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General Battuta posted:I don't understand why the special agent/designated Commander Shepherd of the entire Laconian Empire doesn't bring enough dudes/ships to deal with one insanely old corvette class frigate (or frigate class corvette). They are jobbing so hard. Look, that would mean the heroes wouldn't have a cool and easy victory. I think the reason why lots of scifi series of this type (Cowboy Bebop, Firefly, hell even Star Wars) has the heroes use a modified freighter is to try and keep away from the temptation of just using the ship to solve all the problems. The Millennium Falcon is fast as hell but it's not going toe-to-toe with anything bigger than a fighter.
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Mar 23, 2024 22:02
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PriorMarcus posted:Oh my God. I don't remember any of this at all either. It's a very silly idea that I'm not sure the Coreys had in mind when writing that line of Trejo's. General Battuta posted:I don't understand why the special agent/designated Commander Shepherd of the entire Laconian Empire doesn't bring enough dudes/ships to deal with one insanely old corvette class frigate (or frigate class corvette). They are jobbing so hard. PriorMarcus posted:Is Laconia fascist? Of course they are, but the books seem to change their minds on this constantly. I don't know if fascist is the right word, because we haven't really seen Laconia espouse anything that resembles the fascist ethos. Like I pointed out back in Persepolis Rising, it would've been the easiest thing to have them set up Belters as the bad other or whatever, but there's nothing there. We don't really know enough about how Laconia functions. Duarte seemed like he was pretty invested in constructing a society that, while militaristic and authoritarian, doesn't appear to be fascist per se. Laconia strikes me a this weird military dictatorship led by a God-King, an experiment in creating and depicting that sort of 'heroic/safe fascism' that you see in sci-fi every so often where it's like basically fascism without the most odious parts (the racism, sexism, othering, whatever.) I feel like if we go down Eco's fourteen points of Ur-Fascism, not many of them apply to Laconia. But I feel like Laconia is less 'fascist' than Pacific Rim's PPDC. The problem is we just don't know anything about Laconia. A lot of the takes you'll see on Reddit are, to borrow a term, "ascended fanon" and the Expanse wiki has wrong information in it. For example, the series never actually says that Duarte knew anything about Inaros' plans to strike Earth. For all we know, Duarte's plan might've been to loan Inaros a bunch of ships with the thought that outer system raiding would go up and Duarte could shuffle his loyalists to Laconia slowly without attracting attention under the guise of trying to stamp it out. But then Earth gets hit and, gently caress it, might as well go now. You'd assume if Duarte really was responsible for it, and people had proof, they wouldn't have ignored Laconia for three decades. We don't know anything about Laconia, really. What their economy is, what their internal politics are, what life is like for the average person. My read is closer to Laconia being just a weird attempt at critiquing any and all authoritarian governments through the lens of two authors who don't really have much knowledge of politics or history. I don't get fascism from them. I think they're, honestly, closer to taking shots at communism -- or, specifically, the Soviet Union under Stalin. The state comes first and there's heavy centralization. The ruler is an educated elite who wrote books. The Laconian defectors are basically a vanguard movement. The names Ilich and Trejo evoke eastern Europe and South America. Hell, the Pen/s are basically gulags for people who disagree with the state (but also don't really matter, the Pen/s might as well not exist in the story) where their bodies can be used in the service of the state's goals. poo poo, go through Reddit, and you can find people saying the true evil of Laconia is that they experimented on "THEIR OWN PEOPLE." Which, ironically enough, echoes how members of Nazi Germany were astounded that, to them, Stalin was abusing his own people (because Jews, of course, were not seen by them as German.) Transforming a tiny UN science colony into the centre of the future galactic government, war fleet and all, in thirty years also echoes Stalin's ability to modernize Russia from agrarian to industrial. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Mar 24, 2024 |
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Mar 24, 2024 04:38
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Leviathan Falls, Chapters 17 - 20 Trejo puts his ballsy plan into action and the plot and characters get twisted. Chapter Seventeen: Naomi The captain of the Derecho is sending out a message. They've been orbiting Freehold for one hundred hours and, if the Gathering Storm is not surrendered within another hundred hours, they will be "forced to act against the civilian population." Leviathan Falls, Chapter 17 posted:He had the trick of making threats while being pained at the necessity of doing it. This hurts me as much as it does you. A lot of Laconians seemed to have that style. Naomi had to believe that said something about Winston Duarte and how he’d led. Is this Trejo's ballsy plan? No. Alex wonders if Laconia would really do it. Jim says they will do it. Alex is like but it's a civilian target. Jim says, "But it's our civilians. So, gently caress 'em." But remember back in Persepolis Rising how the Laconian ethos was that every person, even the terrorists, was a citizen of Laconia and therefore granted rights and due process? Like, that was Duarte's whole thing and why Singh was executed? The Derecho's captain starts emotional blackmail by letting people from Freehold speak but Naomi kills the feed. We get some backstory on Freehold: it's one of the most important underground systems, it holds Draper Station on one of the moons, and it is the hiding place of the Gathering Storm. The Roci is now, apparently, hiding itself as the Sidpai out of Auberon. They're landed on one of the moons (I think?) and are pretending to survey it. Holden says they should do something about the Derecho. The Derecho ignores the Rocinante (what happened to Tanaka's all points bulletin?) because it isn't the Storm. They head to Draper Station. The Roci lands. The Storm is there, and so is its captain, Jillian Houston. It is now 63 hours until the Derecho will bomb Freehold. Naomi thinks Jillian still dislikes them from how they arrested her father. 59 hours left by the time the Rocinante starts getting fixed up and resupplied. Naomi goes to see Jillian and says she didn't know Freehold was under attack. This is because Laconian destroyed the repeater. They discuss options. Jillian has the Storm ready to leave with everything she can carry. Freehold was a good base only while no one knew about it. And if the Derecho chases the Storm, then the civilians will be safe. Alternatively, if it isn't, the underground will be ready to record the massacre. However, Jillian doesn't think it's a good idea to get into a fight. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 17 posted:“We don’t have the Laconian supplies or the repair equipment or the expertise. And we’ve been running the hell out of her for years. She’s a good ship, but she’s showing some age.” Suddenly, a ship comes through the Freehold gate. It's the Sparrowhawk. I feel like Leviathan Falls is really disregarding the space takes time idea that was running through the core of this series. They cross the slow zone in the space of a single conversation, etc. Anyway, the Sparrowhawk transmits to the whole system, and it's not encrypted. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 17 posted:“This message is for Naomi Nagata. My name is Anton Trejo. I think you know who I am and the situation we’re both in. It’s past time that you and I talk. I would like to propose an alliance . . .” This is the plan that Trejo wishes he had the balls to try. Yes, really. Chapter Eighteen: Jim Trejo's message puts Jim on the, sigh, verge of a panic attack. Trejo outlines his plan: the ring space and the unknown entities attacking humanity are the true threat. He has read Naomi's document about the safe usage protocols and he thinks it's great. He's willing to put the protocols in place and establish a method of enforcement to do so. "On behalf of Laconia and High Consul Duarte, I am offering the underground not just armistice but collaboration." Trejo wants to end the fighting. He will put two Laconian destroyers in the ring space, even if it risks their destruction, to enforce Naomi's transit protocol. They will not take aggressive action, nor will they limit or control trade. He will "guarantee the safety of any ship making use of the gates, and grant blanket amnesty for the underground." The Derecho will be immediately reassigned to that role. And all Trejo wants is Teresa Duarte. He says she's not in any danger. They just want her home. Jim... has a full on PTSD episode. He flashes back to the Laconia State Building and how powerless he felt. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 18 posted:He’d done so much, tried so hard, and accomplished so little. Holden thinks Laconia is coming to torture him again. Because, apparently, that happened. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 18 posted:And now they were coming to ask their questions and drown his answers out with pain until he’d say anything. Or they wouldn’t ask anything, they’d just beat him until he understood that he was at their mercy, and they were merciless. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 18 posted:But the honeymoon faded, and the version of him it left behind was scarred and broken. He didn’t feel weak. He felt annihilated. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 18 posted:Years were gone. Years of prison and torture, which had been bad, and of pretending to be an honored guest while the threat of death invisibly followed one step behind. The dancing bear years. They’d been the worst because they’d broken down his sense of himself. Of who he was. Of what was true. The Jim Holden who had tripped the alarms in Medina Station was gone. The Jim who’d schemed against Cortázar and for Elvi Okoye had been half a lie from the start. He was all that was left. As much as I like the attempt, honestly, it's a loving joke. Naomi comes by. She says Trejo is surrendering. Holden says it's only if he gets to hold the police force. Naomi says it's everything she wants: the underground will be a new Transport Union, free of the Laconian hierarchy, and the authority to deny passage to any Laconian ship. And she thinks it is bullshit. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 18 posted:“But . . . How else do peace treaties get made? That happens, doesn’t it? History’s full of wars that ended because people chose to end them. We hurt Laconia badly. We broke the construction platforms, and they’re not coming back. Not anytime soon. Duarte was the architect of the whole thing, and he’s off the board. The glitches where people turn off or the rules of physics change? They’re the threat.” This is why I think we've seen the horrible stuff they apparently did to Holden, and why our perspective character for them is Tanaka -- Naomi is about to get everything she wants, and Laconia in the two preceding books was the devil who snared you with what you wanted. Duarte didn't lie. Duarte had no need to lie. He would've let her live out her days with Holden in their golden cage, and she would've been happy. But that needs to be recontextualized. Holden was, in fact, tortured. If Holden was tortured, this makes Duarte a duplicitous tyrant. And this is why I think they made Tanaka our Laconian viewpoint, because she is a liar, too. She even spells it out in her first chapter. On the outside, she's But, this gives us a problem: how the gently caress can this plot proceed if Trejo surrenders to Naomi? It can't. Holden says if they don't accept, they'll be right back where they are, with the Derecho about to start a massacre. Teresa says they can just hand her over. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 18 posted:Jim raised his hand like a student in a classroom. “Are you saying that you want to go back?” Alex points out that it could be a ruse to get the Rocinante to reveal itself, and if they have to dock somewhere to hand Teresa over, then that exposes them to Laconian marines. Jim thinks that Teresa trusts Trejo, and wonders if her knowledge of Trejo is a better guide than his distrust of the man. Given Holden going into flashbacks and PTSD episodes pretty quickly, I think it's fair to say that, yes, it might be. Alex says that Trejo's defection from Mars means they can't trust him now, however. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 18 posted:“That’s not the only question,” Amos said. “If we hand over Tiny, are we still the good guys? That’s a question too.” Naomi shakes her head and shoots the plan down. The way she sees it, this is Trejo trying to make them responsible for whatever action he takes next (????) and that, if they do what he says, they'll "be saving all the people he would kill to punish me if I didn't." ??????? Leviathan Falls, Chapter 18 posted:Amos’ laugh was almost the same timbre and cadence as Muskrat’s little bark. When he spoke, he was mimicking the soft, threatening whine of an abusive lover. “Look what you made me do, baby. Why do you have to make me so mad?” Leviathan Falls, Chapter 18 posted:“That’s it,” Naomi said. “I couldn’t put my finger on it, but that’s why I can’t do this. He’s holding a gun to their heads and then pretending that I’m the only one who can decide whether he pulls the trigger. That’s not a trust exercise. It’s just another threat.” If I had to point to one issue at the heart of The Expanse, it's that I'm not sure the Coreys believe in heroism. They don't believe in sacrificing your ideals for the benefit of others. They don't believe, really, that situations can be messy and terrible and sometimes the best thing you can do is sacrifice your pride or desires for the greater good. The bad guys are clear cut -- they're dumb domestic abusers who you can shoot in the face and quip about. The bad guys are the ones appealing to a greater good. The good guys are the ones who want everything to remain the same and won't brook their world being disrupted. Drummer throwing thousands of lives away on multiple occasions is seen as this weird strategic necessity instead of being an awful tragedy. When faced with getting everything she wanted, just the cost of her pride and one little girl going back to her homeworld, the crew of the Rocinante basically go 'that's unfair.' At the end of the day, the only real responsibility anyone has is to their immediate circle. The crew of the Rocinante have a responsibility to their 'found family', and that's it. Oh, it's terrible that the people of Freehold might die, but that's entirely on Trejo. The fact he's making his terms clear, as horrible as they are, are just a nth-dimensional chess move to make you feel bad. Don't worry about systems. Don't worry about structures. Don't worry about humanity. Only care about what's within your immediate arms reach, dear reader, and pay no mind to all the things that you may be complicit in--and that, perhaps, you could stop. Bystanders can't be culpable, remember? No, don't act. You might fail. Just keep your head down and rest assured that, by not acting, you're not culpable. Naomi is getting everything she wanted, and that can't happen, so the authors need to put the situation through some pretty twisted logic to ensure Naomi won't accept it. Does it matter if there's mail under the velvet glove, if refusal (which you wouldn't do, because this is everything you wanted) would result in hypothetical deaths? It's insane. It's silly! It only makes sense if you assume Trejo is a liar and will take Teresa and then kill everyone anyway. It's especially silly when, in a few chapters, things will go very wrong and the Rocinante crew will go, "Well poo poo, guess Trejo was a man of his word like everyone thought, we made the wrong call, wish we'd taken the deal." And then they tell Trejo they're accepting it, actually, and he's like "Great, took a while but I'm glad we got it sorted out." Leviathan Falls, Chapter 18 posted:“Don’t forget the surrender. The amnesty,” Jim said. “There’s a carrot along with the stick.” Yes, Teresa wouldn't go back to Laconia if it was an ideal world. But it's not an ideal world, and she just told you that she's willing to go if it means people won't die. More to the point, Teresa is a child. Are you really willing to let a hundred thousand people die because you're honoring the wishes of a child? Something's really falling apart here. The storytelling logic and continuity feels absolutely tortured. Trejo's plan, Operation Ballsy, is probably on the level because I can't see Trejo being like, "Okay, Tanaka, it's time to do something crazy and completely balls to the wall: we're going to lie to Naomi Nagata." Naomi basically decides you can't trust anyone within the Laconian hierarchy, so, what was the point of bringing them to the negotiating table? How are you going to end this conflict? Do you really think Trejo is going to give you a better offer when you refuse this? This links a little to the brief stuff about heroism. For all their Twitter-brand cynicism and humanitarianism, the Coreys don't really understand realpolitik. Oh, they know it's bad, sure. They think it'd be great if politicians could just do the good thing and not the bad thing. But they don't understand what it means for Trejo to make this offer, and what refusal will entail. Trejo's position will not reduce after wiping out Freehold and the Storm and the Rocinante. Lip service to po-faced 'nothing is fun, everything sucks' "realism" is, uh, fun. Actually engaging with what that means for the characters and their decisions is not. And like, the Coreys must know how shaky this part is is because they're trying so hard to root it in character motivations and biases. Holden knows the Laconians are basically sadists. They're reaching into Amos' brain and hammering the PROTECT CHILDREN neurons as hard as they can. Alex brings up Trejo's treachery. Anyway, the crew figure they have two "mostly okay" ships. If they evacuate Draper Station, then the Derecho will give chase as it will no longer have reason to bomb Freehold. Holden tries to leave the room they're in and, huh, they're under emergency lockdown. Naomi calls Jillian. Jillian says... Well, Jillian says that while Naomi is the leader of the "civilian branch of the underground" that this matter with Trejo is a "military matter" and she's all for the exchange of a thousand lives for "one girl who they aren't even going to hurt." Naomi counters that Trejo won't just walk away. Jillian says that, based on their intel, he will. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 18 posted:“You don’t get to make that call,” Naomi said. “That’s my job.” And this feels like something I've seen half a dozen times on Battlestar Galactica. Adama and Roslin coming up with this split of command in the miniseries, and then a bunch of grim discussions where Adama basically says those lines verbatim: I'm captain of the Galactica, I have authority over military decisions, and this is a military decision. Sticking around to save Kara. Roslin sending Kara back to Caprica. The mutiny. Probably more. Alex asks Jillian not to go through with it. Jillian says Bobbie would do it. Amos says she wouldn't. Jillian says the Sparrowhawk is incoming with a Laconian representative (gee, sending Tanaka in will be a good idea which won't go wrong) and the Rocinante crew are being restricted to their quarters until the handover is complete. Jim and Teresa nod to each other. Chapter Nineteen: Kit And, so, we hop over to Kit. He and his family are in a ship called the Preiss. They're heading to Nieuwestad. Kit thinks about the other people on the ship. Kit sends a message to Alex. They've been on the float for five days. He cracks some jokes about divorce and living on a ship and wonders about deleting them. Everything is going according to plan, though. Then, bad news. A "blink" in the San Esteban system. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 19 posted:Kit felt his gut tighten, but only a little. He’d been through a half dozen rounds of the aliens from inside the rings turning off his mind for him. Everyone in Sol had. Anyway, Rohi says that everyone in San Esteban is dead. If you're curious, no it's not a system we've ever heard of. Chapter Twenty: Elvi But luckily, Elvi is here to give us some exposition. San Esteban was one of the first wave of colonial settlements. Eighteen million people had lived there and it was self-sufficient. Everyone is dead, but there are corpses. Elvi listens to Holden discussing his hallucination/vision on the ring station with who I assume is a Laconian interrogator. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 20 posted:Tell me about the systems going dark, the interrogator said. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 20 posted:Because, Elvi thought, the builders or the Romans or the space jellyfish—the beings of light—hadn’t known what it was to be alone since they’d learned to glow in that ancient, freezing ocean. They were individuals and they were a unity. A superorganism, connected as intimately as she was with her own limbs and organs. Anyway, Fayez pops in and says Laconia has brought through a relief drone to resupply the Falcon. Elvi says she's listening to Holden's Laconia files. She's apparently comparing them to earlier recordings he made when the gates opened. She says she's figured out how everyone died in the San Esteban system, though. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 20 posted:“An uptick in salt precipitates that matches when everyone died,” Elvi said. “It looks like the mechanism the dark gods figured out is to make ionic bonds just a tiny bit stickier. It lasted just long enough to shut down neurons...” Leviathan Falls, Chapter 20 posted:“The builders didn’t go look. They didn’t have to. They were already connected. When they lost a system, they knew there was no one there anymore. They used the gates to shove matter around when they needed to, but that was like us moving food through our guts. It was barely even conscious for them anymore. It wasn’t something they scheduled or had trade routes for. So if there was nothing in a system to support, there’s no traffic to support it.” Could also just be that the poison killed all the rats it could, and more rats moved in. Fayez says it could be within their error bars. Elvi says she'll need to run more experiments with Cara. Fayez is like, hey, do you ever think you're like Cortazar, keeping them in cages and using them to run tests? Fayez thinks she's violating ethical standards. Elvi is like, yeah, I am. She brings up the story of Omelas, the story about a beautiful land where everything is utopic providing one child is left to confusion and misery. Jeez. Elvi, of course, does the Coreyian thing where she's like... Leviathan Falls, Chapter 20 posted:“This isn’t that,” Elvi said. “I’m working for an authoritarian dictator in a system where people are suffering and screwing each other over and killing each other. I’m compromising my safety and the safety of the people who work for me by smuggling my research to my boss’s political enemies. We’re not doing anything here to make a beautiful, gracious, pleasant utopia. If we win, the lives we save will be the same mix of poo poo, frustration, and absurdity that they’ve always been.” I've said before that I really felt during my first reading that there were these flashes that I was wrong about my assumed safe landing. That, perhaps, Leviathan Falls was going to end in the death of everything. No one would stop the dark gods. Maybe it was wrong to try. The grueling despair of the Holden chapters, for example. The fact that the plot so far is just 'Let's keep Teresa out of Laconia's hands for one more day.' Leviathan Falls, Chapter 20 posted:“The child in the story was being sacrificed for a quality of life. If I’m sacrificing Cara, and I acknowledge that I may be doing that, it’s not for quality. It’s for quantity. If I have to lose her in order to keep the quantity of human life from going to zero? It’s cheap. If it costs everything, it’s still a good trade.” Fayez just acquiesces and goes "okay." He says, with 234 highlights: Leviathan Falls, Chapter 20 posted:“Every miracle we’ve pulled off, we’ve done it using primates. Just because we’re capable of mind-blowing wonders doesn’t mean we aren’t still sex-and-murder machines. The organism doesn’t change.” I think it's important to note that we are about 40% of our way through the final novel of this nine books series at this point.
