with the feeling that this should have been multiple books, and I was honestly puzzled that the so much of what to me would be essential to telling the story happened ‘off screen.’ Now the more spoilery bits, and I will try not to get too into the weeds… So Holden’s trauma was communicated in sort of a flat half-assed way—I agree. It may have not have felt like that had the reader actually experienced the trauma of what Holden endured on Laconia (this and his rescue should have been it’s own book). Like a lot of things that happened after the second or third book, while I love this series and I found it as a whole the most believable ‘near future’ science fiction take on what human societies might look like, as someone who has studied History, Political Science, and Political Theory/Philosophy for most of my professional career, there were a lot of things that just seemed like bullshit. For example, as I alluded to in an earlier post, the whole fear of taking away sole access to someone’s memory or stream of consciousness is overblown, and I object to the notion that a sense of individual self would be impossible under such conditions. BUT… this is the authors’ universe, and since we are essentially dealing with Deus Ex Machina alien magic, I can suspend disbelief. The things that were harder for me to suspend disbelief about in the series were in earlier books—for example pseudo-fascists arising on Earth following the bombardment of the planet by the ‘free navy’ would have been far more realistic than the Martian Navy just absconding to Laconia and setting up an ‘Empire.’ It turns out that the authors’ take goes against everything we know about nationalism and how it operates, but I digress. While the second part of Leviathan Falls was more quickly paced, I did not find it super compelling for a lot of reasons… and it was very easy to tell exactly where the plot was going to go pretty early on. I was completely disappointed with Holden’s character arch across the series, as his final act of shutting down the gate goes completely against who he seemed to be for most of the series; which, I will give the authors props in as much as that final dialogue between Miller and Holden seems to acknowledge. What isn’t acknowledged though is that Holden making his unilateral decision to shut down the gates is, in essence, no different at all than Duerte’s unilateral decision to turn humanity into a hive consciousness. Holden, at the end, just becomes the mirror image of Duerte—in essence just acting exactly as Duerte did, just making the ‘opposite’ choice. The supreme irony being that, in choosing to make this unilateral decision Holden condemns millions of people to their deaths, more people than than the Laconians probably ever killed in their attempt to ‘protect’ humanity. These deaths weren’t quick deaths either. Holden essentially condemned millions of people to a slow death from starvation, where people mostly likely got to watch their children and loved ones suffer before they died. I am not sure how the character I came to know as Holden could have let that happened, when it was pretty clear that, even if he did not want to give humans the choice of what to do with the gates, he certainly could have held off the alien Other long enough to let non-self sufficient colony worlds evacuate before he shut the gates down. I have other thoughts, but I will save them. I guess my final take away is: This probably should have been two books, and the authors should not have relegated so much of the important events necessary for character development to the off screen between books... That said, Leviathan Falls was not the worst end to a series I ever read, and the book was competent; however, it was not really compelling or satisfying. I am not sure two books rather than one could have fixed that. tl;dr I did not hate the book; however I did not really like it either. ZombieLenin fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Dec 15, 2021 |
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Dec 15, 2021 17:23
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Thom12255 posted:Don't agree with this, that would've taken months, he was close to being completely taken over by the protomolecule in which case he would no longer have been able to choose to destroy the gates. I got the impression he had enough left in him to let the ships in the slow zone get out before not much more. You could be right. I guess I interpreted both Holden and Miller’s conversation and Duerte’s condition just before the end to mean a couple of things: Holden was not going to die; and now that he had assumed Duerte’s place in the “machine,” Holden’s transformation would continue along the same lines as Duerte’s. In other words, Holden was being turned into the ring stations controlling/foundational personality. As far as Holden being at the brink of losing control, I read that as being tied to the ships leaving the ring space, which denied Holden the power of the minds of the people on the ships in ring space; and while he had the option that Duerte did to reach out and tap the minds of everyone through the rings, this is a step he did want to take because it was going to be irrevocable. ZombieLenin fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Dec 15, 2021 |
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Dec 15, 2021 18:25
