|
The guy is literally growing new alien organs inside his body, there are likely subtle physical features occurring that Holden picks up on because he still has some of The Investigator in him picking up on details.
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2018 08:00
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 17:37 |
|
|
So, did anyone else notice this particular irony in the discussion of the Goths and the Prisoner's Dilemma? The aliens may have actually been playing tit-for-tat for the last three decades without humans realizing it. They kept "punishing" ships for over-using the rings, but weren't trying to annihilate them until humans started using those alien weapons or dropping bombs and gamma bursts into the space inside the rings. All of their responses make sense if you figure they're trying to change human behavior, and are "betraying" in response to human activity.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2019 09:02
|
|
|
Drone Jett posted:Nah, the changing frequency and type of attacks on humanity requires some sort of intelligence, even if an artificial kind. It’s not purely reactive anymore. Yup. The final "blackout" that affected everyone more intensely was not in response to anything, but was a pure escalation on the part of the Goths.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2019 20:39
|
|
|
TheOneAndOnlyT posted:EDIT: Also I get the historical reason for calling them "Goths", but every time I read it I imagine humanity's greatest threat being a bunch of pasty teenagers wearing all black. Well Elvi did perceive them as creatures that had never existed in a world with light. You can't get much darker than that  Also, I'm pretty sure the Jupiter sized diamond computer is going to be their info dump, not the grey zombies.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2019 21:06
|
|
|
The neutron star trap was set up by the builders. They probably understood what they were dealing with a little better than humanity and figured out that the Goths existed in the space between the Rings and that their presence was preceded by virtual particles becoming hydrogen atoms in the system they were attacking. Much like the antimatter bombs, the gamma blast was likely supposed to "hurt" the Goths if they stuck their tendrils through that ring. EDIT: The builders likely didn't intend to disintegrate two Rings and irradiate the slow zone, they probably would have moved the other Rings out of the way if the trap was sprung. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Apr 12, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2019 17:37
|
|
|
Haha, yes. The big "gently caress you! I'm just going to flip the game table!" response should have been a big hint that the aliens might not respond completely logically to being antagonized.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2019 18:09
|
|
|
Duarte honestly should be played by a relatively unknown, but excellent middle aged actor. The guy is supposed to be completely unremarkable until all of sudden he secretly upends all of human civilization. Even then, it's through proxies and you don't realize he was behind it all until he takes the fleet through the Ring. Also, I'm 90% convinced that the authors were picturing a young Edward James Olmos every time they describe him in the novels. Obviously he is too old, which is a drat shame.
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2019 20:53
|
|
|
withak posted:Season 4 trailer: My guess is that they are going to change out Amos from Holden as the guy that has the duelling pistols on the bridge resembling a human tongue.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2019 19:26
|
|
|
Fuzzy Mammal posted:Did anyone else find the climax to book 4 kind of inscrutable and abrupt? So I'm going to respond as if you haven't read any further than Book 4. 1) It wasn't a portal, it was a literal sphere of unreality that confounded the senses when looked at by humans, and literally was invisible to all the ring-builder tech, including The Investigator. 2) It was absolutely leftover from whatever killed the ring-builders. None of the artifacts waking up on Ilus could see it, and it basically erased any ring-builder tech that touched it. Malevolent? Maybe? 3) In its attempts to refine the subroutine known as "The Investigator" the giant AI that controls the Sol Ring accidentally made it too similar to Miller, which caused it to act in an altruistic manner towards the minds trapped in the Ring as well as the humans who were being negatively affected by The Investigator flipping all the switches of all the artifacts. The other automatons were the Ring AI trying to stop it from erasing its programming. 4) Entering the sphere erased The Investigator, which being a subroutine of the Ring also erased the portion of the Ring that was causing it to "reach out". Doing so moved the Ring into a more dormant phase that also stopped the suffering of the human minds inside the Ring.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2019 17:57
|
|
|
The entire thing with thinking of "the protomolecule" as a ridiculously sophisticated AI running millions of subroutines, one of which is The Investigator, is actually something someone in the TVIV thread said after watching Season 3. It's not something I thought of myself when reading the books, but it helped me go back and understand WTF was going on with Proto-Miller and why he was only able to go rogue right at the end.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2019 21:56