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Mar 24, 2024 07:52
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Basically, the events of Chapter 18 make me think of two things. One is the end of this novel, because it's a somewhat similar situation, and it relates to the second. The second is to go back to the epilogue of Leviathan Wakes:Leviathan Wakes, Epilogue posted:“That’s what got us here,” Holden said. “Icons. Symbols. People without names. All of those Protogen scientists were thinking about biomass and populations. Not Mary who worked in supply and raised flowers in her spare time. None of them killed her.” There're, presumably, a lot of Marys on Freehold. What do you think Holden and the crew of the Rocinante would say to Freehold Mary's husband, should he come find them after the Derecho bombards the planet, and ask them why they didn't hand over Teresa? All of those nameless people on Freehold. The Rocinante crew were thinking about ideological purity and scrying intent. Not Mary who worked in supply and raised flowers in her spare time. None of them killed her. Sure, they've come along way over thirty years, but one wonders if it's been to the best result. And, of course, none of this matters. This isn't a series where characters reckon with things. The reason why it passes by so easily is because the authors know it's not an actual threat.
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Mar 24, 2024 09:38
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The talk about the Builders reminds me of another alien species in fiction, the Festum. From Fafner In The Azure, they're towering, golden-skinned monstrosities who search out sentient life and attack it, and are casually able to warp space. They are a hivemind like the Builders, though in their case it is because they are the equivilant of the Dark Gods in Expanse - the Festums are just fingers of an extra-dimensional being that are slowly becoming distinct being through exposure to reality and living beings - mostly through consuming them and absorbing their everything. And the main thrust of the show is grappling with an enemy that is utterly inhuman and unreal but is slowly becoming more human and real in every way possible.Milkfred E. Moore posted:Basically, the events of Chapter 18 make me think of two things. One is the end of this novel, because it's a somewhat similar situation, and it relates to the second. The second is to go back to the epilogue of Leviathan Wakes: It is very strange as it seems like the easiest trolley problem ever...
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Mar 24, 2024 21:07
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Leviathan Falls, Chapters Interlude 3 - 24 Things get bloody at Draper Station, and then Duarte reveals himself with one hell of a bang. Interlude: The Dreamer (3) It's another Dreamer interlude, so, you know what that means. Leviathan Falls, The Dreamer (3) posted:The dreamer falls purposefully into dream and dream and dream, swimmingly layer on layer on layer on the abyss. She is threefold, and one still missing, and the dream tells her about the unfolding across the emptiness and of the light of stars and cells and minds, the flicker that draws them like songs and kisses because their kisses were all light. Chapter Twenty-One: Tanaka Jillian has sent a message to Tanaka. She will accept one envoy to come to Draper Station and take custody of Teresa Duarte. Both Tanaka and Mugabo see Jillian as inexperienced and green. Both of them wonder why Jillian is talking and not Bobbie or Naomi. It turns out they already knew the Rocinante had gone to Freehold. Tanaka says she'll go get the girl. Apparently, Tanaka did not pack her fast scout suit (why?) but, luckily, the Sparrowhawk is carrying a "latest-generation assault suit." It has two Gatling guns, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and reminds us that the suit itself is strong enough to let her rip a human limb from limb. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 21 posted:It was the pinnacle of Laconian design engineering, and in her hands it could clear a base like Draper Station without assistance. As long as she didn’t step in front of any PDCs. Tanaka drops down to the base and enters. Jillian greets her with four bodyguards. Tanaka pops the safeties off her weapons. Jillian says that Trejo gave his word that, if they give them the girl, then all Laconian forces will withdraw. Tanaka points out that the girl isn't here. Jillian says she needs "more than vague assurances that you are acting in good faith." Tanaka wonders where Nagata is. Jillian tries the 'I'm the military boss' thing, which Tanaka isn't impressed by. Jillian doesn't like Tanaka's tone, and points out her assault suit isn't exactly a sign of good faith. Of course, meeting a solitary envoy with four armed bodyguards and not the person you agreed to hand over probably isn't a sign of good faith either, right? Tanaka opens fire. She hits everyone but Jillian, killing them instantly. Tanaka wanders through the station killing basically everyone. She imagines herself telling Holden and his crew that this is their fault. At some point, Tanaka is caught by surprise by three Belters and an improvised gas tank missile, and it does a bunch of damage to her suit and gives her four broken ribs and a busted shoulder. She kills them. Then, Tanaka says that whoever beings her Teresa Duarte will live, and everyone else will die. Chapter Twenty-Two: Jillian Jillian knew she had hosed up from the moment Tanaka had stepped into the base. She calls up Alex and says she made a mistake. She tells him to get his crew to the Rocinante and get out. Jillian keeps moving, hoping Tanaka gives chase. She does. Jillian orders the Storm to prepare for emergency launch. Luckily, "something" distracts Tanaka, and this allows Jillian to get dome distance from her. Tanaka gets there just as Jillian gets onboard, but her RPG can't penetrate the airlock door. The Rocinante has not yet launched. Jillian orders the Storm to launch and engage the Sparrowhawk. The Sparrowhawk shoots the torpedoes down but does not engage further. The Rocinante clears Draper Station. Jillian calls up Alex. He says they're fine. Jillian tells them to head straight for the gate and she'll buy as much time as she can. Mugabo hails them and advises them to surrender. Jillian is like, pfft, Tanaka just made it clear how much Laconian honor is worth (but, I mean, you didn't exactly have the girl waiting...) Jillian is glad that she'll get the opportunity to kill Mugabo. Chapter Twenty-Three: Jim The Rocinante is burning hard. The Sparrowhawk has been destroyed but the Storm has been reduced to a debris field. There's a real echo of Battlestar Galactica here, a second one, I guess. Where they blow up the more advanced, tougher warship Pegasus because the hero ship is the aging Galactica and so it must survive. Holden seems more bothered by the burn than Naomi. Naomi watches the replay of the battle. The Storm had destroyed the Sparrowhawk, then charged the Derecho. The Derecho took some hits, but the Storm was destroyed. Naomi is like, what the heck, I thought Trejo was a man of his word. Jim says he is, but that Tanaka was responsible, even though he was "pretty sure" he killed her back on New Egypt. You didn't even check, Jim! Interestingly, Teresa didn't tell them that Tanaka was there (unless it happened between pages.) Jim says she saved them. Naomi says that from the moment she talked with Laconia, she'd killed Draper Station as Laconia would never just forget what the underground had there. Jim and Naomi argue. It gets weird. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 23 posted:“They were going to bomb the cities. People she knows and loves. Her family.”  Alex shows up and says the Derecho could still catch them. Naomi says they need to pick up Tanaka first. Teresa calls up and says Amos is having another seizure. In the medbay, Jim says Amos was out for about thirty minutes. Amos is just like, oh yeah, this is happening because Elvi's doing something with Cara and we're all connected. He likens it to listening to someone in the next cabin over. There's three of them -- Amos, the girl, and the brother, Jim says. Amos isn't so sure. They agree they did the right thing in keeping Teresa. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 23 posted:“I know,” Jim said with a sigh. “It’s going to be a problem, though. I don’t see Tanaka giving up.” Chapter Twenty-Four: The Lighthouse and the Keeper Huh, weird title. It turns out Tanaka had been considering doing an art program and had been in university at the age of sixteen. I guess that explains the brief painting thing back in her first chapter. She's thinking about a painting at the moment. She meets the captain of the Derecho, Botton. They can't catch up to the Rocinante in Freehold, or until they leave the ring space, but they'll be able to track the drive trail. We hop over Ekko aboard the cargo vessel Forgiveness. He's relaying a message to his major shareholder, Mallia Curran. They're going to need to go through the gate at speed. Meanwhile, the crew of the Rocinante are keeping ahead of the Derecho. They think about heading for the Nuriel system, but Amos says they have to go see Elvi, because he feels a lot like a plot device at this point. Holden tells Alex to plot the fastest course to Adro. Kit wakes up. They're a few hours out from the gate. His wife, Rohi, wonders if they weren't supposed to head out to other planets, other stars. Back on the Rocinante, Alex messages them to prepare for transit. Naomi points out there's too many ships preparing to transit. The Tyrant's Folly, the Taif, and the Forgiveness. One of them, at least, will go dutchman. But the Rocinante should be fine. Should be. Ekko: the Forgiveness continues toward the gate. Holden: the Rocinante burns toward the Adro gate. There's this weird idea that I don't think we've seen before that being 'on the juice' makes it hard to think, with multiple people forgetting thing mid-sentence. Naomi thinks she should've taken Trejo's offer and that humans have shortsighted these coded in their DNA. Tanaka: the Derecho passes through the Freehold gate. They appear to have lost the Rocinante's trail, and something is happening at the Sol gate. Kit: Kit's child, Bakari, is crying. Kit is singing to him -- and their ship goes dutchman. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 24 posted:The darkness whirled toward him, scattering him. Scattering his son. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 24 posted:Something happened to Tanaka that felt like waking up without falling asleep first. Her awareness shifted, opened, became something it hadn’t been a moment before. She was in her crash couch, but she was also in the medical bay with her head in excruciating pain, and in Botton’s cabin with a bulb of whiskey in his hand and the burn of it in his throat. She saw through a thousand sets of eyes, felt a thousand different bodies, knew herself by a thousand different names. Holden: they reach the Adro system and head for the Falcon and Elvi. Apparently, the juice only makes you "eight percent less likely to stroke out." I can only assume they mean eighty percent. Holden's in the autodoc as a consequence of their hard burn, Naomi (despite being a Belter) doesn't need it. He wonders if Tanaka's ship went dutchman. Naomi thinks all they need to do is cooperate and they'd fix the dutchman issue without any sense of irony. Alex gives them a message and tells them look at the ring gate. The Adro gate is no longer dark like all the gates, but lit up bright and surrounded by an aurora of energetic particles. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 24 posted:“Amos?” Jim said. “Are you looking at this?” The end of this chapter marks the exact halfway point of this novel, and it seems like the real plot is about to begin. What is Duarte up to? Is he going to announce himself to the universe as their savior? And what's with the new functioning of the gates? And was any of this prior half of the novel even necessary? Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Apr 2, 2024 |
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Apr 1, 2024 05:00
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An Interlude Of My OwnTy Franck, 2017 posted:"The first two and a half games promised so much and set up such a fantastic universe, and then the end of the third one, it just... It made everything that had come before irrelevant. It was just a loving terrible ending," Franck said. "It really felt like there was a fantastic ending that I had been promised, and then when I got to it... You know what? The ending of Mass Effect for me was like the ending of Lost, where [you] became aware that they really didn't know where they were going the whole time and they'd kind of just been making things up.
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Apr 1, 2024 14:38
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Normally I'd have some poo poo to talk about some creative decision the Coreys made but I want to say nice things insteadquote:Something happened to Tanaka that felt like waking up without falling asleep first. This sentence is both very Corey (describing a weird thing using a kind of prosaic metaphor) and...pretty good? It's an intuitive way to describe a very unintuitive thing, becoming more aware. We experience a lot of ways to become less aware, like drinking or falling asleep, but we don't have a lot of the opposite experience. Tanaka going doomguy on the entire resistance base is also something she probably needed more of to work as a character. The problem is it's painted as something vindictive, a spiteful retaliation, so it still makes her come off as The Abuser Villain we've had all series...I dunno. Milky, you've got a good voice for recaps. You're good at this!
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Apr 1, 2024 14:40
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General Battuta posted:Milky, you've got a good voice for recaps. You're good at this! Thanks! Sometimes I can be a bit cheeky, but this thread really is a labor of love and respect. I think the best way to appreciate something as it is, flaws and all, and I try to write as truthfully as possible as a result. But I'm also aware that people can interpret what I consider as 'mild ribbing' as, uh, a decade-long hate campaign. A lot of the time I'm more in conversation with the aura around the work than the work itself. I think Leviathan Falls is full of odd creative decisions, but I can't say I wouldn't make the same ones if I hadn't been under the same circumstances the Coreys were. I'll talk more about the Mass Effect 3 comparisons as we close in on the climax because Franck's comments are wonderfully ironic given that the comparison was pretty common after release. That said, I actually think certain elements of the ending of this novel were perhaps intended for Abaddon's Gate -- but, well, more on that later. If there's a strength to the Corey team, it is that they can make everything sound intuitive. I've mentioned before they're able to make their exposition feel invisible, even if that is more a strength of the first few books, and I think it relates to that ability. However, I think the dark side of that ability is the common thread of how unrelentingly... Well, it's not even dour, is it? Mundane, tedious, ho-hum, beige. Yet, they can still make things weirdly straightforward and memorable (such as with the bullets and the dutchman events) or, yes, Tanaka's first moment of awareness there. Which makes it a shame that the Elvi and dreamer stuff so far is so murky and obtuse. Tanaka as Doomguy is... I like that she's a soldier who is getting screwed around with, and she is someone you should not screw with. You gently caress around, Jillian, and you find out. It's hard not to compare it to Drummer and the Tempest. When a Laconian officer steps through the airlock in a heavy assault suit, it's not brave to try and dictate terms while you're seemingly not honoring the ones you accepted -- it's stupid. That Naomi dismisses the base and everyone in it as seemingly dead anyway is surprisingly heartless. I think the problem with it is more conceptual. A chapter of Tanaka going ham on everyone in the base is a tough sell because we already know she's a violent killer and we already dislike her for it. So, she kills a bunch of faceless resistance guys and it doesn't even feel like the story is that interested in it. It could be harrowing if we know the crew of Draper Base and can recognise, say, that Tanaka is cutting Caspar in half with her miniguns, but they're just goons. I understand that Tanaka is doing something terrible, but I also don't care that she is. It's a shame. It's also a shame because I think Tanaka needs a win around here, but destroying Draper Base and the Storm don't really feel like it. It reminds me of the feeling I get from Bobbie's death, this desire to return the series to the crew of the Rocinante, on their own in the big universe. Tanaka was just the vehicle to make that happen. Maybe in a grittier, more epic ending it would've been more of an event. Jillian dies, and someone we know (Amos, Alex, Bobbie?) is the one to catch Tanaka by surprise and ensure the Rocinante can escape. But then I feel like we roll back over to what is surely one of the core pillars of the series, that they're cinematic space opera novels which are very self-aware they are cinematic space opera novels, and so it is "unrealistic" to have one of the heroes lure the bad guy into a trap so the others can escape at the cost of their own life. Or, in a deep irony, maybe it's just okay to sacrifice the Marys but not the found family. But then you remember how this novel ends and--
Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Apr 2, 2024 |
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Apr 2, 2024 02:41
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I know I always make comparisons to other things, but the whole part with Tanaka reminded me heavily of the climax of Strategic Armored Infantry. Not in a way that makes me think the Coreys saw it like with Zone of the Enders, but in aa "this did that idea better". Where the villain decides to drop all of his pretenses and goes on a gleeful murder spree on the ship that that everyone thought was the villian's ship, but he had only been using them to get at the heroes.The moment the started questioning why the villain wanted them to go after a ship that they just discovered was just a training ship and wasn't secretly transporting a new weapon reveals that they are actually just as much the villain's victims as anyone else and he uses his control over the automated systems to kill everyone and then goes from room to room, executing the helpless survivors. And it's very effective because it's a very horrible betrayal of people who had been loyal to him, especially combined with the reveal that the protagonist's side were the actual villains in the conflict. With that said, I agree with General Battuta, the recaps are extremely good, and I wish I could do it half as well as you.
