PriorMarcus posted:This is kind of a side question, but there seems to have been some discussion about in the thread and I'm out of touch with the Expanse franchise. As far as I'm aware, no, there has not been anything more about Cas Anvar and the allegations since the investigation was announced and he left the show/Alex was awkwardly written out. There was a rumor that the reason he was removed was because his behavior wasn't limited to fans, that he'd harassed people within the production team, but I don't think there was anything that corroborated it beyond hearsay. He doesn't seem to have done much work since the accusations came out, for whatever that is worth. That said, I still run off the theory that killing Alex was dictated from above the writers/creators as whoever made the decision saw him as just the pilot, and then the difficulty of writing around the lack of Alex in the later books was a factor in the cancellation. It could also be that it appears a lot of the sets were destroyed during the first cancellation (perhaps everything except the Rocinante sets) and that would've necessitated rebuilding a lot for the scene on Medina, etc. And yeah, I think the weaknesses of the later books -- especially Tiamat's Wrath and Leviathan Falls -- feels like they were pre-emptively scaling to the TV show budget. There's nothing in the later books as crazy as what we see in Abaddon's Gate or Cibola Burn. As far as the franchise goes, I know the Dragon's Tooth comic series is set in the TV show 'no Alex' timeline but haven't heard anything about it. Likewise, there's the Telltale Expanse game but I haven't heard much about it either. Neither of them sound particularly intriguing from the general premise, but who knows.
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Aug 17, 2023 10:00
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:That said, I still run off the theory that killing Alex was dictated from above the writers/creators as whoever made the decision saw him as just the pilot, and then the difficulty of writing around the lack of Alex in the later books was a factor in the cancellation. I definitely feel like a lot of the passion for the show, behind the scenes, died when Cas was outed and left. From interviews and snippets it does seem like loosing Alex and facing the prospect of big changes to the story killed any desire to push for further seasons. I'd be interested in hearing how much Cas being written out changed his last season. I feel like attempts to minimize his scenes really hurt the pacing for that season, and his investigation on Mars ending after a couple of episodes, only to have him sat on the Razorback for most of the season was rubbish. They also cast a fairly big guest star for Sauveterre and had him in two scenes total, so presumably there was more of him originally too, but maybe not. Milkfred E. Moore posted:And yeah, I think the weaknesses of the later books -- especially Tiamat's Wrath and Leviathan Falls -- feels like they were pre-emptively scaling to the TV show budget. There's nothing in the later books as crazy as what we see in Abaddon's Gate or Cibola Burn. The ending of the last book, basically being a retread of Abaddon's Gate, very much left me feeling like the writers knowing they could achieve the climax on screen so writing towards that. I don't want to say the ending was disappointing, but the scale was definitely smaller than I'd wanted. Even the 30 year time jump feels as much like a conceit to keep the same actors in the roles. I'd of rather seen a 100+ year time jump and whole new characters. The earlier books and the scale of events in them is a fairly steady build, and then they kind of reach a peak around the middle of the saga and scale back from there. I wish I had more enthusiasm for the comic and game, but I just can't seem to muster any for them.
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Aug 17, 2023 12:43
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PriorMarcus posted:I definitely feel like a lot of the passion for the show, behind the scenes, died when Cas was outed and left. From interviews and snippets it does seem like loosing Alex and facing the prospect of big changes to the story killed any desire to push for further seasons. I don't think there's ever been any proof that Alex's role in that season was changed (although there was definite proof that he was in the scenes following his death on Luna, so, there were reshoots at some point) but I feel like they had to be because, as you say, it's really odd for Alex's plotline to go the way it did in the series and then to have both Anvar and Adams just sitting in the Razorback set for so many episodes. Not to mention that said plot should have involved our first interaction with Duarte, who then gets introduced in a manner that feels very odd, and the Martian collapse plotline was much more prominent than it was in the books. It genuinely surprised me that we didn't even see Duarte during that season. PriorMarcus posted:The ending of the last book, basically being a retread of Abaddon's Gate, very much left me feeling like the writers knowing they could achieve the climax on screen so writing towards that. I don't want to say the ending was disappointing, but the scale was definitely smaller than I'd wanted. Even the 30 year time jump feels as much like a conceit to keep the same actors in the roles. I'd of rather seen a 100+ year time jump and whole new characters. The ending of the series is just... whelming. With the final book, I wrote out something like ten predictions before I cracked open the novel and I think I got nine of them right. I'll have to dig them out when we get there. It's very much the ending you expect to get, very safe and just... whelming. There was a comment I saw soon after release that was, paraphrasing, "Well, at least it wasn't a total dumpster fire?" and I think that sums it up. I think the comic and game suffer from the problem of the Expanse world just not being particularly interesting outside of the core novels. Which isn't a slight, I'd say Babylon 5's world is exactly the same. It doesn't help that the graphic novel is an interquel purporting to tell the untold story between Babylon's Ashes and Persepolis Rising (what untold story? Persepolis Rising basically states nothing happened for thirty years) and that the game is built around Drummer. Which... Cara Gee was wonderful in the series, but I don't know if Drummer is a strong enough character to build a game around. But more than that, it being a prequel starring a known character means it is unlikely to be particularly ambitious when it comes to choice and consequence (not even getting into Telltale being a developer with a less-than-stellar track record.)
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Aug 17, 2023 14:56
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I don't think there's ever been any proof that Alex's role in that season was changed (although there was definite proof that he was in the scenes following his death on Luna, so, there were reshoots at some point) but I feel like they had to be because, as you say, it's really odd for Alex's plotline to go the way it did in the series and then to have both Anvar and Adams just sitting in the Razorback set for so many episodes. Not to mention that said plot should have involved our first interaction with Duarte, who then gets introduced in a manner that feels very odd, and the Martian collapse plotline was much more prominent than it was in the books. It genuinely surprised me that we didn't even see Duarte during that season. It feels like, in an effort to minimize his screen presence, they took two episodes of him sitting on the Razorback and stretched it backwards, but removed more content of him on Mars. I also feel like him dying in the process hurt Naomi's ending, and the ending on Luna for sure. They should have at least had Bobbie join the crew officially so that you had Mars presented on the crew before Avasaralla's big speech. In retrospect I wish they had simply left the season intact, acknowledge in a press release that it was completed before the allegations came out and then recast him for the following season. Milkfred E. Moore posted:The ending of the series is just... whelming. With the final book, I wrote out something like ten predictions before I cracked open the novel and I think I got nine of them right. I'll have to dig them out when we get there. It's very much the ending you expect to get, very safe and just... whelming. There was a comment I saw soon after release that was, paraphrasing, "Well, at least it wasn't a total dumpster fire?" and I think that sums it up. I remember those predictions in the thread, and how spot on they were. I think, my main disappoint wasn't the content of the story, but the execution. No final space battle really, just Holden and an insufferable Laconian walking through some corridors. No big revelation about the Roman's either, really. I'll save more in-depth thoughts until you cover those books though.
