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I posted this in the TVIV thread where people were bitching on about Cibola Burn, but I stand by it: The payoff in Cibola Burn is great. Ghost Miller as a Multi Limbed Tunneling Primordial Horror Thing was worth the drudge that was Ms Horny Doctor. The Investigator + Miller aren't gone forever, are they?  I've heard he is back, butThe main bad/character was the planet and to a lesser extent The Investigator, as such it was the less liked ginger half sibling of space opera, planetary romance. David Brinn tried the same thing with his second uplift trilogy*, though Cibola isn't half as turgid as that. *The Uplift War was also Planetary Romance.
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Sep 15, 2016 21:57
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Captain Fargle posted:They made it pretty drat clear that Marco really isn't as clever as he thinks he is and the only reason he and Filip got anywhere was because Duarte, who has actual power, is using him as cover. Yeah, I was going to say, Marco was cover for the Mars military rebellion, whatever he believed. I think the Martians were surprised he dropped the hammer though.
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Sep 18, 2016 13:13
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Miller mentions it several times as the entire purpose of the investigator. Plus the eldritched eye of an angry god thing.
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Dec 4, 2016 22:24
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Isn't the supernova thing described as like trying to cut off an infected limb? Like they are afflicted with something and bombing the affected systems has the effect of stopping the spread? But it doesn't work. I'm sure they just sublimed or something equally unsatisfactory.
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Dec 5, 2016 00:51
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You guys didn't pick up on the constant pissy comments by Martians and Belters about Earthers not appreciating the earth. They have a massive envy complex, of course they want an earth-like planet of their own. Also I thought it was a lot more than an quarter of the population, more like 80%. There are nowhere near enough ships or resources outside of the gravity well to support 23 billion people. People of earth are hosed. I haven't read BA yet, did they limit the catastrophe?
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Dec 9, 2016 17:08
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ZombieLenin posted:And again, with Mars we are talking about a wealthy population with a large middle class--the wealthiest inner planet (so the wealthiest of the wealthy countries). What's is being described in the books is akin to 10% of the American population up and moving to the moon the moment it's "open" to "colonization" or the loving desert of Mauritania now that they've opened it to gold prospecting. No, it isn't. Mars is nothing like any of those situations. It's more like offering the crew members of Ascension the chance to teleport back to earth. Yeah I know they never left, but the situation is more comparable. It isn't those people with all the privilege that are leaving, it's the people at the bottom that are making up the bulk of emigres.
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Dec 9, 2016 20:31
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The mad scientist, Cortazar, tells Captain Sauveterre that the protomolecule sample arrived intact, in a message before something happens in a book that was released last year.
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Dec 11, 2016 14:49
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Strategic Tea posted:If history is anything to go by people will be travelling and trading as soon or sooner than it's remotely practical. Even with a frontier to settle people don't wall themselves off and do nothing but internal infrastructure until they're caught up to developed nations. The exception being, religions, cults and political extremes. There is also the
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Dec 13, 2016 17:30
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It might be a remnant of the counter measures they used against whatever eat them. The gates would have been used almost exclusively for resource transfer by their builders so something is wrong with them.
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Dec 14, 2016 16:45
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The equivalent belter population would be Clacton on Sea. Nobody would miss them. In the comparison with the bombing of Japan, the terrifying unintended consequence was 70+ years of disaster manga/anime. Earth should flood the belt with poorly drawn and plotted animation for 1000 years in punishment.
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Dec 15, 2016 15:52
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I expect they are waiting for the right moment. Like once all the hard work is done.
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Dec 22, 2016 20:42
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They never interact though? Unless you mean Pa? In which case she never had an opportunity. He had a dozen gunships surrounding his insecure arse all the time. They were bigger and faster than her three ships.
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Dec 23, 2016 01:45
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The Muffinlord posted:He's gonna roll through the gate with a fleet full of whatever the equivalent will be of the Earth destroyers with bolted on Shadow tech from that one episode of Babylon 5. With some kind of inertia reducing tech. Or some other game changer. Maybe they will just enforce their border and set up a non aggressive government. I suspect they are growing mustaches for the purposes of villainous twirling.
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Jan 5, 2017 00:43
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Is it not likely that mars will receive a lot of refugees from Earth, thus giving their project a boost? I know they won't all be terraforming experts but those aren't the bodies that are being lost, they are losing the great unwashed at the bottom of the social heap. This is exactly the social strata that refugees are forced into. Mars should open their doors and stop qqing about the empty living quarters.
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Jan 7, 2017 19:32
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ZombieLenin posted:Maybe the first book of Hyperion is good. Then it gets all Dan loving Simmons. I started to switch off when there was talk of a dyson sphere made of trees populated entirely by plot devices that had traveled back in time to arrange everything and that the shrike was in fact Kassad's soul trapped in a murderbot or something. That was the fall of Hyperion? The backwards time girl was genuinely interesting though. Endymion was pure dreck from start to finish. I wish he had writ it in water.
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Jan 7, 2017 20:48
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Platystemon posted:Belters don’t actually engage in many fleet actions, though. The Free Navy have maybe two dozen MCRN corvettes? The UN Navy and the 2/3 of the MCRN that is left can't match that? Were they all on holiday or something? These Free Navy goons were just hijacking everything in their space, why not dress up some frigates as colony barges, or put several inside hollowed out colony ships and dry fist the FN group of ships that try and board them. Or fill them full of torpedos with auto targetting. Or any number of clever things that a host of very clever military minds (that Avasarala mentioned in her epic put down of Holden) could come up with. Ah but no, the authors said they couldn't do it for some extremely specious reasons that stunk of having written themselves into a corner. As unsatisfying as it is, at least they released the book in a timely fashion. They could have gone back and rewrote it, with the combined fleets of Earth and Mars annihilating the FN quickly and stuck on some other story and plotline, but taken 2 or 3 or 6 years of rewriting before putting it out. It is unsatisfying, but really not as bad as it could have been.