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Apr 2, 2024 10:25
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quote:However, I think the dark side of that ability is the common thread of how unrelentingly... Well, it's not even dour, is it? Mundane, tedious, ho-hum, beige. I think this is actually really core to the books' (unintended?) philosophy, and is why I came to dislike them so much more returning to them years later. But will let the series wrap up first! Does anyone ever, at any point in the books, think of space as beautiful? Or Earth, or any of the colony worlds? Hell, is there even any sense that anything was lost when Earth was glassed in the sense of its history, natural beauty or culture, instead of just 'billions dead - that's a million times worse than a hundred million!!'
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Apr 2, 2024 21:24
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Strategic Tea posted:I think this is actually really core to the books' (unintended?) philosophy, and is why I came to dislike them so much more returning to them years later. But will let the series wrap up first! It does seem like the Expanse is largely a No-Fun zone with regards to the place that they all live. That's not necessarily bad, it is how a lot of 'everyone lives in space' stories handle living in space. But typically in those, the people living in space will still feel a deep connection to Earth, because it is the one 'kind place' to humanity, compared to space and everything in it.
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Apr 2, 2024 21:42
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Strategic Tea posted:I think this is actually really core to the books' (unintended?) philosophy, and is why I came to dislike them so much more returning to them years later. But will let the series wrap up first! I got curious about this and had a quick look, and I'm going to say 'probably not.' I could've sworn Prax had a moment where he thought space was beautiful, but I couldn't find it. Elvi seems to be the only character who thinks of anything as beautiful, and that's when she's going around Ilus and it's just like, wow, this place is so beautiful in that sort of detached awareness. There's a recurring thing where beauty is associated with fear or severity, which lines up with Eros' descent to Venus probably being the event that's most 'beautiful' in the series. Kchama posted:I know I always make comparisons to other things, but the whole part with Tanaka reminded me heavily of the climax of Strategic Armored Infantry. Not in a way that makes me think the Coreys saw it like with Zone of the Enders, but in aa "this did that idea better". Where the villain decides to drop all of his pretenses and goes on a gleeful murder spree on the ship that that everyone thought was the villian's ship, but he had only been using them to get at the heroes.The moment the started questioning why the villain wanted them to go after a ship that they just discovered was just a training ship and wasn't secretly transporting a new weapon reveals that they are actually just as much the villain's victims as anyone else and he uses his control over the automated systems to kill everyone and then goes from room to room, executing the helpless survivors. Aw, thanks! If you're curious about another longform recap I've done, I covered the Terminator TV series The Sarah Connor Chronicles a few years ago. It's similar to this one in a lot of ways, I think: interesting ideas, variable execution rate, but I think TSCC has these wild swings of ambition and much more to say and rewards paying close attention than The Expanse does. I like to think it's the most detailed recap/analysis/reading one could find of that series. I just skimmed a few posts in that thread and think my thoughts hold up. It's easily the best Terminator sequel since T2, notable because of how much everything post T3 tried to nick from it (and do worse.) It was a series before its time and, as I write this post, its bizarre genre-cross of a future sci-fi apocalypse drama and a psychological family drama about raising the messiah was probably a substantial influence on me, haha. I wanted to talk a little more about Tanaka's massacre, too. The stuff you say about Strategic Armored Infantry, which I haven't seen, is basically correct. A scene like this has to say something. Going by the text, this is the scene where Tanaka drops her professional soldier mask and openly indulges in the sadism and bloodlust we've seen 'behind closed doors' with that one boytoy from earlier and the helpless animals. The problem is, the Coreys have hit that button so repeatedly and obviously that it makes this scene feel like an odd repeat of another chapter that didn't actually happen. The fact she's visiting it on, essentially, a faceless mass across about a single paragraph does a lot to undercut it, too. This is about all we get: Leviathan Falls, Chapter 21 posted:Corridor by corridor, meter by meter, Tanaka moved through the station. She headed toward the large clumps of heartbeats first. Hoping that the center of the largest resistance would be the heroes of the Rocinante, but it never was. The resistance fighters were tenacious and brave, Tanaka would give them that. They came at her with little regard for their own safety, and some of the counterattacks had a real cunning to them. Though, given that her rampage had left little indication surrendering would lead to safety, she’d have been doing exactly the same thing in their situation. And everywhere she went, the seventy-meter range of her heartbeat detector found new pockets of people, hiding or preparing to fight. One by one, she went to them all, offering them amnesty if they put down their guns and turned over the girl. Not that she expected them to. Not that she’d necessarily stop shooting if they did. 'Show don't tell' is practically a cliche when it comes to writing advice, and I think it is better understood as 'Show don't tell (what is interesting)' and I think Tanaka's massacre should be the most interesting thing past the failed negotiations. The resistance fighters were tenacious and brave -- how? What were their cunning counterattacks against her assault suit? And there's a part of me that thinks there's something dissonant between 'Tanaka was on a rampage', 'Tanaka figures Teresa can survive getting winged by her bullets', and 'Tanaka offered amnesty before killing each group.' Given that Tanaka is an experienced combat officer who has, from memory, cleared stations before, I think she's very much the sort to just sum it all up like that -- but I think that paragraph is a touch too detached and, well, 'tell-y.' I don't know. Violence is a funny thing in fiction. I don't like stories that throw in action as a bit of a speed bump to make sure the reader is paying attention on long stretches. But this feels like that. It also combines with that one line of Holden's that has stuck with me from when I first read Leviathan Wakes, the line about Protogen's evil being because they didn't see people as, well, people. But from Persepolis Rising onward, there's been this undercurrent of the 'good guys' (Drummer, Naomi, Jillian) needing to just bite the bullet and send people into fights they can't win because the cause is just. Isn't it the same mindset? Their ends don't justify the means, but we're built different. Naomi's admonishment of Jillian's "big heroic sacrifice" and the inevitable loss of Draper Station sticks out to me because Naomi's concern isn't that it happened, it's that it didn't really achieve anything. it brings to mind Infinity War where the biggest rebuke Thanos' insane plan gets is "You don't know that will work" and characters angrily talk about 'not trading lives' to avoid sacrificing one person, then do just that (except they're nameless dudes.) Then, there's the authorial side of things, the process. Who writes what? Do they write chapters out of order? Did they write, say, Jillian's chapter about escaping Tanaka before they needed to fill in Tanaka's part of the attack? I believe Leviathan Falls was delayed for some months, and I wonder if that was due to rewrites. Maybe it comes back to the bad guys not getting to be 'cool' and, like it or not, extreme displays of violence can be as cool as they are awful. That'd align with the weirdness that despite her seventy-something meter range heartbeat detector, three people sneak up on her with a improvised missile and hit her with it before she can even turn around. Returning to TSCC for a moment, the thing I really like about that series, as janky as it is at times, is that it is trying to say a lot about empathy, communication, love and faith and how it relates between people and killer robots who can become people. It's likely that the plot would've been resolved by extending some of that to Skynet in the present. Whereas I don't think I'll ever be able to look past, in the authors' own words, that The Expanse is just "We're spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle." Not humane, not loving, not just. There's a lot of ways you can read that usage of gentle, and I don't think any of them are as desirable as the authors hope.
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Apr 2, 2024 23:50
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Man the heartbeat detector meme has really made it big.
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Apr 3, 2024 00:42
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:
I kept waiting for this to come up ever since it was mentioned in PR. But, it just never does. Like you have Tanaka the power armor wearing bad guy right there! to do something cool with this idea, and just... nothing. What a shame.
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Apr 3, 2024 05:40
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banned from Starbucks posted:I kept waiting for this to come up ever since it was mentioned in PR. But, it just never does. Like you have Tanaka the power armor wearing bad guy right there! to do something cool with this idea, and just... nothing. What a shame. The opening of Persepolis Rising makes it seem like the Laconian Empire is practically dependent on the protomolecule. As if The Pen is this massive facility where people and animals go into and protomolecule comes out which they're putting in armor and weapons and ships and High Consuls. But it isn't, really. It's kind of like how I thought it'd be neat if the Laconian ships were made used protomolecule-infused brains as crew or something, because then you'd get around the whole population thing and there'd be this uncomfortable idea of weird mad science being baked into almost every aspect of the Laconian military or something while being a bit of an extension of Protogen and stuff. But. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 25 - 28 It all comes tumbling down, tumbling down, tumbling down... for Tanaka. Meanwhile, Amos plays detective and Elvi develops a curious case of ESP. Chapter Twenty-Five: Tanaka There's a particular thing the Coreys like to do, and I wonder if it is indicative of who is writing a given chapter. That is, the sort of paragraph we seem below. These 'the captain of the...' openings aren't as common as I first thought (but there was one back in Chapter 17 of this very novel, too) but they like to do thing thing that's basically what follows: Leviathan Falls, Chapter 25 posted:The captain of the Preiss was a flat-faced, pale-skinned man with a stubble-length beard that didn’t hide his double chin. He’d spent two decades ferrying colonists to new worlds, and now he floated in Tanaka’s cabin with a vague look on his face. He should have been frightened. He only seemed stunned. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 17 posted:The captain of the Laconian destroyer Rising Derecho had a pleasant face. Thin, high cheeks and a little pencil mustache that reminded Naomi of old entertainment feeds about the fight for Martian independence. His eyes were dark brown, his skin only a little lighter. He had the trick of making threats while being pained at the necessity of doing it. Babylon's Ashes, Chapter 21 posted:The captain of the Proteus was a dark-skinned man with wide-set eyes and broad, expressive lips. His uniform was Martian, except for its insignia. Not taller than Jakulski, probably, and comfortable moving in zero g. Tanaka is impatiently talking with the captain of the Preiss. The Preiss' captain is saying that taking drugs was nothing like what just happened. It seems like the Derecho has been retasked to figure out what just happened as their crews are boarding a bunch of ships and getting info from their sensors and comms. No one seems to know what saved the Preiss. Tanaka asks them is anything is different about their ship or its cargo, but nothing else. Tanaka asks him what he experienced and he talks about "being in the ocean, but the water was other people." And, yeah, I'm increasingly certain that the Coreys figured that having Duarte implement the Human Instrumentality Project was a good idea. Tanaka asks him what he remembers of it, but it's only scraps. Tanaka considers her own experience had been like a whiteout. She'd been in a "hurricane of unfamiliar consciousness" and by the time she remembered who she was, the Derecho had gone into automatic lockdown. Tanaka checks out one of the scraps of information provided by the Preiss' captain, and finds out that -- yes -- it appears that he shared memories with a woman on L-4, a place he had never been. It scares Tanaka. The Derecho is taking in all the info from the gates. All of them are glowing now, it looks like. She reminds herself that her job is to be hunting down Duarte and hauling him back to Laconia, and looking into this phenomena isn't it. It turns out a lot of people had shared experiences and it's freaking Tanaka out. Trejo sends a message. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 25 posted:“Colonel Tanaka,” he said, nodding at the camera as if he were looking at her. “I want to thank you for your report. I’m not going to bullshit you. The outcome in Freehold system isn’t what I was hoping for. But you were the one with boots on the ground. I’m not going to second-guess you. This other thing . . . Well, it’s concerning.” Leviathan Falls, Chapter 25 posted:A buzz was slipping into his voice. His annoyance might be with her. It might be with the universe or the unjust nature of chance. Or maybe he hadn’t gotten laid in too long. She didn’t know how he lived his life. She steeled herself to take the brunt of it, whatever it was. Tanaka thinks the unspoken threat of Trejo's is that he'll pull her Leviathan Falls, Chapter 25 posted:She had been inside Botton in a way more intimate than even the most authentic sex. Had he experienced something like that with her? Was he, right now, recalling one of her trysts with inappropriate men? She suddenly felt violated and exposed, but he hadn’t said a word. Two things I want to talk about here. The first is telepathy. Telepathy-as-violation feels like a pretty common sci-fi idea. The creator of Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski, seems to consider the possibility of telepathy being such an existential threat to our way of life that he's written a few series that features it, and it's responsible for the bizarre handling of telepaths and the Psi Corps in Babylon 5. But I wonder why that is. In the case of a lot of these takes on the idea, it's often because not everyone is telepathic and so it's possible for everything to flow only one way -- they learn everything about you, you don't even know it happened. Or sometimes telepathy just turns people into megalomaniacs who go around sifting through people's minds like books in a library. It's very human and very obvious why we might not want someone to see our darkest fears, our crudest thoughts, our sincerest fantasies. I think that is because, on some level, they're only special because they're purely for the individual in question. They're not supposed to become real, or even acknowledged by anyone else. They're that private, that intimate, that necessary. But what I'm wondering is, well, is that true? Why do we take the idea that telepathy would be a violation? Could it not be possible that being able interface with someone's mind and perspective in this weird science-magical sense would lead to something transcendental? Especially when, as we see here, it was shared among everyone as this almost spiritual experience. More to the point, does this relate to perhaps the loudest idea in Leviathan Wakes, that shared communication and information deserves to be known by everyone and co-operation and whatever else Naomi was just talking about... But even then, wouldn't it be creepier if everyone came out the other side of the Ring Space Instrumentality Project rejuvenated by their shared humanity and great Laconian project? This unending well of compassion and empathy, albeit one that only showed up because Duarte did some bizarre thing to everyone without their consent. All that said, it's still utterly baffling to me that the Coreys decided to crib the Human Instrumentality Project from Evangelion as part of their big cinematic 'planned from the start' ending. It stuck out to me like a sore thumb ever since I read it, and I spent much of the back half of this novel just being confused by it. Like, you're really going to try this? Evangelion took two different swings at the idea of this global human cosmic noosphere, and Anno ended up in two different places, and that's with the benefit of a series that'd always had a strong psychological element. I don't really care if authors lift setting elements I recognize. The more you read, the more you realize everyone does it. The thing is, I'm just confused as to why you'd pick that element for this story. The second, is this: Leviathan Falls, Chapter 25 posted:She’d navigated her whole life on the unbroken membrane between her public self and her private one. The idea that the separation might have been ripped open put her on the edge of almost animal panic. A while back, I think I mentioned in the SF/F thread that a reason why I love Blindsight is that I have schizoid personality disorder and it was the book that helped me realize it. This hits that same note for me. I don't think Tanaka is schizoid in that way, but I think it's an interesting thing to note. But it doesn't help that feeling I had during Tiamat's Wrath that they had just read Blindsight. In Blindsight Siri, who I do read as schizoid, experiences something similar. Blindsight posted:Sarasti, you bloodsucker. It's just so strange to see it showing up in The Expanse. Anyway, Tanaka tells Botton that the Science Directorate will be taking over the investigation. Tanaka stresses to Botton that whatever he experienced was a hallucination. Botton says he found them unpleasant and he'd like to put it all behind him. It'll take several hours before the Derecho can move out. Botton says a ship went through to Bara Goan at around the time the Rocinante should've gone through and they'll be ready to follow it. Well, guess they've lost the trail then. Tanaka has the strange thought that she used to be a boxer, but not in her voice. She feels like she's missing something. Chapter Twenty-Six: Jim Holden is, wait for it,  having trouble sleeping. His time on Laconia has left him with nightmares and a fear of the dark. But apparently, this specific thing "a little insomnia while his lover of decades rested at his side"...Come on, Jim, it's been thirty years. I think you owe Naomi something better than 'lover.' They never got married? Mother Elise never was like, 'Jim, you better treat that girl right?' Did Naomi not want to get married? Well, neither Jim Nagata nor Naomi Holden sound very good, to be fair. Holden reflects that they're both mortal and they're going to die sometime. I've said I've liked this stuff, but I feel like I don't need it in every single chapter. Anyway, Holden goes for a walk. The Rocinante is about 75% of the way to the Falcon. The Derecho has not followed them. Holden goes up to see Alex. They have some beers. There's still no clue what the glowing gates are doing. Alex is drunk and talks about the gates, saying that it'd take a hundred and fifteen years to visit every single planet and system via the gates. A hundred and forty if you wanted some tourist time. Alex says the gates and everything they brought with them are too big for humanity. They dock with the Falcon. Jim tries to make a joke about how he expects Tanaka to be on the other side of the airlock. Naomi doesn't trust the situation enough for them all to go over, and tries to get Amos to stay behind because they still have that weird 'Naomi doesn't trust Amos' idea popping up now and again. Elvi, Fayez and Cara meet them, but Holden has no idea who Cara is. Elvi looks like poo poo but greets them warmly. She'd love to do some scans on Amos. Amos calls Cara "Sparkles" because I guess cute nicknames are just a thing he does now. Fayez says it's "awkward as hell." Chapter Twenty-Seven: Elvi The crew of the Falcon had panicked when the Rocinante came through the gate, wondering if the resistance had come by to blow up the Falcon or maybe the giant space diamond. She explained the situation to Harshaan Lee, basically saying that Trejo won't be surprised by this but he also won't be happy. Lee shrugs it off as following the chain of command. Elvi reiterates that he shouldn't try to do anything on the sly. Like a few of the chapters in this novel, we hop back a bit and see Elvi and Fayez welcoming the crew of the Rocinante from the other side. It doesn't really tell us anything new and, yes, it feels like padding. Elvi thinks Naomi looks like someone who could negotiate across a table with Trejo. Holden, she thinks, "looked exactly like himself, but older" which doesn't feel like how I'd describe the guy given the internal world we've seen so far. She leads them down to the lab. Elvi calls it "a loving prison" then realizes that Holden "had spent the previous few years being tortured in an actual prison." He doesn't seem to mind. Elvi lets them know about the data she got from Tanaka, and Elvi fills everyone in on what happened: a colony ship attempted transit just after Tanaka, the ship vanishes, and then returns. But also, the ring entities apparently got really pissed off, too. The edge of the slow zone went similar to when they'd slipped in and destroyed Medina Station, the Heart of the Typhoon, smashed up the Falcon, and took Elvi's leg. Amos comments it's too bad they didn't kill Tanaka. Elvi also shows them that it's not just the Adro gate that's active, but all of them. And there was a "cognitive effect" that wasn't losing time, but "a kind of networked connection between the minds of the people in the ring space." It appears that they experienced other other's memories. Amos is like, huh, that sounds like what happens to me and Sparkles. Apparently, Cara had reported similar during her experiments into the BFE. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 27 posted:“BFE?” Amos asked. Elvi says the effect has happened between the modified humans, sure, but now it's also happened to unmodified human beings. The gates are also communicating with each other, much like Cara and the diamond. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 27 posted:“We’ve been using them as a matter transport system, which they are. It makes sense that they’re also a communication network.” Elvi suspects it's a neural network, and that it might be about as smart as a fruit fly. Naomi gets scared by the idea that the gates are alive and able to think. Elvi and Naomi share a moment about how tough it is doing lots of science and how tough it is running a guerrilla government. Either way, Elvi mentions that there have been no weird events since the gates have started glowing. No consciousness events, no changes in the laws of physics, no mass deaths like in San Esteban. Amos says that doesn't make sense, in a line that feels like it should be Holden's, because all the builders died and had no way to stop it, even when they shut down the gates. Elvi shrugs that off, and mentions that two percent of the people in the ring space experienced "a man who was present but wasn't there." The same man Cara encountered. Duarte. No one seems surprised by it, which is a little odd. Amos continues doing the heavy lifting for the exposition and it feels so off-kilter. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 27 posted:“So when he went missing, he vaporized? He’s a protomolecule ghost now?” Amos said. “Haunting the network?” Anyway, Elvi has no idea. She suspects Duarte is piggybacking off her work to find new applications for what Cara and Amos are aware of. Jim says Duarte has come out of his coma "more powerful than before." It's kinda funny that Elvi doesn't mention, yeah, and I saw him vaporize a guy's chest with a wave of his hand. Elvi suggests doing a dual dive with Amos and Cara. Elvi suspects this will give Amos and Cara more control over the dive than Cara herself had. Then, with that control, they can try to talk to Duarte... Chapter Twenty-Eight: Tanaka Tanaka's gone into the Bara Goan system and, oops, the Rocinante isn't there. In what feels like something Tanaka should've known and altered her decision making process, Bara Goan is host to Gewitter Base, a massive Laconian installation that features two Storm-class destroyers-- (I told you it's a screw up and not something deliberate, Tanaka should be calling them Pulsar-class destroyers!) --on constant patrol and one thing they do is keep an eye on all traffic through the gates. Between that, and the observation posts, none of them saw the Rocinante enter the Bara Goan system. Come on, Tanaka. Think! Did you really expect the most-wanted ship in the empire to head there? Think, Tanaka, think! Tanaka and Botton discuss following the wrong lead in Gewitter's officers' club. Gewitter is German for thunderstorm and it's like, oh my God, is everything in Laconia named for weather stuff? Excepting those frigates that got stuck with birds? It's a little silly, isn't it? Duarte brought with him three books to Laconia, and they became the empire's founding texts. Game Theory and You, Of Rome and Roads, and The Big Book of Meteorology. Botton doesn't seem to care about following the wrong lead, if only because it's Tanaka's mission. Tanaka tells Botton to contact signal intelligence and put out a bulletin based on the Rocinante's drive signature and hull profile, but didn't she do exactly that back in Chapter 16? Leviathan Falls, Chapter 28 posted:“And make sure they understand,” Tanaka said, “that finding this ship is a security priority. Failing to report will be considered an act of sedition and punished by being sent to the Pen.” Leviathan Falls, Chapter 28 posted:“You heard about San Esteban?” she asked before he could step away. “Hell of a thing. Whole system wiped out, just like that.” But it works -- or seems to. Tanaka is like, dang, he must be forty years younger than me and that's one thing, but apparently... Leviathan Falls, Chapter 28 posted:An affair with someone of a lower rank was still a violation of the Laconian Military Code, and now that she had Omega status, literally everyone in the military outside of Fleet Admiral Trejo was a lower rank than her. But her status also put her effectively outside the law. Which took away some of what made it worth doing. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 28 posted:She was hungry, though. Not for sex, though that was how she was going to fix it. For control. For the sense that she wasn’t vulnerable. That she was able to exert her will over a hostile universe in the form of this boy’s body. Tanaka is like, I have a room on this station, do you want to see it? And. I really try to avoid low-effort shitposting but... Lieutenant Randall Kim sees "her ruin of a cheek" and says he doesn't think it's a good idea, and Tanaka just... Leviathan Falls, Chapter 28 posted:A rush of emotions and reactions welled up in her, as unfamiliar as a bus filled with random strangers. Insecurity, shame, sorrow, embarrassment. She could put names to each of them, and the names were all ones she’d suffered under before. But these were different. The sting of embarrassment was like feeling it for the first time. The sorrow was a flavor of sorrow she’d never generated before. The shame was a different nuance of shame. She knew the feelings, genus and species, but they belonged to someone else. Some crowd of others who had sunk invisible wires into her heart. So, she goes off to see the base doctor, a Captain Gagnon, under the disguise of asking about her busted cheek. He says its fine, but Tanaka is so shaken by the thought of being ugly that she tells Gagnon to put her through for facial reconstruction right now. I'm not making any of this up. After the surgery, she's lying in bed while she talks with another patient whom she dubs Gravel Man who seems to be buried in some kind of full-body life support apparatus. Tanaka got shot in the face, but the only place Gravel Man isn't messed up is the face. He got blown up by an underground bomb. His name is Lias Byrd. Tanaka loses her mind again and starts going on about how she lost her brother in a climbing accident, yet knows she doesn't have a brother. But she remembers it all the same. Captain Gagnon enters and is like, alright, we can discharge you tomorrow, Colonel. Tanaka asks about Byrd and Gagnon says he isn't his patient. So, Tanaka attacks him, pins him to the bed, and starts beating the poo poo out of him. Then, she comes back to her senses, again, and steps away from him. She tells Byrd she's going to make sure they take care of him, and Byrd is understandably freaked out and like, no, I'm good. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 28 posted:She turned and marched out the doors. Two armed guards approached her, then backed away. Her hospital gown was slipping off her shoulders, and she grabbed it before she flashed everyone in the corridor her tits. She was probably already showing her rear end to half Gewitter Station’s medical personnel. It all seemed very distant. The worrying idea that the Instrumentality Project is still in progress -- or, at the very least, the effects persist once exposed -- is just drowned out by Tanaka's everything. It's a very hard chapter to take seriously, and not just because it's extremely hard to have any sympathy for Tanaka given she was basically introduced as a hedonistic sadist who literally shoots (strange) dogs. Like, is this an attempt for us to sit back and go, oh no, poor Tanaka? It doesn't come across as horror. It comes across as bad comedy, Starscream. As a chapter, it's just absolutely wild. Tanaka loses the Rocinante's trail because she forgets about Gewitter Base, gets politely shot down by a bartender, gets immediate facial reconstruction surgery to soothe her ego, beats up another military officer for the crime of having a different patient list, and then checks herself in for a psych eval with her butt hanging out. Like, I work in veterans' counselling, I shouldn't be so glib about this. But I think it's because it's so suddenly melodramatic for otherwise aloof series, and because I think the only way to make it work would be to have Tanaka be a wildly different character. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Apr 3, 2024 |
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Apr 3, 2024 06:31
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Leviathan Falls, Chapters 29 - 32 Duarte reappears -- literally. Amos demonstrates why he should've stayed dead, and Kit why he should've not been in the novel. Tanaka sees a professional. Chapter Twenty-Nine: Jim Holden is watching Xan and Teresa play catch with Muskrat. Like, literal catch. Throwing the dog to each other. Elvi and her team are getting the Falcon's lab ready for a dual dive into the diamond (as opposed to Muskrat, the Falcon's Lab  ). It's been a few days. Fayez mentions that Xan and Cara aren't kids but also aren't not kids. Am I the only one who remembers the protomolecule child-alien-soldier experiments from Caliban's War? Sure, it was thirty years ago and all, but it surprises me that it hasn't come up.I don't like saying things like 'this chapter is boring' or 'this chapter is padding' but this chapter is, well, both. There's a lot of Holden thinking about Theresa or thinking about Xan or thinking about how dogs go to the bathroom in space or how dangerous a machine shop of an "aging Martian gunship" could be for kids to hang around in. Eventually, Fayez shows up to worry about how something is being taken from Cara every time she connects with the diamond. He takes Holden to see the catalyst (who, I guess, survived the events of Tiamat's Wrath) and tells him that she "was" Francisca Torrez and one day she showed up for work "intoxicated and belligerent" and Cortazar had her in the Pen before she had sobered up. She is being eaten by the protomolecule but they are able to contain it within her body. Fayez considers her "a skin balloon filled with protomolecule." Leviathan Falls, Chapter 29 posted:“I’m not going to bullshit you,” Fayez continued. “If we took what we do here to a normal ethics board, they’d just call the police. We’ve moved past scientific ethics, past moral questions, and I’m pretty sure we’re shooting past crimes against humanity now. But I still know it could be even worse.” Jim nodded. Three days later, the dual dive is ready to go. Cara and Amos are ready to begin. Holden tells Amos he doesn't have to do it, but Amos says that this is what he came to the Falcon for, and gives a cheerful thumbs-up. The final checks proceed, and then the dive begins. We'll talk about Amos in a few chapters. Interlude: The Dreamers (1) The dreamers dream. The grandmothers attempt to show them things, but Amos holds firm. The grandmothers are all dead and they'd tell their truths to anyone. Cara tries to see "the single living man in the land of the dead" but is unable to -- but then, he is there. Cara tries to wake up, but Amos does not. Leviathan Falls, Interlude: The Dreamers (1) posted:It was an unwinnable war, the third man says. But it was fought. They were soldiers made of crepe paper and candy floss, scattered by their own guns. But they made guns. They were cobwebs who stood against a rockslide, and for all their cleverness were torn. The dreamer sees and is blind. Leviathan Falls, Interlude: The Dreamers (1) posted:There are tools at our disposal, Dr. Okoye. Tools made to fight against the enemy on the third side of the gates. I am . . . learning about that. I have made some progress. It is a war we can win, but not without some changes. Leviathan Falls, Interlude: The Dreamers (1) posted:We aren’t stronger than they were. But we’re base materials. We are made from clay, and that’s our power. They were fragile, and we are robust. They had a sword but lacked the strength to wield it. I will find the sword and the map they left behind. Leviathan Falls, Interlude: The Dreamers (1) posted:Yes. Interconnected, with our thoughts and memories flowing freely between nodes. All our illusions of division washed away. Empire was the closest I could imagine to it. But—the third man gestures at himself almost in apology—I can imagine more now. Chapter Thirty: Elvi Now, here's something -- Duarte didn't just show up to the dreamers, Duarte appeared in the middle of the lab. We hop back to almost the end of the conversation. Just like with Trejo in the prologue, Elvi is convinced that Duarte is there. The conversation ends and Duarte vanishes and Elvi asks for all available data so they can figure out what just happened. Elvi wasn't the only one who saw him. So did Holden, which he thinks is unusual because when he had Miller in his head, he could only appear when Holden was alone. Cara awakens in a blissful state. Amos seems normal. Later, Elvi is going over the data Tanaka had gathered on the weird ring zone incident. Elvi then goes over what they got from Duarte -- he was not physically present as he did not show up on the security camera footage and he didn't interact with anything beyond each of their brains. Elvi suspects that Duarte has way more "computing power" than Miller did. Naomi wonders about his plan and Elvi is like, sure, it could work. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 30 posted:“Are you being sarcastic?” Naomi said. As usual, I might be complicated by the fact I'm remembering things from the previous novels. For example, in Abaddon's Gate, I can't say I got the vibe of the Builders having evolved as an intelligent light-based group-brain jellyfish worm thing. Miller talks as if they're closer to a post-singularity civilization who'd uploaded their minds into a supercomputer or alternate layer of reality or something. Abaddon's Gate, Chapter 25 posted:“Sometimes, having a body at all means you’ve got a certain level of status. If you aren’t pretty drat trusted, you don’t get to walk around in the fallen world.” Abaddon's Gate, Chapter 25 posted:“Because,” said Miller, lecturing to a stupid child. “The place is in lockdown. It’s not accepting remote connections without a level of authorization I don’t have.” Abaddon's Gate, Chapter 25 posted:He had been beyond anything like a threat for so long that all the reflexes of survival had weakened, atrophied. Anyway, Elvi thinks Duarte can do it. The question is whether it'll make them into ants or neurons. That's to say whether they'll have a sense of self or not. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 30 posted:“So you’re saying,” Naomi broke in, “that Duarte, or whatever he’s turned himself into, is at least plausibly preparing to make everyone, everywhere part of a collective consciousness with him at the center so that he can go to war against the things beyond the gates.” Naomi and Elvi go to work sending out a bunch of messages. After a while, Amos shows up and asks to speak to Elvi. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 30 posted:“About the experiment?” Leviathan Falls, Chapter 30 posted:“When you started before, I was sort of in on it. Impressions. Nothing you’d take in front of the judge, right? It’s why we had to come out. Needed to be here. Do it myself. That way I’d understand. So here we are, and I did the thing, and I get it now. So now I can tell you it’s over. It stops now.” But there's two things I can think of with this scene that drive why it's so noxious. The first is that, yes, Amos' time in Caliban's War where we glimpse his past and see his drive to save Mei might make one think that he cares about children -- and, yes, Amos does. But a lot of that drive stems from his own childhood trauma, not some high-handed morality to save all kids everywhere, and also expresses itself in outrageous violence. And I should stress that when Amos attacks the hacker who is holding out on them, the novel indicates that the hacker is themselves a "teen" and a "kid." When Amos explains himself to Naomi, it's clear that his explosive response, and his own reasoning as to why he reacted the way he did, stems from the his own unresolved trauma. As a child of the sex trade, who had been sexually abused, Amos was terrified about that happening to Mei. Clarissa was something of an extension of this. Amos understood that you could get a new name and a new life, as he went from Timmy to Amos, and saw something of a kindred spirit in her. It wasn't that she was a kid, although the fact she was a younger than him probably played some part in his thought that she could redeem herself. His relationship with Teresa is less well-realized and, honestly, I don't think the series has explored well enough that Amos was prepared to nuke her and how there should maybe have been some tension between Amos' fondness of her and the fact she could've been a tactic to get Holden out. The fact that Amos just genuinely liked her is flat and uninteresting. The second is that... Let's look at this from an outsider's perspective. Amos died and was resurrected by the protomolecule. Duarte went through a similar process. At this point, it's possible that Duarte isn't Duarte anymore because, as we've been told, Cara is losing bits of herself with every dive -- and Duarte had his whole psyche blown to bits. We've just seen that it's possible for the dreamers to interface with the machine, forcing Duarte to actively lock them out, and even show up in their local space to politely tell people not to bother stopping him (DOCTOR OKOYE, CEASE YOUR INVESTIGATIONS). If his was truly beyond their reach, he wouldn't need to do that. The fact that Duarte locks them out and drops by to reassure them that everything is fine is, to me, a pretty obvious acknowledgement that he might have something to fear from them, that his plan could still have a Holden-brand wrench jammed into it. And then, a few hours after, the resurrected Amos wanders over to Elvi and tells her to shut down her experiments. And not a single person wonders like, poo poo, isn't that convenient? Can we trust Amos? Or is the protomolecule network covertly shutting down something that might be able to gently caress with its plans? Earlier in the novel, Naomi was even wondering whether they could trust Amos, whether he was Amos or something pretending to be Amos. Again, if something is pretending to be Amos, then you must wonder why it is pretending. Anyway, Elvi says that the experiment is their only access to the information within the artifact, and that she can't stop if it means losing access. Amos goes, fine, because he's stopping it for everyone -- no matter what Elvi says, it's over. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 30 posted:“And if we all die because we didn’t push a little harder?” While I don't think there was ever any other plan for Amos to be caring about the kids, there's definitely a part of me that wonders if the Coreys weren't flirting with something else. There's this weird spine of a much darker story in this novel, yet it never eventuates. The dark gods can't be stopped, Duarte's plan is basically extinction, Amos is a protomolecule infiltrator, Holden's a traumatized mess, etc. But it's all just bland because the story isn't really willing to acknowledge the stakes. Amos showing up and telling Elvi, hey, stop this experiment or I'll kill you should be a scarlet banner that deserves more attention than what it's going to get (which is nothing, because Amos is the most moral actor and general wise man, you see.) Chapter Thirty-One: Tanaka Tanaka is in counseling with Major Ahmadi. Which means backstory time -- Tanaka was orphaned at "quite a young age" and spent "over forty years" with front-line combat units, all of it largely classified, meaning she has led a life of "constant trauma" more or less. No long-term relationships, never lived anywhere for longer than a year, refusing promotions to remain a field officer. It's fascinating to me in a weird way. None of this is really new information, and I also don't really care about it. Tanaka is the bad guy, the antagonist, the gleeful (strange) puppy kicker. I don't want this 'poor little girl' bit. I want to see her being tough and cool and vicious. It feels so remarkably fake to try and, I don't know, peel back the bad bitch to reveal the scared girl underneath as we're getting into the last third of this novel. Had Tanaka been more of a presence in these last three books, I might be amenable to it. But like Battuta said, everything about her is just so obvious. Like the protomolecule mythos stuff, it feels like they're speedrunning her character so we inevitably care about whatever role she's going to play in the climax. But more to the point, Chapter 31 reads like Generic Therapy Chapter 765C. I'm not here to talk about my parents, it sounds like you have me pegged, head shrinker, I'm not running from anything, why are you here, etc. The attempts to demonstrate Tanaka's mental state and the varied memories competing in it doesn't quite work. Major Ahmadi is a "thick, matronly" woman because Tanaka has mommy issues with her mom and aunt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tanaka brings up the consciousness incident in the ring space and how she can't have anyone in her head due to her secrets. She mentions the weird hallucinations and how she doesn't want anyone seeing her feelings and experiences. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 31 posted:“Aliana, I feel that you are describing intimate assault.” Tanaka says it is still ongoing, and briefly entertains killing Ahmadi. Ahmadi says there might be medicines to reduce intrusive thoughts that might work, assuming the mechanism is similar, but for some reason I don't think intrusive thoughts and being part of Duarte's Ring Space Instrumentality would have the same mechanism? Well, it turns out... the pills work. Which is just, again, weirdly fascinating and makes me want to laugh. It feels really self aware. Like, everyone knows how badly psychiatry and counseling and such can be depicted in genre fiction, especially when it concerns psychic powers and possible psychotic symptoms, but being able to blunt Instrumentality by taking pills feels like such an over-correction that it's rather surreal. It'd be as weird as having Duarte undergo cognitive behavior therapy to understand that, actually, his plan is bad and his behavior is harming people. Like, the vast power of the ring network is messing with people's serotonin inhibitors and giving them intrusive thoughts but the intrusive thoughts are also an actual psychic experience and this is all some prelude to creating a physics-defying hive mind? What? Tanaka gets a message from Botton. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 31 posted:“We had a high-priority report from the Science Directorate on Laconia. Dr. Ochida’s office flagged it as critical.” Chapter Thirty-Two: Kit Kit and his family have reached Nieuwestad. He's having the weird shared memories that Tanaka had been. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 32 posted:It had started on the Preiss. It had started the moment they’d died. Kit didn’t say it, but he was sure that was what had happened. The dark things, more real than anything real, had blown him and his baby away like handfuls of dust in a high wind. That was death. And then their clock had been inverted. They hadn’t been reborn, but un-killed. The man who wasn’t in the room with them had managed it with a vast effort. An effort that had exhausted him. But if saving one ship exhausted Duarte, can he really go to war with the dark gods? Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Apr 10, 2024 |
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Apr 10, 2024 09:01
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Also, something else. So, Amos refers to Xan as "Little Man." But the Dreamer chapters make mention of a "little man", too, within the dreamscape. But we are told Xan is locked away in an isolation chamber and not participating in the dives. So, uh, what's up with that?