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Aug 17, 2023 16:16
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Persepolis Rising, Chapters 37 - 40 Plans get put into motion, Holden meets Singh, Bobbie and Amos finally have it out. Chapter Thirty-Seven: Alex Alex's back hurts and he feels like everything is going crazy. They've lost Holden, but they still have Bobbie, and to Alex that's okay because Bobbie counts as double for him. Alex reflects that it was his job since the death of the Canterbury to take care of his "little family" and the only time he was unable to do it was when he was married to Giselle and her "leaking sack of a relationship" -- jeez, Alex! The whole 'Alex as the heart of the Rocinante crew' idea always felt like an informed characteristic that was awkwardly retconned in by the later novels. In the early books, he's just the pilot and is often missing from 'Rocinante crew talk and planning' scenes. The series made it more of an actual thing. Alex has a brief chat with Jordao, one of Katria's goons and Singh's informant. Alex doesn't think much of it and goes to talk with Naomi. Clarissa is there, sleeping, but Naomi says she's not doing well. For her own part, Naomi compares herself to Achilles, needing to emerge from her tent before Patroclus does something rash. Naomi's most upset by the fact she doesn't know Holden is alive or dead, and that this is something Holden keeps doing to her. It's kind of interesting because Naomi is very angry about this, and it reads more like a break-up chat than a 'I miss him' chat. Persepolis Rising, Chapter 37 posted:“He’s exhausting,” she said. Clarissa wakes up. She wonders if the Laconians could fix her. Alex offers to let her go to the Laconians if she wants and she says she'll keep it in mind. Soon, Bobbie drops by with news about Holden and a document that outlines "how to free him." I presume this is the "everything" file she mentioned last chapter. Among other things, it contains information on a ship "like" the Gathering Storm and details that indicate that Laconian power armor suits can be shutdown remotely. Bobbie thinks they can come up with a plan to grab the Storm, blind Medina, and lockdown all the Marines. And free Holden, too. Chapter Thirty-Eight: Singh Singh is thinking about the time before Laconia. He thinks he was young enough that he had no memories of anything but Laconia before then. I'm not sure if that adds up. He was a child during the events of Caliban's War, and could remember watching the newsfeeds. The defeat of the Free Navy was also something that Singh had experienced as a child. But I'm reasonably sure there's been about ten years between the events of Caliban's War and the events of Babylon's Ashes (which was a slight discrepancy with Nami in the prologue of Babylon's Ashes). A quick check through some Reddit threads and the Expanse wiki appears to confirm this. So, if Singh was old enough to remember watching the newsfeeds (maybe around six years old?), and it was about nine years to going through the gate, then he would've been somewhere in his teens. Not so young that he'd have "virtually no memories" of anything before, which implies he was a young child when they made the transit. Singh is watching Holden through a monitor. It's sort of interesting that Singh doesn't note his physical description at all: he is "older than he'd expected, his temples gone white." Singh tries to figure out some way not to see Holden as a terrorist, and tells Overstreet that he did tell people to take shelter. Overstreet points out then maybe he shouldn't have bombed the air supply. Singh goes to talk with Holden. Singh asks him if he can get him anything and Holden, of course, asks for coffee. Singh gets him some. Holden expresses that Singh looks like a teenager, Singh says he's the same age Holden was when he was thrown out of the navy -- what was that, late twenties, early thirties? Not sure that adds up in the timeline. Holden and Singh spar about their philosophies. Holden mentions that he's spent "a lifetime pushing against" groups like Laconia. Singh points out that Laconia has only reacted to the Sol powers taking aggressive action. Singh points out that the Union condemned colonies that didn't follow their rules. Holden replies that he disobeyed that order and walked away from the Union, and that Singh can't do the same. I feel this is the chapter that exposes the weakness of the Laconian regime as such a central pillar of the plot. It feels like the Coreys were wanting to explore the idea of how do you stand up against a benevolent dictator. A sort of clever indictment of the neo-liberal humanitarian space fascism that sci-fi likes to wheel out every so often. But the actual point is that Laconia is champing at the bit to start hurting people, that their "gentle, bloodless conquest" is basically a facade to fool everyone. Singh asks Holden about Ilus. Holden gives the brief version: contested colony, sent out there to mediate, everything went bad, planet woke up, ghost of guy he used to know. Singh asks him about the 'bullet.' Holden basically shrugs and says, yeah, it deactivated the protomolcule. Singh shows up the sphere about the Tempest. Holden says they need to find Elvi Okoye as she's the expert on that object. Persepolis Rising, Chapter 38 posted:“Look,” Holden said. “You and me? We’re not friends. We aren’t going to be friends. I will oppose you and your empire to my dying breath. But right now, none of that matters. Whatever built the gates and the protomolecule and all these ruins we’re living in? They were wiped out. And the thing that wiped them out just took a shot at you.”  having trouble sleeping . He would like Holden to be a madman who didn't know what he was talking about, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Singh recounts to himself the origin story of Laconia: the gates opened, Winston Duarte knew the value of Laconia, and took a third of the navy and the live protomolecule sample to realize his dream. He reflects that Sol and Laconia are linked, as was the protomolecule and its builders and the things that had killed them and vanished. And the things that had returned.Chapter Thirty-Nine: Amos Amos is chatting with Peaches about the recyclers, and he's having some... issues. Persepolis Rising, Chapter 39 posted:His hands imagined what it would feel like to snap her neck. The tension first, then the grinding feeling of cartilage ripping as it gave way. He saw the look of betrayal in her eyes as the life went out of them. It was as clear as if he’d actually done it. It's actually... rather confronting. It's one of those things where I'm not sure the Coreys are aware of what this says about Amos' mental state. He's having vivid hallucinations/fantasies that aren't exactly under his control. He's not just thinking, God, I'd love to strangle that guy, but imagining and feeling his body going through the motions. It's a notable escalation from his more casual ruminating on violence back in Nemesis Games, for example. Which is fine, Amos is under a lot of stress. But it comes back to that thought that Amos is a lot less safe than the novels like to act. Bobbie comes by to try and talk to him. Amos walks out. Bobbie follows him into a room that Amos has, by implication, picked out because it's going to come to violence and the room has enough insulation foam that no one will hear them. We get one of the more memorable exchanges from these books: Persepolis Rising, Chapter 39 posted:“Look, Amos. I understand you’re pissed off at me. And honest to God, I’m more than a little pissed off at you right now too. But we’re a crew. We’re friends, and we can work this out, whatever it is. I’m here, okay? So whatever it is —” After an intense fight, Bobbie gains the upper hand and gets Amos on the floor and begins kicking him until he's down and out, and Amos compares it to sexual release, and finally regains his senses. Persepolis Rising, Chapter 39 posted:“I don’t,” he said, then gulped in another breath. “I don’t want things. You know what I mean?” They go to see Clarissa. Clarissa is like, hey, what the gently caress happened? Amos says they were just sparring, but notes he no longer has any violent urges. In true Amos fashion, he greets it with a placid "So that was good." It's rare for me to say there's an outright good chapter in these novels, but this is one that has stuck me with since I read it. Chapter Forty: Naomi Someone wakes Naomi up. Saba says they have to get moving, Laconia is about to survey the whole section and turnover their hideouts and boltholes. Saba gives them a hand terminal and some cover identities -- Naomi is now Ami Henders. Naomi wonders if Laconia has access to all their historical news footage linking her to Holden, and I was wondering this when they captured Holden: wouldn't you start looking for his crew? Go through the records? Data from checkpoints? En route to the refugee quarters, Laconia finds their secret base. Singh is offering a limited amnesty but we don't get the details as Clarissa turns the transmission off. Alex figures he'll go find a coffee shop to get some food, even as Naomi knows that's a massive security risk. Naomi reflects the various steps of her plan: reach safety, identify safety, blind Medina and the Gathering Storm, gather the evacuation groups, and save Jim. Saba asks to meet them at a restaurant, and they go to meet him. They have a week before the Typhoon arrives. Naomi outlines a plan we don't get to hear about. Saba says they'll need two bombs: one for the sensors, one for the jail. Amos and Bobbie will deal with the Storm. Saba will get the Malaclypse ready, and Alex will ready the Rocinante. Naomi will rescue Jim. Saba goes off to get things ready. Naomi and co. eat food and drink tea. Then Jordao slides into the seat next to them and says Katria sent him to learn about their plan. Uh-oh...