|
|
|
Libluini posted:I thought it was kind of straight-forward and easy to understand. Then again, I tend to read a lot of weird SF. LOLWhut. Sorry, I'll try to respond to this less sarcastically. Did you read a single one of The Investigator chapters in Book 4? The first chapter literally describes the hellscape of human minds endlessly reliving their own moments of death over and over inside The Ring. Every chapter following that talks about the Investigator intentionally turning on the planet's systems under the guidance of the Ring, which repeatedly kills him over the course of the book for failing to determine a way to get the Ring's makers to tell it to stop reaching out. The final Investigator chapter literally talks about all the human minds finally going silent and being allowed to die and the Ring no longer "reaching out" because The Investigator drags all of that "code" through the black sphere erasing it. Did you read Book 4 at all? Did you read any of the following books? The Builders never had a chance against their enemies. Their antagonists literally erased their brains (and all of their technology, which was biologically-based and integrated into their collective consciousness), and they did so in a manner that the Builders could not even perceive, giving them no chance to defend themselves. Proto-Miller was acting against the interests of The Ring because he knew that the Ring was a computer that would keep bashing it's head against the same wall for eternity because no one would ever give it the command to stop reaching out. Miller didn't "Do" anything to the sphere except let it erase him. Like, if you haven't read past book 4, let me know now, but most of what I said is literally in the text of book 4. EDIT: I had to actually go back and make sure I was in the Book Thread before I posted, and that you weren't just talking about the TV show, but yup, this is the book thread and everything I just posted is kosher. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 09:39 on Aug 17, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Aug 17, 2020 09:32
|
|
|
The galaxy literally is not old enough for them to have left their tiny corner. Their protomolecule rocks are stuck moving at less that FTL speeds (hence needing the gates to go places), and there just hasn't been enough time for a bunch of fast moving, but still very slow rocks to make it farther than a tiny little area of the Milky Way.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2021 05:45
|
|
|
Guys, we're 37 pages into the book discussion thread. You only need to spoiler text book 9 previews and poo poo, the rest of the series is fair game. I personally liked the Dutchman Defense. One of the best things from Book 5 is that it starts with Monica earnestly indicating that something is going wrong with the gate transitions, but the whole colony rush is so disorganized that no one is keeping track of which ships are going where. The right eyes were about to start looking in the right place, but then Marco's entire thing fucks everything up, and even the reader forgets about the weird gate poo poo until the last page of the novel. It's brilliant, because it hammers home how utterly pointless everything in Book 5 really is. Finally having the characters sit down and figure out the Dutchman Phenomenon and using that both literally and metaphorically erase the Free Navy is good writing, and I really enjoyed it.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2021 09:50
|
|
|
Alex gets remarried, divorced, and ends up back on the Roci during the time skip. That's the biggest LOL in the entire "none of these characters changed in 30 years". The time skip was a ballsy move, and was necessary for the Laconia plot, but they really screwed up not having the characters change at all.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2021 17:50
|
|
|
When people complain they haven't changed, they're talking about the fact that they are all still living on the Roci 30 years after the end of book 6. I can actually picture Alex kind of dead ending himself on the Roci after a second failed marriage, and Amos and Peaches still being there because they essentially don't have anything else resembling a home. But Bobby? She definitely found friends on the ship, and circumstances forced her onto the ship over and over, but she also has a family on Mars and there's no indication that she doesn't still see Mars as home. The idea that 30 years later she would still be working on this old rear end ship is a stretch. Naomi and Holden? They finally work past her dark past, both metaphorically and literally killing the ghost of her past. She's finally able to commit to him fully and....they still never leave that ship? Get married? Have the children they mention when wanting to have when they discuss their frozen gametes? Again, this is 30 loving years. People work a job and retire in that span of time. It's a really long time to end up in the same place on an outdated, cramped ship.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2021 20:29
|
|
|