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Apr 10, 2024 09:42
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Tanaka is in counseling with Major Ahmadi. Which means backstory time -- Tanaka was orphaned at "quite a young age" and spent "over forty years" with front-line combat units, all of it largely classified, meaning she has led a life of "constant trauma" more or less. No long-term relationships, never lived anywhere for longer than a year, refusing promotions to remain a field officer. Doesn't this make no sense at all? What front-line combat could she have possibly seen to give her constant trauma? We've seen every major conflict of the last 50 years at this point and not once was their a massive boots on the ground presence.
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Apr 10, 2024 10:00
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PriorMarcus posted:Doesn't this make no sense at all? It definitely makes one wonder, yes. See, my immediate response was to fill-in with what we knew from Persepolis Rising: Tanaka had spent a long time in the Martian Marine Corps clearing out Belter stations and outposts. But even so, that would've been thirty-five years ago, and it's not sure how long those five years would've been as part of her overall career given she was just a Lieutenant when the Battle of Io took place. The other weird thing is that she's been apparently refusing promotions to remain in the field, yet still ended up as a Colonel. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that Colonels aren't people who go into the field because they're the guys who direct things. Regimental commanders, assistants to higher-ups, base commanders, etc. And it's generally seen as a bad thing if your Colonel is deciding they need to get out there. Tanaka feels like she should be a few ranks lower than what she is. Somewhere between a Captain and a Lieutenant Colonel. What, if she hadn't refused promotions, would she be the head of the Laconian military or something? Problem is, I don't think what we see of Tanaka in Persepolis Rising fits with this Tanaka. It's also a little odd that Tanaka was apparently wading through Belter stations and killing "insurgents" to such an extent that she's there to "rub some of the stupid off" Singh because she's that much of a subject matter expert and overall sensible military officer, and yet one doesn't get that impression from Bobbie's time with the Corps. Bobbie makes it sound like the MMC was just endlessly training for a fight with Earth and that she hadn't seen much actual combat, if anything, and she must've been roughly around Tanaka's age if not older. But then again, I never got the impression that Mars was going around wiping out Belters with squads of power armored marines. And like, she never lived anywhere longer than a year? Even over the thirty year period where Laconia was being established? What?
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Apr 10, 2024 10:51
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:And like, she never lived anywhere longer than a year? Even over the thirty year period where Laconia was being established? What? Yeah, none of it really hangs together, and the version of the political/military landscape from the earlier books is much more interesting to me. One would also assume that those 30 years establishing Laconia, which makes up the bulk of her time in the military, where relatively quiet and uneventful. How much need for a power armored insane murder soldier could their be? Also, I don't remember her ever appearing before this book.
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Apr 10, 2024 11:08
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PriorMarcus posted:Yeah, none of it really hangs together, and the version of the political/military landscape from the earlier books is much more interesting to me. She actually is somewhat prominent in Persepolis Rising, although I'd forgotten it until this re-read. She's Singh's first military advisor who gives him advice how to handle being military governor of Medina, only for him to throw a tantrum and have her reassigned to the Tempest which Trejo chews him out for. I think it's understandable that one forgets she appears there because she feels like a completely different character. I'm not sure why they brought her back, honestly. It makes me think of how they brought back Havelock, and how he doesn't feel like him at all. So far, Tanaka hasn't at all referenced the events of Persepolis Rising and I'm pretty sure she never does. But, like, Tanaka and Holden met. He was on the bridge when she took control of the station, and he even tried to provoke her to which she didn't rise to the bait (seemingly as part of Persepolis Rising's odd idea that Laconians aren't bloodthirsty dumb fascists.) And like the above, Holden hasn't recalled meeting her either. Persepolis Rising, Chapter 14 posted:It occurred to Singh that Aliana Tanaka had risen to the rank of colonel in the most punishingly trained combat unit humanity had ever known, and that he was alone in his office with her. Except she was a Lieutenant during the Io incident, and it's unlikely she was a Colonel prior to the coup especially if she was refusing promotions... which means Singh is referring to the Laconian Marines, but how punishing could the training be? And when you think about that, you start thinking that, wait, Tanaka is being held up as this genius when she maybe had a decade of experience at most prior to the Laconia coup? They're acting like she was this decades-long officer prior the thirty year gap. She's also summed up as being older than him by "almost two decades" but that only makes it more confusing because Singh was a child during the coup (and Xan's friend, funnily enough) so if he's thirty-something then Tanaka can't be however old she appears to be (in her sixties at minimum) in this novel. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Apr 10, 2024 |
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Apr 10, 2024 12:13
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It feels like they were preemptively merging two separate characters that they thought the show would merge later on down the road anyway. Did they still think they'd get more seasons to adapt these last books at the time of writing LF?
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Apr 10, 2024 18:56
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PriorMarcus posted:Doesn't this make no sense at all? This reminds me of how in the Honorverse one of the big strengths of the Manticoreans is their massive talented and experienced officer pool. But the Manticoreans are established to have not been in any wars in... ever, because warfare was just that rare in the universe due to the difficulties of actually doing it. So eventually they have to establish that they use to be fighting space pirates constantly to the point that they had to also establish that there was a Chaotic Zone full of space pirates to raid merchants, in a zone of space known for its out-of-wayness and absolute poverty... It's like the Coreys forgot they established exactly how much warfare has been going on.
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Apr 10, 2024 20:55
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banned from Starbucks posted:It feels like they were preemptively merging two separate characters that they thought the show would merge later on down the road anyway. Hard to tell. I think the sixth season being the final one was established in 2020, whereas Leviathan Falls was released in November 2021. But the novel was probably written before or during 2020 (assuming a 12-month timeline from submission to publication.) But I'd say they were aware at the time that, short of another miraculous pick-up by another studio, that season was the last one they were getting. That said, all the Strange Dog shorts were included in the hope of enticing someone to uncancel the series. Kchama posted:It's like the Coreys forgot they established exactly how much warfare has been going on. It makes me wonder if they got some wires crossed from the TV series. One of the big changes from the novels to the series is the political situation. The novels make it pretty clear that Earth and Mars are part of an Earth-Mars Coalition to basically jointly exploit the Belt, combined military operations and all, and Holden's message at the start of the first novel basically breaks down that alliance and leads to the cold war that goes hot in Caliban's War. The TV series does away with that and has a sort of cold war state from the beginning with no Coalition. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Apr 11, 2024 |
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Apr 11, 2024 03:03
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Leviathan Falls, Chapters 33 - 36 Everyone goes to the ring station. That's basically it. Chapter Thirty-Three: Naomi Naomi is floating in her cabin, mentally fretting about her work. Honestly, I always forget that Naomi is this underground leader. She doesn't seem to act like it until we hit these points where the Coreys are like, hey, remember this is Naomi's thing? Anyway, Naomi is worried that people aren't cooperating if she isn't personally there to direct them and "pepper [them] with messages" because people think taking down Laconia means freedom rather than responsibility. But I guess that might be what happens when you make the space libertarian lady the leader of your military wing and give her the most powerful ship in the fleet? Jim shows up and asks Naomi about Elvi -- she's been acting really weird around the Rocinante crew. Holden's feeling is that Amos did something. Naomi tells her to ask Elvi directly. Naomi says their plan should be to track down Duarte and talk him out of it and to find a way of using the Builder technology without turning into "an extended version of Winston Duarte's hippocampus." Teresa has convinced him once before, she adds. If that doesn't work, then replace Duarte with Cara, Xan, or Amos. See what I mean about it feeling like Amos is some kind of safety valve? Leviathan Falls, Chapter 33 posted:Jim’s sigh was soft, gentle. It would have been less devastating if she hadn’t heard the despair under it. “Detective Miller once told me, ‘We don’t have a right thing, just a plateful of a little less wrong.’” Naomi is going to send out all their recent information to the underground. Holden, patron saint of sending things to everyone, asks her if she has a plan for it. Naomi doesn't. Later, Naomi heads back to the Falcon and goes to find Elvi. Naomi tells her she's going to send out the info, and that Trejo will certainly find out. Elvi says she has another thought, but she wanted to discuss it with Naomi first. Later, Naomi sends a message to Admiral Trejo: she's accepting Trejo's earlier proposal and sending out a copy of it to her network. Once the underground sees that Laconia is abiding by it, they will stand down. She attaches the information about the recent experiment. She goes down to the Rocinante's machine shop. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 33 posted:“Boss,” the thing that had been Amos said. “What’s up?” Trejo tells Naomi to go gently caress herself, and she had her chance, and she doesn't get to dictate terms to four-hundred Laconian ships, with a flotilla en route to the Adro system. Just kidding. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 33 posted:“Naomi Nagata,” Trejo said, and then chuckled like he’d practiced it. “You are a pistol, aren’t you? I am glad that we’re finally on the same side. I want you to know I’ve always respected your grit and your competence. I wish you’d gotten to know our cause under different circumstances. All this might have come out differently. Better now than never, though.” Chapter Thirty-Four: Tanaka Tanaka is having a Strange Expanse Dream, but it is touched by the Duarte Instrumentality Project. She sees her mind as a flake in a snowstorm and if she were to lose her sense of self, she's not sure she'd ever find it again. She awakens on Gewitter Station and tells herself in the mirror that she is Colonel Aliana Tanaka. She calls up Botton. They have 72 hours before the Derecho is fully resupplied -- they have everything except the fuel pellets. Botton doesn't seem happy about "the armistice" and asks her to speak to the crew. Tanaka is somewhat annoyed that her pursuit of Tanaka was pointless -- and, hell, same. Trejo sends Tanaka a message. He's pissed that Okoye "sold us out" and tells Tanaka her mission stands: find Duarte and retrieve him. Since whatever Duarte is doing appears to be working, they need to find him, understand what he's doing, and take control of it. Completing the mission takes precedence over maintaining the armistice. Tanaka orders Botton to send her up a security detail. She goes to see Doctor Ahmadi. She asks her how pills stop it. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 34 posted:Ahmadi nodded. “It reduces activity in the temporoparietal lobes with some antipsychotic effects. It diminishes spontaneous neural firings globally. Whatever is reaching into your mind, I thought it might help you to not respond to it.” Leviathan Falls, Chapter 34 posted:“When I was an intern, I had a patient with left neglect.” Ahmadi says that by changing the brain you change what thoughts are possible to think. Ahmadi was in Tanaka's dream -- somehow, Instrumentality is making it so the electrical impulses in one brain can trigger a neuron in another brain to fire. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 34 posted:“I thought it would be like . . . being with people. Like a dream, but it’s not. It’s being part of an idea that is too big to think. Being one part of a brain that’s so vast and interconnected, it’s not human. It’s made of humans, but that’s not what it is. Not any more than we’re neurons and cells.” Chapter Thirty-Five: Alex Alex is watching one of his neo-noir films, and the novel is sure to give us a bunch of information about it, when a fight breaks out. At the airlock, Cara is furious. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 35 posted:You had no loving right to get involved in it. You are poo poo to me. You are the same kind of vicious gently caress that Cortázar was, and you can get back there and tell her you were wrong. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 35 posted:“I get why you’re pissed, Sparkles,” Amos said. “This part’s rough.” Alex supposes Elvi told Cara they were no longer doing the dives. Teresa says that Amos told Elvi to put responsibility for shutting the program down on him -- as if he hadn't made some veiled threats to murder her if she didn't, Teresa! Later, Alex reflects on how much he knows the Rocinante like the back of his hand. Piloting her is like pulling on his socks. It's somewhat interesting that despite thinking that if you care for a tool long enough, it develops a soul, the prose never calls the Rocinante her. In Alex's mind, it's always "the ship." Feel like that defeats the point, or the Coreys were self-conscious about people joking that Alex wants to gently caress the Roci or whatever (maybe the protomolecule will give a body with big honkin' metal bazoongas ala Mass Effect 3. I mean, Duarte's practically the Illusive Man...) Skipping over all the weirdly pointless stuff about how they thought about keeping the Rocinante and Falcon connected via the airlocks but then didn't, they head for the ring gate. Alex tries to make conversation with Teresa, and they talk about the fight between Amos and Cara. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 35 posted:“He’s different. I knew the repair drones changed him, but so much is the same that I just thought he was him still. But they killed him on New Egypt, and he didn’t die. The girl who was yelling at him? Cara? If she’d hit you or me, she’d have broken our bones. He just took it. Like it was nothing.” Later, Alex thinks about more things. He ponders sending a message to Giselle and Kit and Rohi but doesn't. As they approach the ring gate, Alex notices that they're using Naomi's transit protocol and it's working perfectly. Naomi says, with 358 highlights: “I think about all the things we could have done, all the miracles we could have achieved, if we were all just a little bit better than it turns out we are.” Chapter Thirty-Six: Holden The ring space is full of ships -- fifty-six, to be precise -- and none of them are moving beyond firing their holding thrusters. Holden finds it unnerving. Elvi says they have the egg-ship on visual. The Laconian vessels on station are grumbling about the Rocinante and Falcon being there, but no one is doing anything stupid. The Rocinante and Falcon head for the ring station. Teresa is already dressed in a vac suit and ready to roll. Holden tells her they'll bring her if they end up needing her. Teresa says it's her dad. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 36 posted:“You understand the risks?” Jim asked. They talk about what Holden experienced. Elvi says the protomolecule was trying to figure out what happened, and it used Holden to do it. Holden says it was because he had a body. Elvi says he mentioned terms like fallen world and substrate. Holden says everything was being filtered through his mind and that he was just being carried along without directing anything. Elvi says then someone's directing things now. They hook Teresa into their comm system and she tries to hail her father, asking if she can come inside. Nothing happens. They string a bunch of sensors around the ring station to see if they missed anything. Nothing happens. They return to the Rocinante. Holden heads up to the ops deck. He finds Amos. There's no sensor data yet but everyone wants to talk about it. Amos, with 497 highlights, says: Leviathan Falls, Chapter 36 posted:“When people don’t know anything,” Amos said, “they love having meetings to talk about it.”