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Aug 20, 2023 07:05
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Persepolis Rising, Chapters 41 - 44 Singh hates his daughter, I hate Drummer, Naomi and Bobbie hate having exciting chapters. Chapter Forty-One: Singh I think Singh has suddenly realized he hates his daughter. See, we open this chapter on Singh ruminating about his life on Laconia. Sure, training on ships sucked, but eventualy he got to go home to Laconia and his wife and "the monster." This is an interesting change. Previously, his daughter (Elsa) was always referred to as "Monster." That is, a proper noun -- like a nickname. Now, he's referring to his daughter as "the monster." Maybe it's supposed to be cute, but it's a definite change, and it doesn't feel cute to me. Especially when he starts thinking about laying his head on his wife's "as-yet-unoccupied belly." Combine that with him spending more time thinking about the time before they had their daughter and their old house... It feels like he hates his daughter! Anyway, Singh thinks if the Laconians were doing things properly, then Holden and all his allies would be dead already. Singh reflects that he has to be firm but patient with them. He composes a message for Laconia where he advises bringing Holden back to Laconia ASAP given his knowledge of the bullet anomaly. Singh finds it ironic and insulting that Holden will get to go to Laconia before he will get to return. Singh wonders if Duarte has made a mistake by sending the Tempest alone to Sol, but apparently decides probably not. Singh orders Overstreet to bring him an escort and he heads down to the docks to check on Holden's transport to Laconia. He'll be leaving in thirty minutes aboard the Lightbreaker, an old Union cargo ship. Holden is there, waiting. Singh wishes him a safe journey. Then, fifteen minutes later, the Lightbreaker heads off. And it's like, oh, I guess the Free Jim subplot has just... left? Later, Overstreet says there'll be unrest in Medina when the Sol forces lose the conflict. But they've found fifteen or twenty members of the underground, yet Overstreet thinks that people in the chain of command are keeping information from reaching them. And he's upset that Singh sent Holden home. Especially when he thinks that the attack wasn't really to hit the Storm, and needing to know the true intent is important to understanding the mind of the resistance. To allay Overstreet's concerns, Singh plays a message from Jordao about the incoming attack on Medina's sensor arrays. Singh tells Overstreet to pull his men off the bombing investigation and find out what Jordao knows. Overstreet sighs and says they have too many number one priorities and not enough men to handle them. Chapter Forty-Two: Drummer Secretary-General Li is giving Admiral Trejo and his Tempest one last change to turn back lest they respond with force. For real. No take backs. Please stop driving your invincible supership toward our planets or we'll be forced to do something. Two-hundred and thirty-seven ships, the combined UN/MCRN/TU fleet, is heading for the fight. This is everything from the void cities to traffic-control skiffs, implying to me that there's a lot of ships in that fleet that aren't rated for fleet combat (and making me question all that talk about the Sol fleets being returned to pre-war readiness and capability.) Drummer reflects on words she heard someone say in an interview: I am a human being. Anything that happens to human beings could happen to me (473 Kindle highlights.) Luckily, the story (and somewhat retroactively) tells us that the void cities were definitely, absolutely evacuated of civilians before the fight. She goes down to see Lafflin off the ship, then meets up with Avasarala. Avasarala is leaving, but Drummer is going to stay with her void city. Drummer thinks that there's no way the Tempest can prevail -- it's one ship that hasn't been able to resupply in weeks, it's already been through a battle, etc. Interestingly, if the magnetic beam gets used again, the allied fleet has disabled the "governors" of the "automated systems", implying the fleet will just keep engaging the Tempest without the input of their crews. Do the Laconians have similar technology? Surely they do. If that's the case, then why is anyone concerned about going unconscious for a few minutes if their ships will just keep fighting? Yes, it's scary, but the worry was always that their respective ships would be vulnerable to attack. Persepolis Rising, Chapter 42 posted:In the scheme of the battle, People’s Home was many things: battleship, medical facility, port, and resupply. It was all the things a city could be. space is vast bit that's really beginning to feel like the Coreys have a tic.The Tempest reaches Leuctra Point (not Point Leuctra) and the allies open fire. The Tempest evades. The allies fire torpedoes, the Tempest fires PDCs. An EMC battleship loses core. One missile -- one missile! -- strikes the Tempest and people cheer. Drummer thinks bombarding the Tempest is like bombing something as resistant as a planet, but at least if you bombed a planet you'd kill the cities (uh...) Sixteen minutes have passed. Drummer worries about the Laconians firing the magnetic beam again. The Tempest takes two minor hits, and five EMC ships die in response. People's Home has expended 66% of their railgun ammunition by now. Drummer begins to consider the Tempest "an apex predator surprised to find itself outmatched by its prey." Drummer, come on, you've hit it three times and it's not even slowing down. One hit, however, has caused the Tempest to vent atmosphere. One EMC ship (just one) fires "high-yield nuclear torpedoes" and the Tempest is consumed in a massive explosion. "One down," Drummer says, "And gently caress you along with it." She gives the order to recall the ships and head home. Everyone cheers. Can you guess what happens next? Go on, guess. I'm not continuing until you guess. Okay, let's see if you got it. Persepolis Rising, Chapter 42 posted:“Ma’am?” the sensor tech said, the word like a drop of ice in a sauna. The Tempest emerges from the fireball unscathed! Drummer reflects that the fireball alone should've killed the ship (what fireball, in loving space?) as the Tempest returns fire. Because apparently, Laconia had known they'd be facing nuclear torpedoes (what, the standard weapon that's been going around for over thirty years?) and they'd apparently known that making it seem like nuclear torpedoes were useless is a good propaganda strategy. Given that the Tempest appears to have survived due to some aspect of the protomolecule (it is described as shimmering blue in the wake of the fusillade), why did people fire high-yield nukes at the alien supership? Did no one remember Eros? What happened to the plasma warheads and photon cannons? The EMC fleet begins dropping like flies. Chapter Forty-Three: Naomi Naomi is having trouble sleeping (aaaaAAAAAAAAA) but that's fine because Katria has come to get Bobbie, and then Naomi goes to find Saba. Saba mentions that a big fight is going down in Sol. It doesn't change what they're doing now; they have contact with twenty-one ships on Medina. Naomi thinks they'll need one hundred minutes to get them all through the gates without any of them vanishing.Saba is sceptical that Clarissa has what it takes. Naomi says she can do it, and that she trusts her with her life. Saba says it's more than that, and suggests Naomi goes with Clarissa while Saba and his people go to free Jim. Naomi mentions that Jordao, the mole, is going to back up Clarissa. Saba says the sensors are more important than the prison. Naomi insists she has to free Jim. While Alex, Amos and Clarissa discuss the possibility of getting rumbled by Laconia mid-escape, Naomi goes through the data. Amos wants to go to Sol. Clarissa suggests Freehold. Alex is like, hey, what the gently caress? Clarissa points out that they were willing to stand up to the Union, so, they'll probably stand up against Laconia. Amos agrees with her, and so does Naomi. She checks on the Lightbringer, which is one of the ships in her data. Turns out it left two days ago, heading for Laconia. There's an odd code on it: 1820KS. Alex says it stands for priority prisoner transfer. Naomi realizes that Holden is gone, and tells Clarissa that she'll go with her on the sensor array mission. They have twenty ships now, and it'll take eighty seven minutes to get them through the gates. But she won't be saving Jim. Chapter Forty-Four: Bobbie Bobbie heads off with Katria on her mission. They move through Medina and Bobbie reflects it is like being on a Donnager-class and, boy, I'm so tired of hearing about the Donnager-class. It's like the only ship the Martians ever had despite it was, during most of the story, the top of the line cutting edge flagship design. After planting a bomb, Katria and Bobbie suit up and head out an airlock. It's interesting that Laconia hasn't locked down the airlocks, I suppose. Katria and Bobbie banter for a bit. They blow the bomb and capture some dead Laconian marines for their power armor (???) and then they go to return the armor to Saba. Katria says that this is the second time they've used an explosion to disguise what they're really after, and the Laconians will probably catch on. I'm surprised Bobbie doesn't nod and go, yeah, once is never but twice is always. When they crack the code on the suit, Bobbie says, then the escape mission begins.