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Jan 10, 2017 01:44
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Toast Museum posted:I should go back and check, but I believe it was a fairly even three-way split among MCRN loyalists, Free Navy, and Duarte's fleet. Duarte took 1/3 of the ships, and threw the Belters some surplus corvettes, enough to distract the inner belt while he got away, in exchange for the proto molecule sample and killing Smith and Johnson. It isn't spelt out but there can't more than two dozen. PA only has 2 and she is Admiral of their #2 flotilla. How many are mentioned? PA has 2, Marco has 9 (or is it 5?) and there are the 2 that chased the Roci. Any others? The captain of the Donnager expects to make short work of 7 similar sized ships.
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Jan 10, 2017 19:33
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ZombieLenin posted:I mean, the excuse was that the free navy was still throwing stealth rocks at the Earth, and the Earth navy was tied to the Earth catching those for political reasons as much as military reasons. I get that, fine. Yeah, they were never a threat. Apart from throwing rocks. The authors wasted too much of the book telling us they were a threat. In the end they were only a threat to themselves.
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Jan 10, 2017 20:05
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Spoilering this just in case. Sorry to be a  in advance.It isn't a Deus ex Machina. Collateral fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Jan 14, 2017 |
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Jan 14, 2017 16:46
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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. Thomas Jane is a good Miller, but he is nothing like book Miller. At any rate, terrifying machine of the old gods possessed by the spirit of Miller is the best version + voiced by TJ? Yes please.
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Feb 25, 2017 20:22
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I expect the ghost of Miller will be a lot more fleshed out than in the books. Probably much more of an exposition device and possible comic relief. Is it revealed later that UN and Mars attacked each other in orbit because Mao was playing them off against each other, and it was a bidding war for the tech? With Admiral Ng being the more trigger happy Do I really need to spoiler that?
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Mar 8, 2017 13:00
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Some fine speaching from Jared Harris here (taken from episode 8): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFuigZexdyY Dawes was far less assertive in the books, so I am thinking he maybe a Marco equivalent, or replacement. He surely has more character, charisma, purpose, personality, yeah you name it. Marco was a poo poo antagonist. If Diago is his son, as he hinted, then you could even remove Naomi's relation to the two and we wouldn't have the egregious coincidence of NG.
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Mar 9, 2017 20:07
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PriorMarcus posted:The slow zone only effects the outer shell of the vessels. This is also why everyone inside the ships is seriously hosed up by the sudden deceleration. The situation doesn't hold up on close inspection. Like most SF/F its best just to accept ~magic or new technology~ as a narrative device.
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Jul 31, 2017 12:57
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Toast Museum posted:Was there something specific they messed up? They seemed to apply the rule consistently. I need to reread it but they change velocity instantly, like in zero time (t=0). I could be wrong about that though. Even if t>0 then the potential energy of the inside of the ships is going to greater than the shell that was stopped, those ships were designed to have the stress placed around the engine housing, not the hull, which would have buttressing from the inside. The inside of the ship would either rip through the hull or if the force is applied equally to the hull at all times the impact would release the kinetic energy and simply explode. Every hard object inside the ship would act like a railgun slug. Not to mention people aren't exactly hard objects. I don't have the numbers at hand, so I could be wrong. I usually am 
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Jul 31, 2017 16:38
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Why are you spoilering something that is freely available on the net? The holden is Jim with the comment about rooms smelling of coffee.
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Nov 21, 2017 14:16
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future ghost posted:After just finishing Pushing Ice and Red Mars I'm not really thrilled by a 30 year time jump. 5 maybe to show some movement, but it's going to be hard connecting with a crew of 60 year olds doing the same poo poo after all that time. Pushing Ice did that constantly and after awhile I stopped caring about any of the characters. I'm surprised you could care about the pushing ice crew at all, it has some cool concepts but wafer thin characters. I would assume life spans are a great deal longer that far in the future, so their 60 could be something like our 40.
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Nov 21, 2017 17:14
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interesting parallel with Clarissa and Duarte.
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Nov 22, 2017 14:04
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Limited access and fear of being sent to the "Pen." Holden notices because the pm is changing him too.
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Jan 5, 2018 10:39
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General Battuta posted:The protagonist guy from Excession might be the worst person in the whole series* They both have fairly rotten personalities. A running theme in the book is abuse, treatment and (this is left ambiguous at the end) recovery/discovery. There is even a Mind that gets into meat minds, appropriately called Grey Matter (Meat Fucker).
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Sep 27, 2018 11:14
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I thought they were done several months ago, have they spent that time rolling it in glitter?
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Jan 11, 2019 02:27
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Uterine Lineup posted:They also posted the epilogue for some strange reason. Was it spoilerific?
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Feb 22, 2019 00:18
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Surely if was all in on his theme he would just dramatically state: "If..."
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Apr 5, 2019 22:55
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Or all 1300 planets moved the goldilocks zone in sol system.
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Apr 16, 2019 01:29
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Would have been more interesting to see the aftermath of the system that lost its gate, but maybe they are saving that one.
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Oct 13, 2019 23:57
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Are they sitting on the last book?
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Feb 16, 2020 16:09
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