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Apr 18, 2024 01:39
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Leviathan Falls, Chapters 37 - 40 'The anjin is upset about books.' Leviathan Falls, Chapter 37 Tanaka is grumpy she's meeting with Holden aboard the Falcon and not in the Laconian State Building. There's a weird aside where she mentally gripes about what war portraits portray versus the reality of war, and it feels not only out of character but also totally irrelevant. Elvi asks whether Tanaka is certain that the Instrumentality effect is spreading. Tanaka says it is and she doesn't know how far it has spread. "And if you don't want it happening to you, start taking these now." The 'pills to defeat the protomolecule space laser' subplot is so bizarre. I'm reminded of that one Stardestroyer.net fiction where the secret to disrupting mind control rays from Hell itself was actually tinfoil hats. But in that case I think it was a weird meta-injoke: "Haha, wouldn't it be so zany if..." Tanaka thinks about how she'd kill Jim Holden, and an unknown voice calls her petty for focusing on it. This is another little oddity about this plot. So, by now, I think it's clear the story wants us to see this intrusions as nightmarish -- indeed, they've already been directly compared to "intimate assault" (let's be clear, rape, and there's a part of me that thinks the reason they use the polite euphemism is because they know it's a silly comparison.) But for the most part, we don't see anything dark or disturbing. It is disturbing, much as I assume medieval peasants would find a radio disturbing, sure, but I don't think it comes across as violating as the Coreys intend. The issue, I think, is Tanaka. Tanaka is not well. She is in dire need of counseling. And our glimpses into what she's been receiving from Duarte's Instrumentality are, well, kind of that. Just then, she thought about killing Holden and someone reprimanded her, to such an extent that his judgement "stung" so strongly that she immediately stops imagining killing Holden. I feel like if your counselor could peek inside your head and gently reprimand your bad thoughts, the whole profession might be much more effective. Basically, when I see Tanaka getting a dose of empathy and humanity from Instrumentality, my immediate thought isn't, oh, it's mental rape. If Tanaka wasn't so closed off, maybe she'd not be so hostile to the idea of someone peeking into her thoughts, y'know? Maybe if it was Elvi, trying to concentrate on her work as she gets sidetracked by whatever thoughts or whatever, it'd come across better. As it is, it's just kind of like... Well, I think it's clear why a bunch of people read this novel and go, 'I don't get it, what was so bad about Duarte's plan?' Naomi says they need to find a way into the station. Fayez says there isn't one, and Tanaka points out it shrugged off a Magnetar's primary weapon and the full force of a collapsing star. But it has opened before, Naomi says. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 37 posted:Of all of them, Nagata was the most surprising. She was nearly the same age as Tanaka, and while the Belter’s long, lanky frame was the result of too much time on the float when she was a child, they still looked like they might have been related. Naomi suggests using the Falcon's sample to open the station, as the Rocinante's sample did in the past. Fayez suggests a dive. Elvi says that might not be easy. The space diamond was seemingly made to be talked to, and it was the protomolecule that opened the station at its own behest. Tanaka says it's a good idea and they can hope to use Teresa to get Duarte back on their side. She offers to escort her in. Naomi says no. Holden says they weren't going to hand her over on New Egypt or Freehold and they're not going to do it now. Tanaka tells them that they're on the same side now, Admiral Trejo's orders. She also points out before Duarte disappeared, the two of them were rebels and Duarte may not be aware of, or care about, their alliance. They're not any better a choice than she is. Tanaka says to ask Teresa. Holden agrees. Tanaka says she'll extract Duarte or, at the very least, open more reliable communication with him. Holden says that's fine, and they can go back to killing each other after ward. Tanaka realizes that Holden is already thinking about how to kill her. Thirty-six hours later, the dive is ready. Tanaka has showers and thinks about having sex to dull the Instrumentality effect. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 37 posted:It was the unsettling certainty that anything she did would be known, shared, experienced, by other people. That it was no longer possible to have secrets of her own. (And this is ignoring that Babylon 5's telepaths are treated far worse than normals and the way the whole affair is muddled because no one ever blames the Earth Alliance for the laws that govern the Psi Corps...) Basically, the problem is that not everyone is a telepath. But if everyone shares everyone else's thoughts, what's the problem? You won't have any secrets, but neither will anyone else. Human civilization would change. The very idea of being human would change. I'd like to think that a total sharing of the minds would result in a fundamental paradigm shift. Okay, that's scary, but it's not what Tanaka is worried about. Anyway, the real issue is the next paragraph: there's evidence that Duarte is exhibiting control over people. A bunch of people working in perfect silent synchrony; a ship suddenly diverting to a possible protomolecule artifact. Tanaka goes to visit Botton and asks him if he's ready to shoot at the underground if it's required -- he's ready. And, in case it all goes bad, to save two bullets -- he's ready to do that, too. Tanaka armors up and meets Teresa and Naomi at the airlock. They depart the Falcon. Tanaka notes the egg ship by the station. It's so odd that no one noticed it being there. It's also bizarre because Tanaka acts like she found it. "Trejo had called in her as a hunter. He'd been right." Except, y'know, Ochida sent her the footage and was like, yo, check this out. So, her hunting instincts were just... recognizing the egg ship in a photo. In the one place everyone should've looked first. Teresa asks Tanaka how well she knows her father. Tanaka says she was in "the first wave." They hang around the ring station, but nothing happens. Eventually, Teresa says that something is wrong. Chapter Thirty-Eight: Elvi The lab is ready to go. Elvi is anxious. A survey team has found the bullet in San Esteban. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 38 posted:Back in what were quickly becoming the good old days, they’d been easier to locate because they appeared in proximity to whatever had triggered them. The hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of experiments by the enemy since then should in theory have produced just as many small, persistent anomalies, but without being tied to a human object, action, or frame of reference, finding them made needles and haystacks look trivial. Cara shows up and asks to go on the dive with Amos. Elvi denies it. Cara has another tantrum about it, saying that she's not a child even if she looks like one, and that she should keep her "loving maternal instincts" to herself, and so on. I really don't know what the Coreys are doing with the whole 'rebuilt people' plot, and I'm not really sure if they know where they're going with it, either. Remember, a sign of Cortazar's evil was that he didn't treat them as children or as human, and Elvi basically agrees with him in this chapter. Like with Amos, she begins to think that she's in mortal danger, but Cara relents. Tanaka says they're ready to go. Amos is strapped in and ready to dive. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 38 posted:Amos smiled at her. It was the same expression he’d have used if she’d told a joke or offered him a beer. And then Amos starts screaming. He has a seizure, but they can't bring him out of the dive. Elvi thinks he's having a massive stroke. Elvi goes to get Cara and says Amos is stuck in the ring station. Cara and Xan shut their eyes and start doing something, and Amos begins to stabilize and, as that happens, Elvi's awareness explodes white. Interlude: The Dreamers (2) Leviathan Falls, Interlude: The Dreamers (2) posted:The dreamer dreams, and his dream is unlike all that passed before. Where grandmother masks whispered and promised and told their secrets, nothing welcomes him here. Instead, there is the machine, and the machine is constant motion. Something that isn’t light glimmers in colors no eyes have seen. There's no way into the ring station. Amos imagines himself getting inside and "builds from abstraction a tool to crack wide the abstract." The "bull-headed god" (Duarte) turns to him, and they know each other. "Where there was once a man, pitiless legions march." Amos steps up to Duarte, and Duarte strikes him down and Amos beings to die, aware of his body ripping itself apart. Amos tries to fight back. "A rat bites a tiger's paw." The dreamers (Cara and Xan) come to Amos, and they either drag him out or Duarte manages to expel them or both. Duarte forgets they were there. Xan forgets they were there. Cara does not. Duarte "stands alone in a lighthouse and faces an angry sea." Amos wakes up. Amos tells Lee that he has to tell Jim and Elvi what happened. There's no way in, and Duarte knows they're there. And, worse than that, he's angry now. This interlude is actually pretty good. Mainly because it's a bit more straightforward and is characters basically battling on the astral plane instead of dressing up expanse_builder_big_secrets.txt with metaphor. Chapter Thirty-Nine: Jim Holden is thinking about the protomolecule. He saw the catalyst and thought of Julie Mao and how long it'd taken her to die. And the people on Eros Station. The big flash of awareness that Elvi had hit Holden, too. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 39 posted:Then, like a dream, he was a hundred places at once. A thousand people. A vastness in which the idea of “James Holden” was lost like a stone in the ocean. He was a woman with an aching shoulder in the galley of a ship he didn’t know, halfway through a bulb of cheap coffee that had been secretly spiked with alcohol. He was a young man in a small, cramped engineering deck, engaged in a sexual act with Rebecca—whoever she was—and torn between guilt and delight at his infidelity. He was an officer in the Laconian Navy hiding in his ready room, the lights off, trying to keep his sobs quiet so that the crew wouldn’t hear them and know how afraid he was. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 39 posted:“Are we sure that these are enemies?” Elvi asked. Naomi wonders why they couldn't make the experiment work. Elvi says the station was basically on autopilot during the events of Abaddon's Gate, whereas now it has someone telling it what to do. The catalyst can turn something on, and Amos and Cara can mess with it, but Duarte was "remade" with the protomolecule and no one's getting into the station if he doesn't want them to. Later, the Rocinante crew (bar Amos) are talking about hearing voices in their heads. Jim actually finishes his food before putting it in the recycler. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 39 posted:He popped his bowl and spoon into the recycler, appreciating how the lid clicked under his hand, how it sealed when he took the pressure away. It was such a small, little elegance. So easy to overlook. Good recycler. +1 morale. Holden heads off to his cabin. He thinks that Amos, Cara and Xan are just the same as the Eros people and Julie: they were rebuilt because an alien drone decided they should be. Holden thinks: Leviathan Falls, Chapter 39 posted:The war would go on. The builders of the ring gates moving from form to form—primitive bioluminescent sea slugs, to angels of light, then to a hive of mostly hairless primates with billions of bodies and only one mind. The dark things inside the gates and outside the universe scratching and ripping and unmaking the sickness that had intruded on its reality. Maybe someday that battle would be won. Maybe it would go on forever. Either way, nothing that Jim knew as human would persist. No more first kisses. No more prayers. No more moments of jealousy or insight or selfishness or love. They would be taken apart and fit back together like the bodies on Eros. Something would be there, but it wouldn’t be them. So, this is basically it. This is the secret 'metaplot' of this series. There's some Reddit posts that take, like, 10,000 words to spell out what this paragraph directly states: the protomolecule has been engaged in some long-running plot to resurrect the mind of the Builder species in the body of humanity. I'm going to be about as blunt and dismissive as I feel comfortable being about this: it's garbage. (More to the point, I'm not sure when Holden learned all this?) Back in Abaddon's Gate, the protomolecule got a human aboard the ring station, and nothing happened. There's not even a creepy in retrospect moment where Miller wants Holden to touch something only to be interrupted by the Martian marines. And this is my whole problem with this 'secret master plan ending from the beginning' -- not only is it inconsistent with the earlier books, it's ludicrously silly. So, you're the protomolecule builders. You're at the height of your power. You have, as best as we can determine, never been challenged. You're able to perform feats of stellar engineering that boggle lesser minds. You turned Ilus into a battery planet. You can stop fusion. You set up a star system in weird nothing-stasis for an unknown amount of years. You turned a neutron star into a supernova booby trap. You exist on what might be a separate plane of reality. You have, for whatever reason, a contingency to ensure the continuation of your empire if you are ever wiped out by a mysterious force that blots out your hive-mind but leaves all of your vital infrastructure intact. Luckily for your contingency planners but unluckily for everyone else, you are blotted out by a mysterious force that leaves all of your vital infrastructure intact. But you also had weapons (that probably wouldn't have worked) and you considered the whole thing a creeping sickness that you thought you could treat with the liberal application of supernovas. That's fine, you somehow know that species' made of matter can resist the dark entities better. So, you have the protomolecule pre-programmed to bring an organic to the ring station and upload your diamond backup to everyone and, hooray, your empire is reborn. Except, there's a problem. That obviously isn't the plan. The Investigator did that perfectly and nothing happened. It appears that your plan depends on a very unlikely set of circumstances. Such as one particular person getting into mad science and wanting to dose themselves up on it, and then the dark entities blowing his mind apart, and this allowing you to rebuild him to do what you want and conduct your master plan (with no survivors.) And then him managing to bring his own physical body to the ring station, after someone else had already activated the ring gates, and found the space diamond, and... But that's not all. It depends on your gatebuilding 'seed' getting caught around a gas giant that is located in the system of your original target in defiance to your original objective when you sent it off. Had the builders actually built their gate around Earth, had Miller and 'Julie' not been able to divert Eros, the whole builder master plan wouldn't have just shot itself in the foot but blown it's goddamn legs off. Even in this very novel, it doesn't seem to make sense. There's three protomolecule-rebuilt people running around (Amos, Cara, Xan) and they're not exactly in much of a hurry to enact this master plan. Amos just tried to disrupt it! And I've even said, wow, wouldn't it be interesting if Amos was was a Manchurian candidate or a flat-out saboteur? I know it's tough to end a nine book series that hasn't had much in the way of, shall we say, planning for the end, but this isn't it. The Expanse was the story of a blind luck, a cosmic miracle. The 'seed' got caught by Saturn and became Phoebe, and humanity evolved unknowing that a vast empire had marked them for death before they even existed (so they could build a highway, basically.) Humanity then grapples with getting access to this strange tool, using it for their own purposes, etc. And then it turns out that humanity perhaps only received the opportunity to exist because something wiped out the protomolecule builders between them launching Phoebe and it arriving in Sol... The only reason I can see the Coreys going in this direction is that they were either totally out of ideas for their big climax and/or they'd genuinely forgotten the worldbuilding and events of the previous novels. Phoebe wasn't just chilling around Saturn, it had been sent to wipe out life on Earth. Had it worked, there'd just be an inactive gate floating in another dead system until, I don't know, aquatic life evolved on Europa. But they wouldn't have any protomolecule to activate the ring station with, so, what? The only reason Holden could get aboard was because the proto-child-soldier-monster left some on the Rocinante. There're some Reddit theories that argue it's a genius plan that's been staring people in the face the whole time, but Reddit has a habit of insisting that anything they like is the smartest thing ever if you subscribe to one amazing theory. For example, the Builders knew Earth had humans on it and so that is why they sent Phoebe. Wrong -- Phoebe was dispatched toward Earth billions of years before that. A lot of them depend on 'well, everything humanity thought about the protomolecule was wrong' but I shouldn't even need to get into how much of a waste of time it is to read a series that is doing so much 'we're getting to the fireworks factory...' setup, only for it to go, 'psych, that was all stupid monkey thoughts' in the last twenty percent of the final novel. Here is what we know of the protomolecule's plan in the early novels: hijack the biosphere of Earth, build a gate, connect to the network. When this does not happen, it creates Miller to find out why. It has no idea what happened, and no hint of having any ulterior motive. Again, it doesn't suddenly direct Holden to Adro or whatever after the gates open, which some theories posit happening, the protomolecule getting a 'software update' from the ring station, it instead goes looking for who killed the empire and, that resolved, asks to die. There was no secret fundamental purpose prior to this novel. The last 20% of this novel. It's not even really a theory. That paragraph explicitly states it. There's just no overarching master plan. The events of the earlier novels don't really influence your understanding of this one, and the events of this one don't retroactively change your understanding of the earlier ones. The reason why people need to write lengthy posts about how well put together the Builder master plan is is because the events of the novels are impossible to reconcile with what we learn in this one. A lot of it depends on basically picking quotes out of context and inventing a meaning that conflicts with the story, like the idea that the "ring of debris" around the ring station in Abaddon's Gate is made up of dozens of alien ships from previous attempts to contact the ring station, when really that results from the Coreys unclear writing: "Around it is a slow-moving ring of other objects, including all of the probes we’ve fired into the slow zone, and the Belter ship Y Que." If there were aliens ships there, you kind of think it'd come up at some point before not at all. Like I said, The Expanse was a story about humanity in the face of cosmic circumstances and vast coincidences. Humanity existed because the land clearance job of an ancient empire went off-target. Ghost!Miller existed because the protomolecule had maybe never absorbed sentient life before. Same with Julie, and this allowed a moment between the two that saved humanity. The ring station didn't burn down Sol because humanity managed, in one single moment, to come together. Hey, isn't that an interesting wrinkle -- when the ring station became aware of substrate life, it immediately tried to sterilize it? Like, I really have to address this. It's a deeply silly reading and, was we'll see in the next few chapters, somehow dosing yourself up with the protomolecule allows you to use it to thwart its own plans which is very odd and not something I've seen the master plan people address beyond 'I don't know, maybe it's because Miller and Holden were friends.' Sorry, if your reading can't account for the climax of the novel it's introduced in then maybe something's wrong with the theory or the overarching writing or both. Phew. Okay. 'The anjin is upset about books.' Watch Shogun, it's great. Holden goes to see Naomi. Holden gives Naomi a very worrying speech. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 39 posted:“You are the central fact of my life,” he said. “Knowing you. Waking up next to you. It’s been the most meaningful thing I’ve done. And I am profoundly loving grateful that I got that. I think of how easy it would have been for us to miss each other, and I can’t even imagine what that lifetime would have been.” "You are the central fact of my life," he said. "Knowing you. Waking up next to you. But I never thought to marry you. Or to do much beyond live on a thirty-year old gunship while wearing jumpsuits that don't fit us right. And I am profoundly loving grateful that I got that." Naomi begins to cry and asks Holden to do whatever it is he thinks he has to do while she's asleep. So, he does. And I think there's something awful about this. I feel like it's supposed to be tragic, but I don't get tragedy from it. I get 'Wow, Holden's an rear end in a top hat, and he's learned nothing.' I think that, genuinely, it'd be kinder if he just did it without putting Naomi through the mental torture of 'my not-quite-husband is about to do something awful.' Easier for forgiveness than permission, and all. Like, imagine being in Naomi's shoes. Holden has been a wreck since coming back from Laconia, the world is ending, Duarte appears unstoppable, and he shows up and basically sounds like he's putting his affairs in order. And Naomi's just like, well, just do it while I'm sleeping? If I was Naomi, I'd be worried the guy's about to shoot himself (out an airlock or otherwise!) Holden walks through the Rocinante. He thinks about everyone. Muskrat, Amos, Alex, Teresa, Bobbie, Clarissa, Avasarala. He crosses over to the Falcon and heads down to the catalyst. He withdraws a hypodermic needle. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 39 posted:His head felt weirdly clear. Even with the distant awareness of the others, the moment was his own. He felt as alone as he ever had, and also a kind of satisfaction. A falling away of doubt. The anxiety that had haunted him since Laconia had cooked off like dew on a warm day. He was only himself now. I wonder if the authors know how much this reads like the thought process of a suicidal person. Holden extracts a vial of protomolecule blood from the catalyst, and injects it into his leg. He feels cold, he tastes metal, and blue fireflies flicker in and out behind his eyes. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 39 posted:He took a long, slow breath. He was trembling. He opened his eyes, looked around the room, and found what he thought he’d find. What he’d hoped for. The slouch. The half-apologetic, half-astonished sad-dog face. The porkpie hat. So, there we go. As we head into the final twenty percent of this novel, the climax of this nine book series, James Holden has infected himself with the protomolecule -- and, more notably, Miller has returned. And it doesn't really feel like anything. A problem this series has it that because is sticks to a fairly rigid style of storytelling it becomes very easy to predict, and this means that scenes that should have narrative weight, just feel like an entree that's taken too long to arrive. The return of Miller is a good bit, don't get me wrong. Miller is the best character this series had, and his return is welcome for that reason alone. The problem is that, well, of course he's going to show up at the 11th hour to help bail Jim out. It's really obvious. Here he is, at the 80% mark. It's one of those things where you don't know if the Coreys just write in this manner, or if it was a deliberate (and cynical) attempt to serve the audience some fan service. Hooray, it's Miller! The gang's back together! "We need to talk" is a fun callback to "We gotta talk", sure. It's like a reversal of how they met again at the end of Caliban's War -- Miller is shocked, Holden wants to talk. But as obvious a fan service at this is, I don't think this is how the protomolecule works. Back in the earlier books, it's established that the protomolecule was a nodule aboard the Rocinante that was projecting data (basically) into Holden's brain. So, why has this engineered protomolecule sample engendered the exact same 'hallucinations' into Holden? I know there was some stuff about Holden's brain having dry riverbeds or whatever, but the mechanism is different, the the Investigator was a protomolecule construct created to serve a purpose (find out what happened, hence the name) while getting someone to carry it from place to place. The riverbeds were not the cause. The riverbeds were the symptom of having Miller beamed into his brain. I think most people assumed Miller would play into the endgame in some way -- the cynical spirit mentor returning for one last argument. And if the audience knows that, you can surely play with their expectations a little. Have Miller show up with Golem!Amos at the end of Tiamat's Wrath. Hell, have him show up to Holden in captivity due to his proximity to the Pen -- and then follow him aboard the Rocinante. Make it weird, make it creepy, make it unsettling as it was when Miller first stepped into Holden's room after his supposed death. Additionally, Holden dosing himself up with the protomolecule doesn't feel neat and satisfying either. To be a little blunt, it feels like they're just grabbing for the end of Londo Mollari's arc from Babylon 5: "you must surrender yourself to your greatest fear, knowing that it will destroy you." The thing is, Holden hasn't been scared about the protomolecule for a while. Back in the first two novels, sure, but I think by Abaddon's Gate he was all aboard the 'it's just a microwave' train. When it's someone like Mollari, it works because we know how much he has to lose. We see the double-pain of how far Mollari has fallen from being the funny drunkard, but also how by accepting his greatest fear, he'll remove any possibility of being able to return to those simpler times. And, perhaps worse than that, his friends will never know how much he sacrificed and why. We've seen how much he's changed, and how little it mattered (or, perhaps, the self-sacrifice proves it did matter.) It also links back to an idea running through Babylon 5 that a principle of sentient life is self-sacrifice for a cause or a loved one. And the end of Londo's arc is that he, perhaps the character who was most obsessed with status and self-importance, makes that sacrifice alone and in the dark, where no one will ever know. But for Holden? The guy is just returning to the mean. Like he says to Naomi, this is just what he does. It's like the old warrior picking up the sword for one last battle. It's missing any kind of pathos. There's no sense of tragedy, no anything. Is it really a sacrifice if you have nothing to lose? Is it really a powerful character moment if the paths are 'total death of all humanity' or 'inject myself with the glowing blue alien juice?' It feels like the novel is trying to shoot for this idea that Holden's going back to his old habits, but we never saw him rise above those old habits. I understand that it's very much a desperation move on Holden's part -- it worked once before, it might work again, and if it doesn't it's not going to matter for much longer anyway. But even now, thirty years on, he and Naomi can't have a mature conversation about it. 'Hi, Naomi, I've got the urge to do something.' 'Okay, Jim, I know you won't listen to me so I'm going to at least spare myself the anguish of being conscious while you do it.'