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Aug 29, 2023 03:41
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Persepolis Rising, Chapters 45 - 48 The battle at Point Leuctra wraps up in what is probably the most terrible loss of life in Sol military history; the plan to escape Medina goes into action -- but not without cost. Chapter Forty-Five: Drummer The UN/MCRN/TU fleet is getting hammered. The Tempest isn't firing its magnetic cannon, but it's firing enough missiles that the ship itself is lost in the sensor readout. Enough missiles that it's hitting virtually the entire fleet. Enough missiles that Drummer thinks it is outright impossible. The Sol fleet begins to employ suicide tactics -- a dozen ships bear down on the Tempest. Cameron Tur tells Drummer that there's no way the Tempest can be firing so many missiles, as the Tempest destroys the last of the suicide attackers. The Tempest isn't even bothering to evade at this point. Tur says that their first engagement was to learn what they could from the Tempest, and now he wonders if maybe they were learning how to fight the Sol fleets, too -- well, no poo poo. Tur says they've known since they examined the railguns on the ring station that Laconia has been capable of: Persepolis Rising, Chapter 45 posted:"...focusing and directing incredible sources of power. Things we’ve only ever seen on celestial levels. Collapsing stars." Anyway, Drummer is like, if we knew that then how the gently caress didn't you see this coming? Tur says, hey, that thing stripped Pallas Station down to less than atoms and thinks locality is a joke, how didn't you know we weren't outside our weight class from the start? And, yeah, exactly -- it's the whole problem with the Drummer plotline. Drummer orders the fleet to keep firing while she tries to raise whoever is in command of the EMC portion of the fleet. The void cities take some hits, including railgun fire from the Tempest. Drummer's void city drops its core, then runs out of railgun rounds and "conventional plasma torpedoes." Then there's a little mistake, I guess? Persepolis Rising, Chapter 45 posted:“I have a connection to Colonel Massey,” Vaughn said. Speaking of Trejo, before Drummer can talk to Colonel/Commander Massey, Trejo puts a direct call through to Drummer. On her monitor, Trejo doesn't look dishevelled or stressed. Trejo introduces himself and says that he and the Sol powers are not enemies, that there are "birth pangs" with every big change, and that he wants the fighting to stop. He understands that Drummer had to fight, but he's also there to accept her surrender. If she surrenders, then he thinks Earth and Mars will follow. If she does not surrender, Trejo says, then she should tell him what number of dead will make it so. Zero, Drummer says, and orders all Transport Union ships to stand down. If there's anyone else who can stand against Laconia, Drummer thinks, then it's someone else. Somewhere else. Chapter Forty-Six: Singh The EMC has surrendered, too. The Typhoon is close to arriving in the ring space. Singh wants to get back to Laconia and see his wife and daughter. Overstreet debriefs him about the attack: two marines were killed, but that's about it. Singh thinks the underground is running out of steam. Overstreet isn't so sure. But there are five officers and five marines waiting at the sensor array, waiting to apprehend Naomi and Clarissa. Overstreet stresses capturing Jordao, too, to preserve his cover. Interestingly, Singh considers that a form of betrayal: the man had done his part and deserves his reward. Overstreet's hand terminal goes off with a report of an unauthorized launch. An old Martian gunship -- the Rocinante. It's old, but it still carries missile and a railgun and a fusion drive. I feel like if I was a Laconian, I would've removed its missiles and disabled its railgun. But its fusion drive could still melt Medina to scrap as it is. Singh orders them taken out, but Overstreet reminds him that Medina's defenses were destroyed in the raid. Singh decides to sortie the Storm. Overstreet doesn't like the idea of a close-quarters fight near the station. If the Rocinante wants to leave, Overstreet suggests, then perhaps let it go. Singh contacts Commander Davenport aboard the Storm and orders him to engage the Rocinante, even though they are less than fully crewed. Another report comes in -- someone has opened all the locks on the prison cells. Overstreet advises Singh to get into a secure location. Four power-armored marines come through to escort him. Just as they reach teh shelter, however, the marines lock up and go silent. As Singh hides in a public restroom, Overstreet reports that all the powered teams across Medina are experiencing the same problem. Singh's only chance is that if the operation at the sensor array is critical to the underground's efforts, then he might still be able to stop them... Chapter Forty-Seven: Bobbie About ten seconds before the Rocinante leaves dock, Bobbie and Amos are clinging to the outside of the Gathering Storm which the novel helpfully reminds us, again, is a weird-looking gemstone-esque ship. Despite looking like crystal and feeling like skin, Bobbie's magnetic boots are able to hold to the exterior. Maybe. The plan is to get inside the ship take it off the board by any means necessary. The Rocinante breaks away and the Storm heads off in pursuit. The Storm is a destroyer and the Rocinante is a frigate, so, the weightclass advantage goes to the Laconian vessel. Additionally, the Storm is cutting edge and the Rocinante is thirty years old. It's a shame we don't learn more about the Storm's capabilities, and it's a little odd that -- with the Rocinante heading away from Medina -- the Storm doesn't open fire. Amos begins cutting into the Storm's hull. Problem is, the Storm's hull can heal just about as fast as he can cut it. Amos begins cutting in a sort of spiral pattern, but it'll still be a tight fit. One of their fellow boarders balks at it and Bobbie threatens to shoot him in the head an example to others. Everyone makes it in and we get out first look at the inside of a Laconian ship. Persepolis Rising, Chapter 47 posted:It was eerie. It was familiar as a well-loved face, but wrong. Where spars of titanium, ceramic, and steel should have been, crystals grew. Lines of fracture shot through them and then disappeared like watching lightning discharge in a bottle. Where sheets of metal and carbon lace should have been, seamless blankets of something that she tried to think of as lobster shell and then fabric and then ice defined the spaces. Chapter Forty-Eight: Clarissa Clarissa doesn't feel so good. She recites her mantra to herself: I have killed, but I am not a killer. Because a killer is a monster, and monsters aren’t afraid. After a brief chat about Holden with Naomi, the alert goes out, and the two of them head for the sensor array. Apparently, the reason for this mission is not just because Medina has a sensor array, but because it has multiple back-ups with their own power supplies, and they need to do something with the diagnostics to send false data until someone figures out they were doing it and it all feels too convoluted for a plot that appeared to be just 'turn off the sensor array so they can't see where we're going.' Jordao shows up. Clarissa thinks he looks suspicious. They head for the array. And there, waiting to meet them, are some Laconians. Jordao laughs and Clarissa realizes he sold them out. Jordao tells them about the plan. There are five Laconians, one of the Laconians prepares to shoot Naomi, another to tie-up Clarissa's wrists, and Clarissa triggers her mods. Clarissa throws the man trying to bind her wrists down, dislocating her shoulder in the process. She "strains and rips" the tendons in her knees and hips with the motion, but manages to evade the three gunmen who aren't pointing their weapons at Naomi. Clarissa does a flying knee kick and busts the guy about to execute Naomi's face. She grabs for one of the other shooters and snaps his neck, and then his spine. She shoots the second, and then the third, and then finishes off the executioner, and then the other two. Clarissa then shoots Jordao. Naomi rushes over to Clarissa, who has collapsed to the floor. Clarissa notes that Naomi's skin is pale -- this sticks out to me because I was under the impression that it is wrong to describe a dark-skinned person as being pale from shock or whatever else. The way I understand is that, while their skin tone can change, it isn't the same as what happens to someone with light skin, where you go white-pale, it's more of an ashen tone. Persepolis Rising, Chapter 48 posted:Naomi was spattered with blood, her face pale. Ren stood behind her. He was wearing some kind of black robe that made her think of Jesuits.