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Anonymous Zebra posted:It wasn't really Duerte at the end though, it was an alien simulacrum built around Duerte's personality, literally just like Julie Mao from the first book. The text of this book in fact even compares him to Julie. The Ring Station "wants" to maintain the network. Much like the protomolecule, it is a stupendously advanced AI capable of finding new ways to achieve its purpose. Maybe Duerte was still close to being a human when he stepped into the thing, but what Holden and Co. met at the end was not really Duerte. I disagree. It wasn’t the protomolecule tech, at least not “full stop.” It was very specifically the ring system and the things powered by the stealing energy from the “other” universe. So for example, Holden closing down the ring network and the power station did not effect Amos or the kids who were rebuilt by the protomolecule tech. Not only did these characters not immediately die, but Amos is still apparently immortal and around a millennium later… It also did not effect most of the tech on the Lanconian navy ships, which all came from protomolecule tech. The one called out exception was the gravitational weapon used by the a Magnetars. Furthermore, as is pointed out repeatedly in the text, if the ring protocol had been followed from the outset, it would have worked. Alex even mentions this as he’s leaving the ring space at the end of the novel. The authors appear to, from my reading, be saying… “Naomi’s protocol would have worked, but because humans are greedy and do whatever they want, it would have ultimately failed…” Which is itself at odds with everything that Holden and the protagonists represented throughout the novels. For me this just added to jarring effect of Holden saying at the end, “well on balance I still think people are more good than bad, but gently caress everything I believed in leading up to this! My experience in Laconia has apparently taught me that it’s actually okay to make the decision to close this poo poo down for everyone, and in the process kill millions of people.” Also, it’s important to note that multiple times the authors insinuate that humanity will ultimately be able to develop the protomolecule tech—in full—themselves; and will probably ultimately become the thing Duerte was trying to turn them into. Though hive mind humanity isn’t actually necessary for humans to develop and use the ring tech and whatever ‘weapons’ hold back the gate entities. As Miller tells Holden, the hive mind thing is only necessary for humans to use the ring system weapons that were developed by the ring builders… because to ‘pull the trigger of the gun… you have to make a hand that fits the weapon.’ PS. While writing this while not nearly as bad as the Mazalan series, there were a gently caress ton of loose and dangling unresolved issues at the end of these books. Just as a couple of examples… The gate entities can somehow gently caress with the physical laws of this universe in systems where there are gates, but how it’s described at the end when Holden gains the perspective of the ring station… I am left wondering: what the hell where the ‘ghosts’ that appeared on some planets and on the Laconian ships when they used their graviton weapon? In retrospect it just seems like these ‘ghosts’ were a plot convince and not in line with what the authors ultimately decided to “reveal” about the ring entities. Also… Venus. You’ve got a planet completely remade by the protomolecule with Julia Mao as the controlling personality—why does it exist? What was its function? There are more things I’m curious about that never got addressed, but those are the two big ones. Paddyo posted:The more that I think about it, I honestly really appreciate the ending, and thought that it was totally in line with the way that Holden's sense of right and wrong has been portrayed throughout the series. The way that he addresses the unintended consequences is great, and totally on brand for him. gently caress it. Partly. He’s always been about doing what’s right, drat the consequences… He’s also all about radical transparency and trusting in people to do what’s right; and he’s also is, essentially, a champion of the downtrodden… The thing is, he always does what he believes is right (whether it was the right thing has always been an open question)… but at the very end Miller literally asks him, “are you sure you are doing the right thing?” and his reply is basically, “I have no clue.” That’s very un-Holden. Railing against Duerte about being the ultimate fascist dickhead by deciding for everyone that he’s doing to turn them into a hive mind, then basically being like… “well gently caress it, I’m in charge now and I am deciding for everyone instead of Duerte” feels wrong too, and finally… “oh, I’m going to do this and kill millions of people… oh well. I am probably giving some people a shot at developing in our own ‘human’ way…” felt off too, but really I have no clue. Finally, it’s totally unclear what Holden is actually going to achieve. In the final act Miller mentions that the ring station is ultimately safe, as is everyone in it, because the gate entities have done their worst to it, and short of literally setting off a new Big Bang, nothing bad can happen to the ring station or it’s occupants. So imagining as others have said, Holden is being turned into a protomolecule tool, but as long as that process isn’t complete he can shut down the network…. What exactly happens when he does that, then protomolecule totally takes over Holden? Couldn’t the new protomolecule coopted Holden personality turn the ring system back on at some point? ZombieLenin fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 16:32