I loved it, and had a lot of fun reading the book. Honestly, people are saying "I called it!" like that's not the most insufferable thing someone can do, but I'll be damned if a single person before this week "called" one of the main plot points being loving human instrumentality! Again, they managed to tell another chapter in the story where I wasn't sure where they were going, and was pleasantly surprised by the twists it took. It was good poo poo. EDIT vvv Mad that I liked the book? Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 09:29 on Dec 4, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2021 08:56
|
|
|
I believe the point is that Holden has matured, and the naive man that originally set-off a system-wide war with his poorly thought out broadcasts realized that sometimes life is making lovely choices without all the information, and so he...just did it. It was a tough call, but I don't think he has a lot of time to think about it before making it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2021 08:53
|
|
|
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. Holden was going to die to the protomolecule within hours if not minutes. After that, he would be remade into a system that would be committed to maintaining the gates. This was why Holden rushed at the end. He was basically counting his last few breaths. Everyone trying to find a way for human civilization to continue while using the Rings is missing the point of the novel. There is no future for humanity using the Proto Tech. Full stop.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2021 20:50
|
|
|
30 worlds were part of the group that finds Earth. There could have been 100s of other human civilizations independently developing out there.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2021 08:58
|
|
|
Nihonniboku posted:At a certain point they also began adapting novellas and incorporating them into the show. I've never read the novellas, but I'm pretty sure the first one they fully adapted was season 5 with Bobbi. "The Butcher of Anderson Station" (Fred Johnson's backstory), and "Drive" (the story of the invention of the Epstein Drive) were both just straight put into the show as part of the existing episodes.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2022 08:59
|
|
|
Nah, if there ever is a follow-up it will still be 30 years. It would explain why she is an absolute mess at that point (she is way past her expiration date and on borrowed time), and it's not that weird for people to outlive their diagnosis, especially when humanity is in the process of jumping way forward due to studying the alien technology.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2022 02:59
|
|
|
There is no future for humanity with the gates. They couldn't "beat" the gate entities, but they could indefinitely stalemate them, but to do so they'd have to use the hive mind and it would not be humanity anymore. Also, there is no guarantee that the hive mind was not an idea implanted by the Builders in the first place, much like how "Julie" thought she was going home, but it was just a mechanism to navigate Eros to Earth. Holden had two lovely choices and minutes to pick one. You can agree or not agree with the option he choose, but trying to tactical realism a more optimal solution is pointless because there was no third option except letting the gate entities kill every human in the universe,
|
|
#
¿
Jan 31, 2022 00:01
|
|
|
Milkfred E. Moore posted:I remain unclear as to why the human hive mind would stalemate the gate entities. I mean, they annihilated the Builders and their hive mind and they have no problem with annihilating humanity (as mentioned, they're capable of it) so it seems like they're fine to win no matter what happens. It seems pretty obvious. Humans are physical beings and not living data. The weapons the Builders created seem to hurt the substrate they lived on, but would not hurt human hardware. Once the human hivemind activates the weapons, the Gate Entities can no longer affect our reality and the hivemind would remain safe indefinitely (as long as they keep holding down the trigger of the gun).
|
|
#
¿
Jan 31, 2022 03:14
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 17:37 |
|
|
banned from Starbucks posted:Laconia already had colonists when the rogue Martians landed, right? Or is that just a TV show thing? Seems odd they didn't report the existence of the orbital construction platform back to Earth. Colonists were landing on hundreds of worlds and sending back fragmented and crazy accounts for some time. The colonists on Laconia did notice the construction platform, but it was part of a literal pile of insane reports experts were trying to sift through at the time. The whole thing behind Duarte was that he wasn't the absolute smartest person in the room, but he was the fastest at reaching the finish line when it came to noticing things and extrapolating it out the final conclusion. At the end of Book 4 Chrisjen is talking to Bobbie in the epilogue about the chain of events the success on Illith will cause in the solar system and on Mars. She's a very smart person, and is ahead of everyone else we know about at realizing this, but the irony is that Duarte already got there first. He knew Mars was doomed and looked for a new future in those colony reports, and was the first person to make the leap between "half-finished ship in orbit" to "I can build an empire with that".
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2024 09:01
|
|