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Sep 5, 2023 04:04
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Persepolis Rising, Chapters 49 - Epilogue The Great Medina Escape comes to a conclusion, Sol falls, and Singh has a series of terrible realizations. Naomi hopes to save Jim, and we get what's probably the most gripping epilogue in the series. Chapter Forty-Nine: Bobbie Bobbie thinks the insides of the Gathering Storm are very similar to the Rocinante, but also alien: the decks have no seams or bolts, the bulkheads have an uncomfortably fleshy texture. By now, the Storm and the Rocinante are exchanging fire. Laconian resistance inside the ship has been so fleeting that it feels odd for me to even call it minimal, although Amos appears to be encountering much more resistance as he heads toward engineering than Bobbie on her way to CIC. Alex radios them to let them know that the Storm is breaking off pursuit and heading back toward Medina, and that anyone still on Medina should finish up and get clear. Saba is still there, waiting for the last few people from the prison break, and he asks Alex to keep the Storm off them for as long as possible. I do wonder how the Rocinante is managing to survive so long against a superior vessel, but it's not that important. There's a whole bit where the crew of the Storm basically flip between full burn and no burn to disrupt Bobbie's advance. About while that's happening, the Malacalypse launches from Medina, and the Storm heads home. The Storm begins docking approach and Bobbie bursts onto the bridge. Commander Davenport orders the ship to dock, but Bobbie says she'll kill all of them if they do so. There's three people on the bridge, including Davenport. Bobbie says everyone can live, or everyone can die, and she'll ram the Storm into Medina to prove it. Davenport remains defiant, but Bobbie calls up Amos and tells him to stand down and not try to blow the ship -- any dead Laconians will result in the person responsible shot, including him. That leads Davenport to acquiesce to Bobbie's command. Davenport and co. get tethered together and stuck in an airlock, and then thrown outside with ten hours of air. Bobbie now captain of the Gathering Storm. Naomi calls them and says Clarissa is dead. Amos says it was a good way for her to go, down fighting, and then says Bobbie will be a good captain. Which feel a little disconcerting given how she spent the last bit of this chapter threatening to kill a whole lot of people, including innocents aboard Medina. Chapter Fifty: Singh While Carrie Fisk gives a speech, Singh is fuming about what's happened. He considers Fisk and the Laconian Congress of Worls his sole success -- everything else has been tainted by failure. His best informant and an extraction team are dead, the external sensors are compromised, the Laconian marines got shutdown and he has no idea how they did it, fifty-two prisoners are missing, twenty Union ships escaped, and the Gathering Storm was hijacked. And, for all of it, he was hiding in a public toilet. He is not taking it well Persepolis Rising, Chapter 50 posted:He had treated the people of Medina as though he were their leader instead of their warden. Instead of their zookeeper. And they had paid him back with violence, death, and dishonor. All of that was a given now. This is maybe the most interesting character development we've seen across the whole series. It's sad, because Singh wasn't such a bad guy, and also terrifying to see him ready to take things further. Usually when an Expanse character spends a chapter griping about something, you don't get the sense of them realizing what the problem is, their role in it, or what has to change to avoid it happening again. Holden, for example, has just spent thirty years being exactly the same guy. Later, Singh meets with Overstreet, who says it is fine for the Typhoon to transit. Overstreet also thinks the Underground burnt everything they had to retreat from Medina. The worst thing is the loss of the Storm, and Overstreet points out that Singh's XO should've blown the ship if boarders were going to take it. Honestly, it's a little dumb to me that maybe the dozen or so people on the ship couldn't repel the boarders but, hey. Singh thinks an example needs to be made. A whitelist made of those they know who were certainly not involved with the insurgency, and the rest to be made an example of. Overstreet is not happy with it, he repeats the line about these people being Laconian citizens and therefore subject to Laconian criminal processes. Singh counters that he was put on Medina to learn the difference between theory and practice, and that Overstreet will follow the chain of command. It's a nice little conflict! But Overstreet says that he has other orders, too, and he draws his sidearm. Persepolis Rising, Chapter 50 posted:“You see, sir, the high consul made it very clear to Admiral Trejo that the rule of the empire is permanent. And if history shows us anything, it’s that people hold grudges for generations. Whole societies have lived and died because of their antipathy born out of events that happened generations before. Or maybe things that got so mythologized, they were just pissed off about stories of things that never happened in the first place. The admiral was adamant that we hold ourselves to a higher standard. As we always have.” Persepolis Rising, Chapter 50 posted:“For what it’s worth, I don’t disagree with you. These people are scum. They don’t deserve or understand what we’ve brought them. For me, I think they never will. But their children might. Their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren. The story of Medina will be that Governor Singh mismanaged the station, lost his ship to a band of malcontents, lost his perspective. And when he let his wounded pride exceed the mandates of the high consul’s directives, he was removed for the protection of the everyday citizens in his care. You see the difference? If you kill an insurgent, you’re the enemy of all their friends. All their family. And then there’s an expectation. Precedent. Enemies for generations. Forever. If you kill your own – even the highest among your own – to protect someone powerless, they remember that too. It sows gratitude. It sows trust. Generations from now your sacrifice will lead to the peace, prosperity, and fellow feeling among all humanity.” The problem with it is that virtually everyone knows Laconia is bad news from the start (even if Holden goes, wow, they seem pretty alright early on.) It robs the book of a lot of interesting commentary. Yes, it's easy to fight a dictatorship that comes in and immediately starts gassing Belters -- but what if they didn't? What if Laconia was, on the surface, actually everything it appeared to be? Should you still fight them? What if you found out about the Pens? What if you found out that it ran because it was made up of bores like Singh and Overstreet? Can you really trust a society helmed by a God-Emperor? What does Duarte want? And, of course, you need Laconia to be evil so as to not have any moral dilemmas in how the Underground functions or how Drummer engages in a pointless battle for Sol. It's probably one of the more obvious examples in these novels in how multiple perspectives don't necessarily help the story being told. Has our understanding of things been helped by seeing Drummer engage in a futile campaign against a ship that was, for lack of a better term, jobbing the whole time? Is the story of the Underground enhanced by seeing Singh's perspective? If there's an issue with the novels sometimes, one that I think it pretty stable across the series, it's whatever process the Coreys use to figure out their rotating protagonists. I feel like they come up with an idea -- a space empire invades thirty years later -- and then just sort of pick the perspectives that feel like they should fit -- Holden, the guy in charge of the occupation, whoever is in charge of Sol, and the Roci crew -- but don't really consider them as one story. The core of the story is obviously the Holden and Roci stuff, and I don't think the Singh and Drummer chapters really help in the telling of it. That said, the Drummer and Singh chapters combine together for a total of 24 chapters. Of 52, that's a significant fraction of the book, excluding prologue and epilogues. Drummer's chapters feel a little like they thought their novel was coming up short, and so slipped in a bunch of chapters about Sol. Or maybe they thought they needed the big consciousness glitch moment, and surrounded it with a bunch of irrelevant chapters. Is that one bullet beat interesting enough to justify Drummer's place as a big perspective? I don't think so. And I don't see why they couldn't bring the glitch into when they used the magnetic cannon in the ring space, or have it affect the people on Medina for some technobabble reason when they use it in Sol. I also think the decision to kill Singh is an unfortunate one. It would've been interesting to have him as the recurring antagonist throughout the last three novels, especially if he's just had this moment of realization. Even if he stopped being the perfect Laconian soldier and became this Ahab-esque figure, trying to kill Captain Holden, the man who ruined his posting but, worse than that, the man who killed his faith in Duarte. Sure, it'd be similar to Clarissa, but I think Singh would've been more interesting than she was. Especially when you see where Holden ends up at the end of thie novel. But I really do feel like the Coreys weren't planning more than a book ahead, and there's almost this mandate to not let their antagonists be 'cool' or 'interesting.' I note that Persepolis Rising was released around that weird little time in pop culture where creatives got obsessed with the idea of "bad people" enjoying characters like Rick Sanchez or Bojack Horseman the wrong way ("They're bad people, they're not supposed to be cool!"). But speaking of Drummer... Chapter Fifty-One: Drummer It's been three months. The EMC surrendered after the TU did. When the Tempestreached Medina, it did so with a bunch of Protector-class destroyers. Daskess, Ackermann, Ekandjo, Smith. These are some interesting ship names, although I feel they're not intended to draw these connections: the name Ackerman was linked to a Terran lecturer in Babylon's Ashes, Ekandjo is mentioned in Strange Dogs, and Smith is obviously linked to the guy running Mars during the Free Navy war, which feels a little strange. There's also a Stover mentioned and I wonder if that's a reference to the author. Drummer's been under house arrest since the Laconians took over her void city. Drummer finds