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Apr 24, 2024 08:40
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I agree with everything you said. I do think that the secret meta-plot of the series is bullshit, but I also don't know if the Corey's even intended it to be that. Giving them some benefit of the doubt, and maybe a re-read will make me less generous, I assumed the Builders/Roman's (when was the last time the Roman/Goth naming was used?!) had seized on the opportunity Duarte presented when he faded away/contacted the diamond or something similar, not that it had been their millennia long plan like some people interpreted.
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Apr 24, 2024 10:02
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PriorMarcus posted:I agree with everything you said. Yeah, the Roman nomenclature just vanishing is conspicuous. I feel like it could be related to this sudden insight into a master plan 'twist.' You can't suddenly have their big symbolism being 'the long dead empire that build roads' if you want them to suddenly show up as an antagonist. The weird thing about it being an opportunity that presented itself -- which I agree, that'd be a great way to tie it together -- is that Duarte never had access to the 'library.' Seemingly not until his mind had been obliterated which only occurred as an unexpected side effect of a Goth incident. So, I guess the neatest way of resolving it is that Duarte was Duarte until that time when the Goths blasted his consciousness to bits, and what was left pulled itself back together under the influence of the protomolecule, and the protomolecule was like, "Oh, poo poo, we've got the answer to our prayers here, boys!" But also, I think Tiamat's Wrath was going with a different idea for Cara, Xan, Duarte and "the library" than this novel has gone with. As far as I'm aware, this is all the authors have said about it: quote:Ty Franck: "Hopefully the last book helps people understand a little better the madness of Duarte, when they start to realize that he wasn't entirely in control of his own actions. If you read the last book, it's definitely heavily implied that what he's trying to accomplish there is what the protomolecule wants him to do." Authorial interviews are interesting because I think it takes a brave author to engage with the realities of writing and say things like, "Oh, I didn't think about that much" or "It was left for the reader to figure out" or "I had no idea what it was doing" or "I never intended that." Author interviews are basically marketing, so, it's not surprising to see them go, "Actually, yes, I did plan it all out from the beginning." It was a lie when JMS said it about Babylon 5's five-year plan being as-aired from the start, a lie when George Lucas said Star Wars was always the story of Anakin, and it was a lie when the Coreys said it, because we know the series went from three books to nine. As we see there, Abraham says "once again" which makes it seem like an overarching contingency plan, that they've pulled this move before. But it also makes you wonder, like, when did it happen before? The other thing that bothers me about this whole fast life/slow life, protomolecule builder, endless war, whatever, sci-fi plot is that... This is a series where the authors always responded to questions about this sort of thing with, like, 'that isn't what the story is about.' But now, suddenly, it is. Everything has been about it. All nine books have been leading to this conflict. Duarte was a puppet. So, the final climax is between our good guys and a guy who is being manipulated by the protomolecule (if he arguably still is a person at all) to stop the protomolecule from using Duarte to turn humanity into the Builders and-- Yeah, I don't know how this relates to the original story of scruffy ice miners stopping a corporate conspiracy and the difficulty of a future where people are still exploiting each other for profit. And then there's other things -- how could a species not be interested in matter? What does that even mean? The Builders turned a planet into a power plant, they're obviously interested in matter. They had repair drones, and robots, and a ring station with a whole network of gates, all of which required matter to be built or fulfill their purpose. Like, unless you're getting into absolutely heady stuff that borders on outright magic or alternate dimensions we can't understand, I don't get how you can just consider that as remotely what the books demonstrate. Unless you believe in souls (and I don't buy the Coreys believing in dualism) then consciousness emerges from matter. They even say in this novel alone, stuff about changing the structure of the brain changes what it can think. Additionally, while I think I understand what Franck is getting at with the flight simulator comment, I am reasonably certain that the coding of a flight simulator on PC versus one on Mac requires porting and different code -- which means that, yes, the flight simulator does think differently. You can't just install a Mac flight simulator on a PC or vice versa. When Starcraft came out, it took a year for it to end up on Mac. As an aside, check out my retrospective on some Starcraft custom campaigns! And then, like... the hardware is the least interesting part, Franck? The "clay" hardware is what's going to allow them to take on the dark gods! They're overwriting the software! What other parts are there? And then there's quotes like this: The Dreamers (1) posted:The grandmothers are dead, their voices are all songs sung by ghosts, and the truths they tell, they would tell to anyone. They cannot listen back, and the dreamer sees the hollow behind the mask. Which implies to me that there's nothing substantial there in the diamond. Just information. But that's apparently part of the plan too because downloading information into hardware makes the "clay" species into the Builders. And, sure, okay, I can buy that what we think of consciousness is just a particular set of memories and knowledge and context, but this all feels a bit too out there for a series that has rather been focused on teenage love triangles, Holden's need to be a big dang hero, and bad guys sounding like domestic abusers rather than actually setting any of this up. A master plan that depends on half a dozen 'just so happens' is ludicrous. Phoebe just so happens to get caught in Saturn, so Earth exists, which just so happens to discover the protomolecule, which just so happens to not wipe out Earth (again), which just so happens to have a sample to get inside the ring station on a ship of a guy who knew the guy who stopped Eros, etc. Just so happens that Duarte decides to dose himself up on it, because he just so happened to lead a huge military coup to capture the one planet with a shipyard and repair drones, and it just so happened to be left to its own devices for thirty years while he took big handfuls of the protomeme. I just can't take it seriously. Like, the protomolecule is essentially super Lego. Why didn't it just... build a "clay" species? It can build all kinds of fantastic things. It absorbed all the information of a male human and a female human, so, why didn't it build Julies and Millers? It's not that I don't like master plans and gambits. But this is, like, one of those immersion-breaking cartoons where no matter what the bad guy has a contingency. Good master plans are your Palpatines, where he sets up a situation where the options are 'I win/you lose.' A rigged game from the start, but one where the good guys have no choice but to play. Or they're your Gendo Ikaris, someone who is extremely good at using his influence to make things up as he goes along, silently gathering trump cards up his sleeve and tossing ones that can only harm him off the table. The protomolecule plan can only work with this precisely complicated set of events that require, in a sense, everything to go wrong before it goes right. I don't buy that even a slow life alien hive mind can plan like that. It just sours me on the series. I'm not sure the authors intended it as a secret metaplot. I think that's something Reddit has run with because the guy who originated the 'master plan' theory is, uh, rather attached to it. But I think it's a ending to the nine-book series that is incompatible with everything before the eighth and ninth books in the series. I'm also really wondering when Holden figured out "the dark things inside the gates and outside the universe scratching and ripping and unmaking the sickness that had intruded on its reality." I thought it was something Miller mentioned later, but Holden's just thinking about it like it's an open secret. I honestly don't recall it being mentioned yet. edit: It appears Duarte mentioned it when he appeared aboard the Falcon: "They built but were unable to effectively use certain tools that prevent the enemy from intruding into what we mean when we say the universe." And it'd been mentioned by Fayez that there was a hypothesis that the ring space was not in "our universe." But Holden's assessment still feels like he's pulling a bit out of thin air, specifically, that 'we' are "intruding" on 'them.' I thought that's something that gets mentioned in Chapter 43. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 13:00 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 11:28
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Yeah, the Roman nomenclature just vanishing is conspicuous. I feel like it could be related to this sudden insight into a master plan 'twist.' You can't suddenly have their big symbolism being 'the long dead empire that build roads' if you want them to suddenly show up as an antagonist. I'm interested in where you think it was going/presenting versus what we got. Again, I agree with everything you said, and that author interview is interesting. I've never really tracked down anything they had to say after this novel because it kind of left me cold on the franchise. The builders were demonstrably interested in matter. Why even build the gates to expand their empire if they could take it or leave it? If they are just a consciousness stored collectively on the BFE then why even worry about having all these material relics around the galaxy that served some purpose. It's utterly bizarre. I can buy that they Goths aren't interested in matter, and they just wish it would still infringing on their reality, maybe they got confused somewhere in the telling of it all? Making this an unintended consequence of Duarte being vaporized makes so much more sense across the board. I think there's ways for the big, larger than life science fiction story to tie back into the story of human ice miners being exploited, and I've dreamt up alternative endings for the series where it does, but what we have doesn't get close. Interesting, if this was their plan all along, or even before the final book, we see no evidence at all of it in the TV adaptation which they've gone on record saying is like a second draft for them. PriorMarcus fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 13:14
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PriorMarcus posted:I'm interested in where you think it was going/presenting versus what we got. We don't know much about "the library" in Tiamat's Wrath, but what we do get appears to indicate something that Cara and Xan got access to as part of the reconstruction process, and that Duarte did not (because he wasn't reconstructed; protomolecule infection does not give you access.) Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 39 posted:The library was what Cara and Alexander—whose nickname in the family had been Xan—called the information that they carried with them after their re-creation by the repair drones. It was, according to them, like knowing things without having to learn them first. This relates to, I think, how Amos comes back knowing that the dark entities are ready to kill everyone. When you are rebuilt by the strange dogs, you gain 'access' to the library. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 39 posted:But it was interesting that none of Cortázar’s work on Duarte seemed to have resulted in the high consul’s getting access to the library, and the weird turning-off of consciousness hadn’t broken Cara and Xan the way it had Duarte. But for all of his protomolecule treatments, Duarte did not get access to it. I think it's important to note that, at no point, does Elvi connect 'the library' to the Adro diamond. Not even after earlier in the novel, where they call out the diamond as being a possible "data storage material." In that sense, I think it's pretty conspicuous that the novel that introduces the two concepts does not link them. It'd be really simple to have part of Elvi's thought process go -- wait, Fayez said the diamond might be a big storage thing, and these kids are pulling knowledge from somewhere, which means... Now, here is where we begin to run into problems. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 4 posted:“How did it compare to your experience of ‘the library’?” Elvi asked. The library is not the Adro diamond, although it may be the source of the information in the library. But then Chapters 26, 27, 29, 35 and 37 directly equate the library to the diamond as the one and the same. They dive into the library. They've been exploring the library. Stopping exploring the diamond is stopping exploring the library. And, of course, the library can't be the Adro diamond because Cara and Xan had access to it before they dived into it and presumably had access before anyone was even aware of the diamond -- so, huh? I would assume that the library is just, like, a database of information that'd been downloaded into anything that is rebuilt by the dogs: knowing without learning. And this aligns with Cara's words about it being where the information "comes from." But I don't know how to reconcile that with getting additional information from the dives and talking with the grandmothers or whatever, unless the library is an incomplete account of info, but that's never brought up or mentioned if that's the case. And why would rebuilding things get that information? Is it even intentional? Were the strange dogs left active in the empire or are they like some of the stuff on Ilus that had evolved afterward? The unintended consequence thing would also echo back to Eros-Julie and the Investigator. The protomolecule gets infected by consciousness just as much as it infects biological matter. Neither those two entities were Julie or Miller -- they were a mixture of human and alien. Duarte coming back could be the same thing: the protomolecule being combined with Duarte's drive to create an eternal empire. It isn't the protomolecule wearing a Duarte suit, it's a gestalt like the terrified girl driving Eros was. Honestly, though, I don't know how you'd end this series in a strong fashion. There's so many cheques written that haven't been cashed. Too many plates in the air. And it all feels a little like the authors don't really know what story they're telling, or where it's going, or what the point of it is. And I think it all awkwardly crashes together in the next few chapters to give the reader an ending that is just... flatly fine. I'll always wonder how much the weaker parts of this series stem from the stronger parts -- the Belter language, the Rocinante crew, the overall worldbuilding and plot of Leviathan Wakes -- coming from people who weren't Franck and Abraham. The TV adaptation is definitely interesting to think about, too, because I feel like it really made the dark entities feel more hostile than the books did. For example, Holden's freaky experience with them at the end of the third season and his frantic warning to Fred Johnson as this almost doomsayer figure. Also, one thing I pointed out in Babylon's Ashes, but I'm going to bring it back up now, was the attack of the weird silent fleet on Medina. A dozen or so ships came through as one (from multiple gates) and came burning hard for Medina Station without making any transmissions and the railguns blew them all up. This is really odd because no one ever brought it up again, but it's basically exactly what the big threat is now, just on a smaller scale. It makes me wonder if the Roman/Goth thing was completely different where telepathic coordination was something the protomolecule killers were capable of, not the builders. And then, there's this: Babylon's Ashes, Chapter 32 posted:“Coordinated,” he said. “Sounds like they been talking con alles, sa sa? Making plans.” Break lightspeed? The dark gods have done that. They altered the speed of light in Chapter 2 of Leviathan Falls. And the reason why they didn't find any proof of transmissions via Medina is because it was obviously a similar mechanism to what Duarte is doing now: some alocal telepathy. But then why is it just there in Babylon's Ashes? What's the point of it? Why echo that in the climactic confrontation of the series? I don't think I've seen a single person even note the connection here, much less work it into any coherent series-wide reading. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 16:10
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Also, one thing I pointed out in Babylon's Ashes, but I'm going to bring it back up now, was the attack of the weird silent fleet on Medina. A dozen or so ships came through as one (from multiple gates) and came burning hard for Medina Station without making any transmissions and the railguns blew them all up. This is really odd because no one ever brought it up again, but it's basically exactly what the big threat is now, just on a smaller scale. It makes me wonder if the Roman/Goth thing was completely different where telepathic coordination was something the protomolecule killers were capable of, not the builders. God I completely forgot about this.
