The Expanse

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General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

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.

Interested to find out exactly what they wanted to strap to the Martian warship that got eaten at the end of Nemesis Games

# ¿ Oct 9, 2017 19:35

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 09:02

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Book was okay. I think around the point of Abaddon's Gate I realized we weren't going to get anything as batshit as 'alien goo takes over an asteroid and tries to ram Earth' for a while. In a way this book most resembles Cibola Burn; it's a bunch of people miserably contemplating the nature of human society between episodes of action.

Shame the Laconian characterization seems to be limited to 'efficient and boring'.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2017 22:14

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Putting definite articles in your ship names is terrible since now you�ve gotta say �the Laconian ship The Gathering Storm�

Pretty excited for Duarte to literally become a Dragonball villain or turn into a gigantic philosophy worm.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2017 18:50

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Next book is 4000 years later and Duarte keeps cloning Holden.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2017 18:51

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Should�ve crushed all the random Belters under the mighty hammer of macrogravity

Duarte is best viewed as the result of book 1-2�s insane Protogen megalomania combined with Martian envirofascism. �We must think very long term and organize our society for same� is Mars; �the protomolecule should be used to enable radical change� is Protogen.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2017 21:45

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Don't great men occasionally get lucky and take over large chunks of humanity? I am not a historian but it seems like it's happened now and then, especially when a major technological edge develops.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2017 00:05

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Arcsquad12 posted:

So how exactly does one battleship wipe out an entire solar system's defense force?

Their guns don't work on it, its guns work really on them? Doesn't seem too crazy.

"Our spaceship is invulnerable" is a lot more powerful than "our oceangoing battleship is big." A ship can threaten to bombard your coast. Once the Laconians have control of space in Sol, though, there's nothing they can't kill. You can say "gently caress you we' won't surrender" and resist, but you need to accept that the Laconian ship can drive up to your biggest population centers/strategic targets and remove them, and it won't stop.

Unconditional surrender was the only option...especially because it leads to occupation, and then you can start making their lives difficult.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2017 19:12

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

ZombieLenin posted:

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.

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.

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. You can call that 'implausible' if you want, but from the beginning this series has been built on 'implausibly' efficient fusion engines and space biology.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2017 23:35

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

ZombieLenin posted:

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.

No, just shoot it with railguns or missiles. Anyone attacking you from a planet is shooting from the bottom of a barrel: you're up top and you can drop poo poo on him. You are untouchable.

A deus ex machina is the appearance of a god or godlike force to resolve the crisis in a story by exercise of arbitrary power. Science fictional technology in a science fiction book that has always run on - yes, equally silly - magic fusion engines and causality-violating gates is not a deus ex machina.

When something happens in a work of fiction, in general it is more interesting to try to understand why, rather than to shout 'this cannot happen!' and declare the fiction compromised.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2017 01:49

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Arcsquad12 posted:

My question is: Are there any books or franchises that address similar themes of human hardship, while being set in a post-scarcity society? Material needs are eliminated for the vast majority of people, but human fallibility persists, leading to conflicts that, rather than being fought over resources or territory, are instead fought on ideological grounds?

The Night's Dawn! This is sort of a joke and sort of not. It's ridiculously large canvas space opera with a maximalist universe full of technologically and ideologically distinct human factions, ancient mysteries, some aliens, major cultural divides that lead to traumatic conflict, badly written wish-fulfillment sex, and some pretty kickass action scenes...

...and then the main thrust of the series is "what do we do when we discover hell is real, everyone goes there, the souls inside desperately want to get out, and they've just gained the ability to do it?"

# ¿ Dec 14, 2017 05:27

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I'd say skip it entirely but there's one mysterious entity near the climax which pops up again later.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2018 16:29

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Skim it at most, skip it if willing. It somehow makes a safari on a mysterious alien planet into a joyless slog.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2018 00:42

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

snoremac posted:

I�m almost done with Caliban�s War and I�m wondering whether it�s worth continuing the series. There�s a lack of character conflict and it�s draining my enthusiasm. LW has Holden and Miller as interesting opposites, but everything is so jovial in CW. It was going in a good direction when Holden was �becoming� Miller and lost his poo poo in the lab, but that seems to have wrapped up with no consequences beyond him falling out with Fred. There�s no other drama beyond the overarching political battle. Is this book a bump in the road or is the series not for me?

The characters finally get personalities and conflicts in book five. Three is bad, four you can just read a summary because it�s worse than bad and nothing important happens that won�t fit into a sentence of recap. Five is legitimately decent.

e: five not give

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Feb 24, 2018

# ¿ Feb 22, 2018 15:39

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

It's particularly bad because it highlights how deadly dull the Expanse's vision of alien worlds turned out to be. How do you make a planet riddled with dead alien technology so boring? Peter Watts or CJ Cherryh they are not.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2018 16:52

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I hope so

General Battuta posted:

Next book is 4000 years later and Duarte keeps cloning Holden.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2018 17:09

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

It was onscreen in Nemesis Games.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2018 15:40

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

If you keep book 1 as is, combine books 2 and 3, delete book 4 entirely, combine 5 and 6, and treat 7 as the first half of 7-8, you've got a solid series.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2018 02:09

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Eh, that dog�s not so strange

# ¿ Aug 23, 2018 21:55

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The protagonist guy from Excession might be the worst person in the whole series*

*this is probably hyperbole but god I hate him so much

# ¿ Sep 27, 2018 05:08

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Day Man posted:

I mean, all he did was sleep with someone in a free-love society. His spouse stabbed a fetus to death and almost killed him over it.