it strangely relaxing and liberating to not be working and, again, I get this feeling that at some point she was supposed to be Avasarala. Persepolis Rising, Chapter 51 posted:For the first time in her adult life, she had no responsibilities. No long-term political aspirations to cultivate and attend to. No journalists or administrators or officials to spar with. The problems of who passed through which gate, of what artifacts were banned and which were taxed, of how to balance the needs of the colony worlds, all belonged to someone else now. Avasarala shows up and asks Drummer if she's going along to Duarte's "orgy pit." Drummer says she is. Avasarala asks if she knows why Duarte is looking for Elvi Okoye, who you may remember from Cibola Burn, but before they get a chance to talk about that, Trejo kicks off a speech. When asked if the Union is cooperating with Laconia, Drummer wants to say no, that they'll fight to their last breath, if only because "humans are mean, independent monkeys" -- then says that the Transport Union was always meant to be temporary. Chapter Fifty-Two: Naomi Naomi is on Freehold. Yeah, remember that planet with the intolerable gravity for Belters? That one. Things suck, not much is happening, Naomi spends her days just kind of wandering around and being alone and sad. Bobbie sends along a message about the Storm, and Naomi works on it. Bobbie's people are one a moon around another planet in Freehold's system with Amos as her acting XO. This chapter is very boring. You know that writing rule about not having your character be by themselves in a room? It's basically that. Alex shows up with dinner. He's getting along with the Freeholders. They might sell them out, but not yet, and not for cheap. "I think about Kit," Alex says, and I drat near dread seeing that name. Wait for the final book, folks, it'll make sense, then! Persepolis Rising, Chapter 52 posted:“I think about Jim the same way,” she said. “Not that he’s beginning his adulthood, but he always wanted to take me back to Earth. To show me what living on a planet was like. Now I’m here, and I’m finding out, and he’s not.” Naomi thinks she'll find Jim again, if she can only be patient. Epilogue: Duarte And for the epilogue, we get a look into the mind of the most powerful man across the expanse: Consul Winston Duarte. He's watching his ten-year-old daughter, Teresa, have lessons from Colonel Ilich, her tutor, on mass and displacement. Duarte can see her mind change. Huh. Persepolis Rising, Epilogue posted:A pattern of something around her head when she was thinking strongly. As she worked the clay, it infused her hands as well. Ilich had it too, though not as intensely. Of all the ways his changes affected his senses, this new one was the most interesting. He had the suspicion that he was, in some sense, seeing thought. Duarte is enjoying watching his daughter learn, but is summoned to meet Natalia Singh, a meeting he has been "dreading." Duarte gets a lot of humanity in just this epilogue, which is interesting. He both is and isn't who you expect. Sure, everyone's talked him up as this charismatic messiah, and he's seemed like that when we saw him earlier in the novel, but it's really something to see that he's genuinely like that in his own mind. Like Singh, I think he's one of the best characters in the series, and it's crazy he's introduced so late. On the other hand, you do get some wonderful Coreyisms like: Persepolis Rising, Epilogue posted:Natalia Singh didn’t touch hers, but the little girl ate some cake. The sweetness of sugar overcame everything for children. Even loss. There was something profound in that. Natalia would like a copy of the report into Singh's death. Duarte says she'll get it. He says that Singh was a good man, but one who was put into an extreme position and one who overreacted. He will ensure that Natalia has the full support of the government, and that Elsa will get a guaranteed place in the academy. He bows to her, then departs, feeling a slight sadness that eventually he will no longer be able to grant a personal audience to everyone who dies in the service of Laconia. Like, as far as god-emperors go, could you get any better than Duarte? He is handed a report about one of their prisoners. Persepolis Rising, Epilogue posted:“I think,” Duarte said, “it may be time I met this Captain Holden.” Persepolis Rising, Epilogue posted:When he’d been a boy, Duarte had seen an optical illusion that changed one face into another as the viewer came near it. Holden was like that. There was something about the way the pattern of his thoughts moved that reminded him of dry riverbeds. The traces of something that had been there and was now gone, but not without leaving the trail of its passage behind it. Patterns inside patterns. Holden's immediate response to Duarte is to say, eyes wide and shocked, "What the gently caress happened to you?" Duarte says he's been through some changes, and that not everyone notices -- just what does he look like now? It has to be pretty dramatic for Holden to react as he does. Holden can't believe Duarte is dosing himself up with the protomolecule. Duarte says they have a shared interest: the origins and function of the protomolecule. Holden says: Persepolis Rising, Epilogue posted:“You have to listen to me. I saw what happened to them. To the things that made the protomolecule. There was a record on the ring station from before they got shut down.” Holden says that's a great plan, except something killed the people who made everything on Laconia, and that even destroying whole star systems didn't slow them down. Even shutting down the gate network didn't stop them. Duarte says he knows. Holden brings up the "bullet" that popped up on the Tempest and how it was connected to the protomolecule killers, and Duarte says he knows that, too. Persepolis Rising, Epilogue posted:“And it’s related, I believe, to the missing ships. Something deep, something profound, doesn’t like anyone using these technologies and powers. Didn’t like when the last ones did it, don’t like it now that we’ve turned them back on. It’s an interesting problem.” Duarte points out that they can't not use the technology, that it was inevitable ever since it was discovered. Persepolis Rising, Epilogue posted:“If you’ve studied any history at all, you know that. Never in human history have we discovered something useful and then chosen not to use it.” And I think I'll just copy the last few paragraphs of the epilogue, because it is just potent with promise: Persepolis Rising, Epilogue posted:“I don’t need a warning,” Duarte said. “I need an ally. You have seen things no one else has ever seen. You know things I need to know, and you might not even be aware of the significance of some of it. Doctor Cortazár has been trying to find that. Help him. Work with him. Work with me.” Much like the epilogue in Nemesis Games, this is one of those awesome moments. The Coreys have a real gift for wanting you to know where this story is going to go next. Holden and Duarte, unlikely allies? Holden and Duarte sparring philosophically? Holden as the Duncan Idaho to Duarte's Leto 2? Just who are these "killers in the abyss" and why is Duarte so confident that a united humanity can stand against them? With the next novel, Tiamat's Wrath, being the penultimate novel, surely we'll start seeing some big movement on this plot! After all, we're at the end of Book 7 and basically know what we know from Book 3 or 4. Big things are coming, right? Right? Unfortunately, the worst thing about the cheque that the ending of Persepolis Rising writes, this epilogue that feels like it is full of promise, is that the next two novels just can't cash it. That brings us to the end of Persepolis Rising! I'm going to do a summary post of the novel, then take a little break, and then we'll move into the eighth book in the series: Tiamat's Wrath.
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Sep 9, 2023 11:11
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I keep trying to think about where to put Persepolis Rising. It's certainly better than Babylon's Ashes, but not as good as Nemesis Games. I think it's lesser than Leviathan Wakes, but better than Abaddon's Gate. Maybe roughly equivalent to Caliban's War or Cibola Burn. I don't think it quite has the worst parts of Caliban's War (Prax discovers crowdfunding! Soren weirdness!) but I also don't think the Drummer plot is much different to the Avasarala one, but even she ended up on the Rocinante and the political stuff was a little more interesting. It doesn't feel like as much of a 'filler episode' as Cibola Burn did, but it doesn't feel too far from it, either. I think you could write a version of Persepolis Rising that combines elements of it and of the next book in the series, Tiamat's Wrath, and maybe works better than both. The Drummer chapters are probably my least favorite run of chapters in any of the novels, excepting maybe Bull and Filip. The big problem with them is that they don't really add anything to the story, arguably detract from the tight focus on Medina, and only serve to complicate the worldbuilding of the Laconian campaign and reconstructed Sol system. Like all the alien/protomolecule stuff, the consciousness 'blink' is really cool, but that's about all I can say for twelve chapters and I don't think one cool moment among that many chapters justifies their inclusion. On the other hand, Singh is really solid. As I've said, I think he's the best antagonist the series has had. He feels similar to Cibola Burn's take on Havelock, but never has the sudden 'come to Jesus' moment. He's a hidebound jerk, but he has just enough notes of humanity in there to make him relatable. As mentioned, I'm genuinely disappointed that he didn't carry on into any other novels. Seeing Laconia through the perspective of a disillusioned loyalist could've been very interesting, especially if he ended up in a particular role in the final novel that of Tanaka. As always, Holden is generally okay. Persepolis Rising does well to bring some of his flaws to light and get into his underlying psychology -- is Holden a hero, or is he someone who just likes getting into trouble -- which is long overdue. Problem is, I don't really like him enough to notice his absence from the latter half of the novel. And in retrospect, the idea to send him off to Laconia may not have been the best for the series (but Tiamat's Wrath is probably the book I remember least, so, we'll see.) It's reminiscent of how Return of the Jedi had to deal with rescuing Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt as this extended prologue to the meat of the film. The Bobbie segments were fine, I