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Travic posted:Oh absolutely. If everyone had worked together to start with this never would have happened. But that ship had sailed. The Goths were out for blood. They were actively trying to get into ring space and toying with physical constants to try and wipe out humanity one system at a time. There was no going back to playing nice with the Goths. I guess this was unclear to me. It was perfectly clear that the ring entities were pissed and doing their best to kill humans; however, whether or not humans could calm them down by being less irritating and say, following the protocol, wasn’t really clear. From the limited information we were given, it was pretty clear to me that Holden is just assuming at the end that humans could not reset the gate entities to a neutral, non-we are going to kill you all, state. It’s also alluded to that the gate builders had the weapons to hold the gate entities back at the end of the day, AND to go to war with the gate enties and probably win if that proved necessary. The problem was that the protomolecule creators never had a chance to use those weapons because they were so fragile the gate entities managed to easily kill them all. Miller and Holden at the end point out that humans are far more robust than the ring builders, and that the gate entities have no way to know when they’ve succeeded in killing all the humans in a system like they were with the gate builders. quote:Unfortunately the hive mind was needed to hold back the Goths. Holden tried on his own and couldn't, "It was like trying to lift a mattress with a toothpick." Or something like that. He needed everyone linked to have enough oomph to hold them back. Yes, but—I would pull the quote if I hadn’t listened to the book—Miller literally tells Holden at the end that the hive mind is only necessary to use the gate makers weapons because they were weapons built by a hive mind. Therefore, Miller says the hive mind humanity is necessary because the “gun built by the hive mind needs a hive mind hand to pull the trigger.” Whatever quote:Oh Venus wasn't remodeled. Julie was convinced by Miller to land Eros there instead of Earth. Eros mined Venus for materials to make the ring. Then it left. If you're curious all the matter that made up Miller, Julie, and everyone else on Eros is inside the ring. Yes it was, I am fairly positive though it was not inert and people kept the gently caress away, including the Lanconians, for that very reason. quote:It's the trolley problem. It's designed to be a difficult choice with no good outcome. Do nothing and billions die or do something and millions die. Which is weird since in the first half of the book we are beaten over the head with the fact that the ‘right thing to do’ was to not sacrifice one person (Theresa) to save a 100,000. Then later Amos demands the library dives stop because what was happening to a single person as a result was wrong, even if it meant all humanity dies. Only to have the ‘right thing’ at the end be sacrificing a few million to save billions, which is not only contrary to the two preceding instances in this novel I just mentioned, but is also contrary to the protagonist point of view across multiple novels. quote:Yep. Well...probably. Holden was on his way to becoming a vomit zombie. Not another Duarte. If he turned into a puddle of goo he's not doing anything. If the station can still use him then that's why he totally destroys the entire system. He blows up the station and all the rings fall into their respective suns. Not really. Once Holden is hooked in to the station like Duerte was, Miller tells him 100% he’s on the path to being the stations controlling intelligence, and that what was happening to Holden was not death, unless someone else somehow interrupted the process—i.e. Duerte having the process stopped by getting his heart crushed. ZombieLenin fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Dec 18, 2021 |
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Dec 18, 2021 20:39
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Narsham posted:ecause it's the right thing to do, the act of peace, restitution for a wrong even if humanity didn't commit that wrong. But, of course, after multiple books beating us over the head with the notion that the right thing to do, including the vast majority of the last book in which the decision is made, that the right thing to do is never to expediently sacrifice people to achieve an end, nor is the right thing to do ever for one person, or small group of people, to make decisions for all of humanity… So in the end, because Holden thinks it is the right call—despite literally saying to Miller he has “no idea” if it actually is the right call—Holden decides for all of humanity to sacrifice millions of people to achieve the end he wants, while making the decision all by himself.
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Jan 30, 2022 20:18
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General Battuta posted:What else was he going to do? It really depends on how you interpret what happened at the end. The way I read it, he could have kept the status quo with the gate entities doing nothing once he realized how to use the station, he could have ‘beaten’ the gate entities if he made choice to turn humanity into a hive mind, or he could have shut everything down like he did. I did a longer write up somewhere up there about my problems with the ending, particularly after Amos was like we aren’t even going to let this girl communicate with the protomolecule maker library, because having all of humanity die is better than sacrificing one person… but sacrificing a couple million? That’s cool I guess” ZombieLenin fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Jan 30, 2022 |
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Jan 30, 2022 23:42
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