Nah, that's cool (the sleeping, not the fetus stabbing), it's the abandoning the Culture and having yourself physically altered to join a society which not only (!) engineered sentience out of its females but also genetically engineered said females to feel pain during sex :wtf:

that puts him high up on the poo poo list.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2018 01:40

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Ainsley McTree posted:

Maybe I�ll just skip the whole series actually

The Culture isn't weird SF author fetish material, it just has some incredibly vile bad guys and deeply hosed up protagonists.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2018 18:42

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Krazyface posted:

No, you wouldn't.

Yeah it's kind of misleading because average life expectancy is brought way down by all the dead babies. Modal or median life expectancy might be a better way to look at it (although '0' might be the modal result still).

e: I finally watched the rest of Season 3 of this show, and how do they make it all so...boring? They have the acting, set design, and VFX talents to tell a great story but somehow it never seems to go beyond 'competent'.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2018 00:38

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I've read all the books.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2018 01:07

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Remember back at the end of book...4? When that Martian battleship was headed to Laconia, and right before it got eaten by the gate ghosts the captain was looking at some blueprints about something they were going to strap to his ship? Assuming I'm remembering that right, maybe they were planning on a faster rollout of Laconia originally, with the alien technology more haphazardly integrated.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2018 02:26

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Rime posted:

Black bullet is probably basic bullshit about universal laws regarding the conservation of mass or something equally meh and how the PM creators were "overloading" the fabric of the universe with their technology. Same reason ships vanish if too many go through too often. Predict the series is going to end with the Duarte or whoever it is on Laconia delivering a long monologue about glory and empire right before going full-akira and then being turned into a black hole due to his PM self-abuse.

You're probably right, science fiction writers seem to love this story. Holden will have to enforce a warp 5 speed limit across human space, and then Reapers will turn up to complain that the protomolecules are causing stars to go early supernova, and then the Xeelee the will ruin everything.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2018 06:39

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

That Destiny �original story� is a complete hoax.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2019 08:32

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Lmao that Duarte puts so much faith into the prisoner�s dilemma but doesn�t seem to grasp that humans are consistently �punished� for high gate activity, and we�re fine as long as we keep traffic low. He didn�t even take the basic step of putting himself in the other side s shoes? If he treats the Dutchman ships as a tit-for-tat response to us overusing the gates, he�d realize that punishing the Dutchmans is going to lock both sides into constantly defecting, right? Which is exactly what happens.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2019 20:26

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yeah he's pretty much the beep boop I have no selfish emotions rational logic will save us nerd you see growing out of every crevice of the Internet. Except charismatic.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2019 23:05

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

You can�t really blame them. Holding the ring space was a good plan but the moment they provoked the Goths they lost everything - Medina, their absolute leader, and their communications and control over the other stars. Abandoning the platforms to hunt an obsolete battleship was stupid, but it was the kind of stupid decision that authoritarians make all the time. You could even argue it was the right call, if you figure an asteroid was gonna get through eventually. Probably the biggest unjustified reach was Laconia�s planetary defenses not swatting Naomi�s group effortlessly. That doesn�t really make sense to me until the antimatter goes off.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2019 00:06

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yeah that is kinda weird, especially if they could produce antimatter. Even if you couldn�t harden against the scary stuff itself you�d want to prevent any sudden impacts. I think the plot fix would be to save some of the antimatter from early on and use it in railgun shells at the finale.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2019 00:23

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

So is it Winston Do Art or Winston Do Art, Ey?

e: or Winston Dwart

# ¿ Apr 7, 2019 23:12

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Ah, Winston Dougherty.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2019 04:42

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yeah. Antagonizing them makes no sense even from a game theory perspective. You want to punish them and see if it alters their behavior, okay...but why don't you realize they've been punishing you for gate overuse for decades, and you've changed your behavior to cooperate? Wouldn't you then realize that responding to a punishment with an escalation is going to look like a declaration of war?

e: also it's unclear to me why they were so sure that antimatter would damage these aliens at all, given what we've seen of them and their existence

# ¿ Apr 16, 2019 18:18

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yeah, that. Better put.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2019 18:20

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Like you'd know, idiot i'm defecting!!!

# ¿ Apr 16, 2019 18:32

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

bloom posted:

The problem I always had with Marco was that it didn't seem believable people would keep following him once he reveals what a moron he really is.

We have an unfortunately vivid case study in place right now.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2019 15:47

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I do admire the books for shaking things up (especially 5) but I�ve been trying to articulate a sense of dissatisfaction for the last couple books and I think it�s, basically, that no matter where they go or what changes, it always comes back to people doing the same kind of stuff and having the same kind of conversations in roughly the same kinds of places.

Which is the point of the series: wherever we go we bring human problems and human habits. So it�s formally defensible. But I guess it just doesn�t light my brain on fire with delight to have everything feel kinda pro forma.

Turning our heroes� first interstellar trip into mud slug adventure might be the peak of this habit.

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Oct 8, 2019

# ¿ Oct 8, 2019 22:23

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Defiance Industries posted:

Speaking of novellas, there's a new one out next month. It's named Auberon and it's set between books 7 and 8. No points in guessing the topic.

I actually don't remember what Auberon is, so what's the topic :v:

# ¿ Oct 13, 2019 18:42

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I still want to know what the �prosthetic� they were gonna mount on that Martian battleship which gate-disappeared back in Nemesis Games was about. Dropped plot thread? Foreshadowing? Maybe they hadn�t planned the time skip and the Laconian super ships were gonna be hasty hybrids.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2020 20:25

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 09:02

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I feel bad making fun of them because they�re decent guys but I know some Poles on a space game forum who love the MCR and see it as some kind of pragmatic-collectivist techno utopia. I told them the MCR led directly to the genocide of billions before realizing they were probably show viewers.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2020 21:53

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