think. I don't really have much to say about them, beyond the stuff about how it feels like Bobbie was included because Frankie Adams breathed such life into the role. The real highlight of her stuff is the Amos drama, as is delivering on Amos' comments about her being able to kick his rear end from back in Caliban's War. However, once again, I feel the Coreys dropped the ball with Naomi. They've never really known what to do with her beyond "Jim's love interest", and it's getting a little obvious that they think giving her something to do in any given novel entails paragraphs about her doing calculations by herself and telling us they're very important. But I think it's a real problem where Naomi and Alex are battling it out for 'least interesting core character.' Well, at least she didn't end up captured, this time. The big issue with the novel is the timeskip. It's vital to the story they want to tell, and yet wasted in execution. If you were to tell me there was going to be a thirty-year break in between Babylon's Ashes and the next book, I'd expect bigger changes. I feel like Clarissa would already be dead. Maybe Alex would've settled down with Sandra Ip. Maybe Amos lost an eye in a barfight. Maybe Naomi got on the good drugs and she's been able to visit Holden's parents on their farm. That said, I understand why the Coreys didn't want to shake things up too much. But why put in a three decade gap if you're not going to do anything with it? I also think there's a lesser issue with the novel being about insurgency and counter-insurgency and not really having much to say about it. Singh doesn't really do anything, and the heroes don't really face many dilemmas (excepting when Holden goes off to pull all the alarms and warn people, which is why that's a good bit.) Were Laconia more cartoonishly evil, it wouldn't be a problem. But the fact that Laconia walks the walk of its talk means there's more of a discussion that needs to be had. Where Persepolis Rising does well, however, is it gets back to space opera part of the series. The idea of a militaristic society kicking the door to Sol after being cut off from Earth for decades with a backdrop of ancient aliens and space magic is a great one (although I think Blue Planet: War in Heaven did it better), but the nuts and bolts of this version are rough. Laconia is an interesting polity but not really explored. We see a 'bullet' get fired and Duarte talks a big game in the epilogue -- it all feels really good. The Transport Union is also an interesting idea, even if it's just a Spacing Guild knock-off and feels like it flip-flops between government body, a Sol triple power, and a shipping company that represents Earth and Mars. My problem with Persepolis Rising, however, is that it feels overly complicated. The Sol VS Laconia aspect of the story is more complex than it needs to be, and honestly, I'm not even sure the timeskip is necessary (during the production of Season 6 of the series, there was a rumor that they would compress it and the Proteus would take on the role of the Heart of the Tempest) I suspect some of it results from the whole Drummer part of the story. I feel like if you cut Drummer and Singh you could reduce the timeskip from thirty to three and not really lose much. Really, how much of the timeskip balances on a. we need Earth and Mars to be rebuilt and b. Singh's theory-vs-praxis stuff? Think of it this way. The Singh chapters establish early on that Laconia has built a hundred or so advanced Pulsar-class warships to challenge the rebuilt Earth and Mars fleet, but also that their plan is to use a single Magnetar-class to thrash the combined forces and, as it turns out, a single Magnetar can fairly effortlessly wipe the floor with two-hundred or so military warships. Do you see the problem? There's simply no need for the Earth and Mars fleets to be rebuilt, and if they don't rebuild then Laconia doesn't need to build up, and that means you have less questions about how Laconia went from a few thousand people to enough people to crew over a hundred warships in three decades. Especially when you consider that for every frontline military member, you need something like 4-6 people supporting them. And Laconian ships appear to have a similar crew complement as their Sol counterparts... And I mean, you could fix this too with something like Laconian ships are driven by brains-in-boxes sourced from people who get sent to the Pen or something. And, poo poo, wouldn't that invoke creepy questions about the consciousness glitch and some real concern from Trejo? And you could get some wild stuff like, I don't know, Holden talking a Laconian ship into becoming his friend, or Singh ending up as a ship, or even just a simple explanation as to why Bobbie and co. can take the Storm. Anyway, arguably, the Transport Union means the need for a EMC fleet is irrelevant, beyond maybe a policing force. Not the full pre-war military level readiness that the novel equates them to. It's not like the colonies can build enough ships to threaten Sol or Medina. And Sol clearly didn't care much about Laconia. And given the massive damage done to the Sol system, why have them rebuild their entire fleets at all? The massive build up on the Laconian side of the gate also invites questions as to why and how the Sol powers didn't notice it. I try to avoid getting too much into the fix-it weeds, but here's what I've had doing circles in my head since one of the first Singh chapters. Laconia hasn't built hundreds of ships. Laconia has built a dozen or so, and a pair of Magnetars. Duarte's super-analysis says that this will be enough for his plan to conquer Sol -- one Magnetar alone should be enough but, as Trejo says, it might not be. The dozen or so Pulsar-class ships are designed to police the colonies once Sol is pacified. As the series has pointed out, even a ship like the Rocinante can wipe a colony out. Duarte needs control of Sol to be able to build his heaven-storming fleet and have the people to run his empire. Thirty years has given him just enough time and just enough people to take Sol -- if his calculations are correct. A dozen ships to police all the colonies? That might not seem like enough -- but no one has any significant military assets, and certainly none outside Sol. As Duarte himself theorised, if you control Medina, you can control everything connected to it via blockades and so on. All he needs to do is grab Medina before anyone realizes it. A key change here would be that the Laconian jamming prevents Laconia from seeing out just as it prevents Sol from seeing in. This both lets Earth and Mars rest on their laurels easier, but also puts an element of doubt on Trejo about Duarte's supposed capabilities (which is already there, if subtle.) Meanwhile, Duarte is right. Earth and Mars haven't rebuilt anything because they've been rebuilding their infrastructure and have yielded much of the role of policing Sol to the Transport Union. Earth and Mars have a small fleet that basically exists to defend their major holdings and military installations. One battleship from each faction has a "ceremonial" posting at Medina. That way, when the Laconian jamming goes down, and they start thinking that Duarte is coming through with an old Donnager-class, their 'eh, wait and see' approach feels less bizarre. Not only do they have two battleships there, but they're thirty-years newer than whatever Laconia has. Well, out comes the Tempest, and it breezes through the battleships like they're not there with its magnetic cannon, and heads right for Sol. The Sol powers freak out and try to defend Sol, but Trejo is less 'don't make me hurt you' and more 'any and all EMC ships will be destroyed without warning until you surrender.' Drummer knows Earth and Mars will try to sacrifice the TU for their own benefit, as the ideal situation for the inners is to wipe out the TU and stop the Tempest, and so she gets a sort of anti-war role but isn't able to stop the EMC from throwing all their people on a pointless funeral pyre, etc. Would it be better? We can't ever really know, but I feel like there's just no need for the big ship numbers and it conflicts with both the needs of the story and the worldbuilding itself. Will people across the expanse be able to sleep soundly? Will Holden buy his people some actual uniforms? Will Duarte do something about the food being thrown half-finished into the recyclers? Find out next time, as we kick off Tiamat's Wrath! Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Sep 9, 2023 |
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Sep 9, 2023 16:07
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Book 8: Tiamat's Wrath Welcome back. We're reaching the end of the series, which is somewhat astounding. But I'm stubborn and avoid leaving anything unfinished. Tiamat's Wrath is the penultimate novel, and it's one I remember as a little strange. It is also probably the novel I remember the least, but also the one where I really began to see the weaknesses of the Corey team. It's the novel I've been most interested in revisiting as part of this little project. Prologue: Holden Wait, a Holden prologue? That's interesting. Is it implying that Holden will not be a viewpoint character in this novel? The answer, as it turns out, is yes. Tiamat's Wrath is the only novel in the series to not give us Holden as a primary perspective. On the one hand, this is an interesting swerve. On the other, the ending of Persepolis Rising practically promised a meeting of the minds between Duarte and Holden... and this makes one wonder if it'll be present. Tiamat's Wrath, Prologue posted:Chrisjen Avasarala was dead. And we are off with a bang! It turns out Avasarala died four months ago. People are divided as to whether she was a benevolent custodian or a tyrant. Holden is stunned. He considers Avasarala as someone who was doing everything she could to bend history away from atrocity. This is a heck of an opening line, but I feel like it would've been much more effective to announce the timeskip at the start of Persepolis Rising. Avasarala was to have a state funeral on Earth, but Duarte has ordered her final resting place to be on Laconia, as he thinks she was vital to the great human project. Holden reflects that Duarte left out the part about how Avasarala's legacy as Earth's savior was only because Duarte was complicit in the slaughter. There's a whole mausoleum for these legendary dead, and Avasarala will be the first interred. There's a classic Expansian line where the grass wasn't like grass on Earth but was similar enough in all respects that they call it grass anyway. Holden is wearing a Laconian military uniform, which