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Apr 24, 2024 16:20
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General Battuta posted:God I completely forgot about this. Me too.
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Apr 24, 2024 17:27
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I think (if I had another draft on this final book) a cleaner way to do this story is to return to some of the tone and themes of Leviathan Wakes. (It's right there in the title.) Duarte's plan isn't to make everyone a hive mind, it's to set the protomolecule back to 'aggressive construction' mode and build his anti-Goth weapons the same way the gates got built. So he starts doing Eros writ large. Protomolecule zombies taking over ships, colony planets getting Venused. Duarte's going to be the resilient, continuous leadership he always dreamt of being—his subjects are just going to be a little more tightly managed. It's way more physical and threatening, seems easily supported by the foreshadowing, and it also has that 'returning to where we started' factor which seems like it makes for a good finale in so many different contexts. e: And the series was best when the protomolecule felt like a dangerous wonderful alien threat, not a microwave. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 17:30
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General Battuta posted:I think (if I had another draft on this final book) a cleaner way to do this story is to return to some of the tone and themes of Leviathan Wakes. (It's right there in the title.) This is a really strong idea. If I was to refine it slightly I'd still have Duarte partially overtaken by the builders and have the weapon be something they only dreamt of in the time since their defeat, so that it doesn't seem like a loose end that they didn't use the weapon during the original conflict. Then it becomes a kind of bitter remnant of the Roman's who are refusing to forgive/admit defeat and endangering everyone for their pettiness which I think kind of comes a bit closer to the themes of the story.
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Apr 24, 2024 19:06
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General Battuta posted:God I completely forgot about this. That's not too surprising, given how it feels like a random event in a plot-line about random people on Medina Station. It ties back to how Babylon's Ashes feels like it was telling a different story at some point. You can also look at the talk of alien activity on colonies that was going unnoticed because of the Free Navy crisis, the colonies that just dropped out of contact mysteriously, and so on. I'm not at all convinced that -- since the cat is out of the bag in Holden's internal monologue -- that the dark entities being a separate universe that was trying to force the Builders out as they had intruded on them was at all the original concept. I get the feeling that there was no overarching idea for what killed the Builders, honestly. Abaddon's Gate presents a mysterious phenomenon that they had no way of stopping but, for whatever reason, thought that supernova and a gate quarantine would stop it. It was not something that was immediately determined as an attack. Cibola Burn gives us our first 'bullet', which indicates to the characters and the reader that it was a deliberate attack: the bullet in the corpse, a planet that'd been shot in the head. While Elvi has a very odd episode as she plunges through the 'bullet', there's not really anything that suggests it was anything other than an exotic weapon designed to kill Ilus. It was also the only object of its type ever discovered. So, I'm more inclined to think that whoever fired it either forgot to clean it up, or didn't get the chance to clean it up. There's a part of me that thinks what killed the Builder Empire may have been an internal schism, and the 'Goth' side figured out a way to kill the other side that relied on the protomolecule (and, as indicated in Abaddon's Gate, may have basically uploaded themselves into beings of data and light.) That the Builder infrastructure still exists suggests that the enemy was the polity, not the technology. Nemesis Games is where we get out first incident of a ship definitely being eaten by the "dark gods." This is the book that links them to the bullet due to a similar phenomenon. But it could still be possible that the disappearing ships is the result of some kind of sabotage system on the gates themselves. There's also a part of me that thinks that the disappearing ships was originally what it appears to be for everything except the epilogue: Duarte's way of laundering ships to Marco and also sending them to Laconia on the sly over a period of years. Babylon's Ashes, as mentioned, seems to introduce a whole bunch of things happening outside Sol, all of which never matter again. From memory, Persepolis Rising doesn't really give us much beyond explicitly linking the bullets to the dark gods (which raises questions as to why one was only ever found) until the epilogue, where Duarte mentions his desire to storm heaven and wage a war against the things that killed the protomolecule. To be perfectly honest, I have trouble fitting that in with Duarte's actions in the next novel. It isn't, 'hey, I'm going to see if we can communicate with them', it's 'I know they exist, and I'm going to kill them before they kill us.' Tiamat's Wrath is... Well, to be a bit flippant, they read Blindsight and also wanted their alien life to be some inscrutable being/s that humanity can't really comprehend. And I feel like this decision maybe bought them one more novel before they actually had to explain what was happening (and nail down what was going on) but it also basically screwed everything up. I think Tiamat's Wrath should've been the novel that nailed down everything, leaving Leviathan Falls to be the novel that was all about resolving the question of, basically, "Can humanity co-exist with the dark gods?" But, the ninth book in a nine book series feels like it's establishing what's been going on, and cramming everything into what's left. I think the thirty-year time gap is perhaps the worst thing within the series, but it also doesn't help that I think the abandoned whatever protomolecule-abusing attempt at empire they wanted to setup in Persepolis Rising for generic Hitler-Stalin bad guys. General Battuta posted:I think (if I had another draft on this final book) a cleaner way to do this story is to return to some of the tone and themes of Leviathan Wakes. (It's right there in the title.) See, that alone feels closer to the Duarte of the Persepolis Rising epilogue, I think. Whenever I think about 'fixing' the ending of The Expanse, I feel like you'd have to go back to Tiamat's Wrath, at least. But I like this idea a lot. PriorMarcus posted:This is a really strong idea. If I was to refine it slightly I'd still have Duarte partially overtaken by the builders and have the weapon be something they only dreamt of in the time since their defeat, so that it doesn't seem like a loose end that they didn't use the weapon during the original conflict. Then it becomes a kind of bitter remnant of the Roman's who are refusing to forgive/admit defeat and endangering everyone for their pettiness which I think kind of comes a bit closer to the themes of the story. The thing I don't get about the anti-Goth weapons that the Builders supposedly designed and left ready for Duarte to build is just, like... how do they work? I think the next few chapters make the reveal the ring station space is essentially a foreign object in the universe-body of the "entities" and their intrusions are basically an immune response on a universal level. And there's something else that bothers me. The dark gods have the capability to shut down protomolecule technology with their bullets. The dark gods want the ring station eliminated. We see in Tiamat's Wrath that they are capable of interfering in the ring station's local area. So, why didn't they just bullet it then? It's similar to how firing the magnetic cannon in Persepolis Rising didn't draw their attention there for whatever reason. I think the vague idea is that the dark gods didn't know where the ring station was until it lit up after taking the gamma ray broadside -- but, like, after that? It's another one of those things that leaves me thinking that the gamma ray burst was not an anti-Goth weapon, but a weapon the Goths made to try and destroy the ring station, and the Coreys confused this in the same novel they had it happen. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 12:24 on Apr 25, 2024 |
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Apr 25, 2024 10:11
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The great sin of most of the SF&F industrial complex is becoming so enamored with their plot devices they eclipse the human element of the tale. That is all I can think of with this dark gods and light alien nonsense. General Battuta posted:I think (if I had another draft on this final book) a cleaner way to do this story is to return to some of the tone and themes of Leviathan Wakes. (It's right there in the title.) This is legitimately good because it retains the human element of Man vs Man, instead of the bizarro whatever the gently caress this is where James Holden shoots himself up with <PLOT> to trigger a cutscene to unlock the ability to do 9999 damage to the final boss.
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Apr 25, 2024 17:45
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Leviathan Falls, Chapters 40 - 43 Holden returns to the ring station while Naomi does her best to buy him time. The fate of humanity has never been more boring. Chapter Forty: Naomi Naomi is asking Holden if he can see Miller. Turns out the Falcon's security team grabbed him and hauled him to the lab, and Elvi had come down, and then Elvi had called Naomi. Holden says that Miller is currently standing between her and Elvi. Elvi says it can't be the same Miller. Holden says that Miller died when Eros crashed into Venus and when it needed an investigator, it had Miller ready to go. The protomolecule was "physically manipulating" Holden's brain into interacting with Miller, and those manipulations left "channels" and so by combining the protomolecule with his body, it's recreated Miller. Okay, sure. But Holden was never infected by the protomolecule, and I got the impression it was less making physical alterations and more beaming electrical impulses into his head like extremely advanced magnetic stimulation which is why he couldn't appear in more than one location, the protomolecule couldn't beam Miller into two brains on the fly. Holden doesn't know if Miller 2.0 can open the station, but they're running down a lot of clocks, so, it doesn't really matter. Elvi and Naomi discuss the possibility of saving Holden and Holden says he's only interested in exploring that if they can solve the other issues first. If Elvi's able to make the attempt, then it means everything has worked out well. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 40 posted:Naomi realized they were waiting for her to make the decision. Jim was smiling at her, and it made Naomi want to punch him in the face. How in gently caress did I wind up here? she thought. Naomi tells them to get Teresa and Tanaka ready. Elvi leaves and Holden says he's sorry. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 40 posted:“I’m sorry,” he said. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 40 posted:“I’m really, really angry,” she said. “When Jim came back from Laconia—when we got him back—I knew he was hurt. I knew there was less of him somehow. I thought we’d take care of him. That he was injured, not just in his body. In his soul, if that’s the word. With time and care and love, I thought maybe I would see him again the way he had been. The way I remembered him.” Then, Naomi and Alex are like, oh, Holden rose to the occasion, and he is who he is, and blegh. For any of this to resonate, a sacrifice has to involve more than just the mortal life. Holden dosing himself up means nothing because they'll be dead in a few hours anyway. I don't like the John/Delenn romance in Babylon 5 too much, but when John Sheridan goes to Z'ha'dum, the reason why it is so powerful is because it isn't just his life that he's going to lose, but the life with Delenn he could have if he didn't do it. That's what makes it a powerful moment. If Sheridan had terminal bone cancer or something, it wouldn't mean much. Sure, it's nice, but -- well, we're kind of coming back to that suicide thing again. Naomi assesses the incoming ships. Laconian and underground vessels will attempt to intercept Duarte's armada, but the odds aren't good. Naomi decides not to radio Trejo for help because it'd take too long for the reinforcements to arrive. She experiences memories about the death of someone called Jacob and realizes that she's falling under the sway of Duarte's Instrumentality Project. She takes the pills. Elvi and Naomi wonder if Duarte got any info out of them during the brief wave. As if in answer, all the repeaters at the gates go off-line as one, so, no communications now. Hope they don't need Trejo. Holden calls up and says, hey, we're about one hundred meters from the station and we're going to try boarding it. The station opens and they head in. Meanwhile, Naomi assesses the situation. There's even more ships coming in, but they're days away. Except for one. The Voice of the Whirlwind, the last remaining Magnetar-class super battleship, is burning hard for the Laconia Gate. Harder than any crew can sustain. If it arrives in the ring space, Duarte will have more than enough power to prevail. Naomi begins distributing orders to her fleet. Chapter Forty-One: Jim En route to the ring station, Miller 2.0 tells Holden that this is a bad idea, even for him. Tanaka and Teresa join up with him. Holden calls up Naomi and lets her know what we just read in her chapter. Miller 2.0 opens up the station. Tanaka tells Holden to warn her if he's about to "go full protomonster." By which I guess she means 'vomit zombie?' Because that's what people turn into. The protomonsters were deliberate manipulations of children with a specific illness, remember. Tanaka might just be speaking generally, but, it still doesn't really have a history of turning people into "protomonsters." They head into the station. Holden remembers the Martian Marine being destroyed and used to repair the station back in Abaddon's Gate, so, tells everyone not to break anything. Duarte has seemingly created a human-type atmosphere in the station. Tanaka asks Holden where Duarte is. Miller 2.0 has no idea. Tanaka asks for five-minute updates on his status, Holden petulantly does seven-minutes ones because Tanaka is a meanie. Holden is momentarily overwhelmed by a feeling of religious awe, which is apparently a sign of advancing protomolecule infection. There's a funny moment where everyone is acting like they're in charge and Miller 2.0 is just, like, wtf: Leviathan Falls, Chapter 41 posted:“Colonel,” Teresa said. “Please proceed.” Chapter Forty-Two: Alex Alex and Amos are testing the PDCs. Alex and Naomi briefly exchange "It's been an honor" sort of stuff. Alex thinks it's weird that it's the end of the line and Holden and Teresa aren't there, nor Bobbie and Clarissa. Amos and Alex keep running checks. There's something very odd about how the resurrected guy who is very good at fighting, has access to The Library, and will stand by his captain no matter what didn't go into the ring station. Naomi comes up to the ops deck. Alex says it's a good sign that Duarte is calling in the cavalry because it means he's worried -- otherwise, he'd just wait for them to run out of meds and fall into Instrumentality. Alex asks if they should separate from the Falcon to prepare for the fight, and Naomi says no because she doesn't want people to see the underground and Laconia forces as two separate fleets which strikes me as a bad idea. An Instrumentality wave sweeps through the Rocinante and, interestingly, even Amos is affected by it (but not in any way that seems beyond the ordinary.) The first of Duarte's ships come through the gate. Aboard the Derecho, Botton moves to engage, but Naomi tells him not to. There's about fifty allied ships in the ring space, with a dozen coming through the gate. Duarte calls in six more ships from the gate on the opposite side from the twelve that just appeared, which Naomi anticipated. Duarte's ships pull off a time-on-target attack, which Naomi calls "astounding" even though you'd assume that's like one of the most basic types of calls in these naval combats, ensuring all your various weapons strike at the same time. The Pulsar-class Derecho gets blown to bits in the first volley which is a bit of a "lol, really" moment. One of Naomi's ships, the Godalming, decides to try and engage one of Duarte's ships that appears over-exposed. This is, of course, bait, and it gets taken out. The Rocinante falls back to cover the entrance to the ring station interior... Chapter Forty-Three: Jim The group continues to go through the ring station. Holden's extremities are starting to feel numb. Tanaka's stopped asking for health updates and Holden has also stopped volunteering anything, because these people are adults. Tanaka is getting frustrated because they haven't found Duarte. Miller 2.0 says that is making things worse. Miller 2.0 supposes that this is Eros all over again. Eros took over people's bodies and made stuff out of them. Holden thinks that's right, and Duarte's kind of doing it, too: using people like building blocks. Miller 2.0 wonders: Leviathan Falls, Chapter 43 posted:“You need to ask yourself whether you think Duarte’s the perp, or first among victims. You know that this stuff can hook itself into your dopamine receptors. Train you up to like whatever it wants you to like. Maybe it grabbed on to how he feels about the kid over there and used that as a leash. The things that built all this poo poo could be using him from beyond their graves the same as they used Julie. And there are some things you can only access by being in the substrate. You remember that.” 'You know that this stuff can...' But, uh, do we? The first three novels never mention the protomolecule doing that (why would it need to?) and it's not like Holden was ever all hepped up on dopamine when interacting with the first Miller ghost. In fact, unless I'm wrong, none of the novels have mentioned this is as a protomolecule capability. Holden is like, yes, I was thinking the same thing -- but why, Holden? Again, there's no secret reading theory here. Holden just told us what happened with the Builders before he learned it, and now they've told us just what is happening with Duarte. I think this is part of the reason why there's this 'wow, secret lore' take with the series: because it's introducing concepts at the 11th hour that are vital to the end game without ever being present before. So, I think readers who have been paying attention just sort of disregard these bits without realizing it because it doesn't really fit with how the lore has worked until this point. Holden remembers that they found the Julie-mind on Eros by scanning for heat. Tanaka tells Holden to follow her and stay close. Holden asks Miller 2.0 what it's like "when it gets you." Leviathan Falls, Chapter 43 posted:“You want bullshit happy mouth noises, or the truth.” Leviathan Falls, Chapter 43 posted:Miller gestured at the walls, the fireflies, the incomprehensible complexity and strangeness of the station. “It’s where the power comes from. They cracked the universe open, pushed their way in here, and it pushed back. A whole other universe trying to smash this place flat, and it powers the gates, the artifacts. That magnetic ray gun Duarte was playing with. They built stars with it. Broke rules that you can’t break without a different set of physics to strain it through. You can Eve-and-apple it all you want, but this poo poo right here? This is all made out of original sin.” They stumble upon a metallic insectoid sentry. It blocks off their approach. Tanaka goes to shoot it. Holden asks Miller 2.0 to shut it down, and he does. They enter a vast chamber and find... Leviathan Falls, Chapter 43 posted:From opposite sides of the sphere, dark filaments wove a huge web like a stalactite and a stalagmite reaching from the roof and floor of a cave to touch at a single point. Or like the wings of a great dark angel. I'm not sure we needed a literal crucified-for-our-sins element. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Apr 26, 2024 |
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Apr 26, 2024 07:57
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Also, while I never watched much Stargate, it is my understanding that there was a whole plot-line where an ancient alien species figured they could draw energy from another universe but, oops, turns out that universe was inhabited and they're not happy about their poo poo being wrecked.
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Apr 26, 2024 10:58
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The whole 'Dark Gods from another universe and also the mysterious data-being that can only manifest in select ways and don't give a poo poo about the laws of physics' deal still reminds me a lot of the Festum from Fafnir, who can come and attack more directly but it's also their only way of interacting with the universe at first - their physical forms are the result of the people's perception who first saw them, as they read minds effortlessly. And they can do such things as create a black hole-like wormhole in space and time to teleport around and also just plain make people stop existing. They can connect to anyone's minds who answers their psychic question "Are you there?", which most people do without even realizing it. The Festum are just the fingers of a being from another universe trying to figure out what's going on in this shiny hole someone accidentally poked through the worlds.
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Apr 26, 2024 11:34
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