is blue. It's been over three decades since Holden wore a uniform, sure, but I feel like it would've been nice to see how it related to his time in the UN navy. Speaking of uniforms, there was a thought I had while on break. So, Holden and his crew have been wearing Tachi jumpsuits for over thirty years, while working for (among other groups) the OPA. It took about this long for me to note to myself that those jumpsuits, coming off a Martian frigate, would be Martian military uniforms, right? So, what, the Rocinante crew has just gone around for that long wearing Martian gear? It feels like one of those little oversights. Holden bumps into Kiki, Avasarala's grand daughter mentioned first in Caliban's War. They exchange pleasantries and commiserations. Kiki says Avasarala would hate all this, or find it funny. Holden regrets not thanking Avasarala for everything she did for him. Kiki says Holden is "the prisoner with the emperor's ear." Holden says he talks a lot, but doesn't think anyone listens. Kiki says Avasarala taught them the secret to humiliating people who would diminish them (460 highlights.) Tiamat's Wrath, Prologue posted:“The people who have power over you are weak too. They poo poo and bleed and worry that their children don’t love them anymore. They’re embarrassed by the stupid things they did when they were young that everyone else has forgotten. And so they’re vulnerable. We all define ourselves by the people around us, because that’s the kind of monkey we are. We can’t transcend it. So when they watch you, they hand you the power to change what they are too.” Tiamat's Wrath, Prologue posted:As they walked away, he nodded toward the tomb and the words written on it. IF LIFE TRANSCENDS DEATH, THEN I WILL SEEK FOR YOU THERE. IF NOT, THEN THERE TOO. At the reception, Holden is shocked at how quickly everyone has been ready to accept and enact Duarte's idea to make Laconia the centre of the new human empire. It's like he forgot the whole war that ended with the UN, MCRN and TU fleets crippled and Laconia with a hundred warships and three super-battleships with physics-breaking technology. Or that there's been three decades and change of people living away from Earth. And that Earth wasn't exactly beloved before that point. The Transport Union and Association of Worlds are both based on Laconia now, too. Holden spends most of his time in the State Building, but reflects that Laconia is a well-oiled society surrounded by alien wilderness. Tiamat's Wrath, Prologue posted:Holden had heard gossip and rumors about the remnant technologies brought to shambling life by the early work with the protomolecule: boring worms the size of spacecraft, doglike repair drones that made no distinction between mechanism and flesh, crystalline caves with piezoelectric effects that induced hallucinations of music and crippling vertigo. Holden wonders what news from the undeground. Drummer basically shrugs it off and wonders how Holden spends his time. Holden says that he spends it plotting, and waiting for his moment to strike... Not the worst prologue, not the best. Something about it, though, makes me think Tiamat's Wrath is when you can see that the Coreys have improved their writing since Leviathan Wakes. I'm not sure why or how I get that feeling, but it was a thought I had when reading it.
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Oct 7, 2023 12:25
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:And we are off with a bang! It turns out Avasarala died four months ago. People are divided as to whether she was a benevolent custodian or a tyrant. Holden is stunned. He considers Avasarala as someone who was doing everything she could to bend history away from atrocity. This is a heck of an opening line, but I feel like it would've been much more effective to announce the timeskip at the start of Persepolis Rising. You are 100% right about her death being the start of the time jump. Her role in Persepolis Rising is a little cringe to be honest, and her funeral would of been a quick, impactful way to catch up on all our characters after the time jump. It also would of been a good way to get the Rocci crew back together after they have drifted apart into their own lives, so it didn't feel like they had spent 30 years in stasis. Milkfred E. Moore posted:Arjun said this back to Avasrala in Chapter 45 of Caliban's War. Avasarala lovingly mocked it at the time. Really nice callback. This is nice. I didn't catch this when I read the book, so thanks for pointing this out. Also, just taking this opportunity to say that the TV Show recasting did a lot of harm to Arjun, Avasarala and the asteroid attack plotlines. It's probably the single worst recasting I can remember for that reason.
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Oct 12, 2023 11:17
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PriorMarcus posted:You are 100% right about her death being the start of the time jump. Her role in Persepolis Rising is a little cringe to be honest, and her funeral would of been a quick, impactful way to catch up on all our characters after the time jump. It also would of been a good way to get the Rocci crew back together after they have drifted apart into their own lives, so it didn't feel like they had spent 30 years in stasis. That would actually have been really neat, yeah. Everyone joins in, does the small talk catch up: "Oh, hey Alex, how's the wife." "Oh, we got divorced. How about you and Naomi?" "Yeah, she's doing this contractor gig on Luna..." PriorMarcus posted:This is nice. I didn't catch this when I read the book, so thanks for pointing this out. It was an absolutely bizarre choice, yeah. He looks nothing like him, he acts nothing like him. I'd almost believe someone got Arjun, Errinwright and Cotyar confused and ended up somehow overlapping them into Season 4's take on Arjun.
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Oct 12, 2023 12:54
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:It was an absolutely bizarre choice, yeah. He looks nothing like him, he acts nothing like him. I'd almost believe someone got Arjun, Errinwright and Cotyar confused and ended up somehow overlapping them into Season 4's take on Arjun. Part of me wonders if it was a deliberate character assassination so his death could be glossed over/impact Avasarala less, but it's not like it impacts her that much in the book either because she has a job to do.
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Oct 12, 2023 14:00
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Orbit just revealed the collectors editions of Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate and I'm fair disappointed in them both. https://twitter.com/orbitbooks/status/1715020186649260231 The Caliban's War cover is okay, but the Abaddon's Gate one is rubbish. Looks really cartoony, and using silhouettes of other franchise ships is cute but not really what I'd want from a collectors edition. Also, for both books, the inside cover maps remain unchanged from Leviathan Wakes, so both include Eros, and neither features the Ring. Just cheap choices all around.
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Oct 19, 2023 17:27
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Wow, those are ugly. Feels weird that they'd go with something that feels so cheap given the success of this series. Like, spring for something really worth the title of special edition hardcover. Cover art isn't even that expensive. The Caliban's War one is merely bad, whereas the Abaddon's Gate one is quite poor. Using all those ships from other franchises just feels like some kind of cutesy Reddit post. Then again, I'd say that'd represent a significant chunk of the market. It's a shame because I feel like the series had really distinctive cover art. The Leviathan Wakes one is nicer than both of those, however. I've also just heard about this Patreon by the Corey team that I might go through later, when we get to the end of the ninth novel, just to get a glimpse of their creative process. It seems like an interesting experiment. Basically, they're writing a novel and sharing the whole process: Patreon posted:We’re going to share our work sessions on a new novel from the brainstorming and kicking around new ideas through outlining and drafting to getting feedback from readers and editors. And along with that, all the written materials – outlines, drafts, revisions, notes on the back of napkins, all the way to the final manuscript. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapters 1 - 4 We are introduced to four of our five perspective characters -- three of them returning (Elvi, Naomi, Alex) and one of them new (Teresa.) Chapter One: Elvi Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 1 posted:The universe is always stranger than you think. There are two phrases that I think are core to the Corey perspective in this series. The first is, as noted to me by General Battuta , "That’s the kind of monkey we are." Humanity is stupid, selfish and violent, and it's practically encoded in our DNA. The other is that one, this attempt at a bon mot about the complexities of the universe. The thing is, and Tiamat's Wrath is the book that made me realize it, is that the Corey team isn't very good at imagining something strange. And, ultimately, what they do envision in these novels, isn't particularly strange. The protomolecule, for example, is very easily understood to an extent that a corporation can turn it into a special project. The strangest and most interesting parts of the series have been the 'bullets' and whatever is eating the ships. Not to get too far ahead of myself, as I may talk about this later in Tiamat's Wrath, but I think a big thing the series is missing is a sense of wonder, of transcendence, of the unknown. Space travel? It's ho-hum, and it sucks. People? They suck. Hundreds of habitable worlds? They really suck. The Rocinante crew? They suck, too -- they're not really motivated by anything beyond their next paycheque. The UN? It sucks. Mars? Dead. The OPA? Turned into a shipping union, and now dismantled. Why does anyone do anything? Is it just naked power? To stand atop of the heap? Does anyone genuinely believe anything, or are ideals just a façade for narcissism and sociopathy? Why did two men write nine books? Was it really just striking while the iron was hot, and cashing out as much as they could? Anyway, Elvi is herself reflecting that the phrase is trite -- and yet, the universe is stranger than it was, than anyone could know. The discovery of the protomolecule, and then the shift from it being alien life to alien life's tool. "A wrench that converted the entire asteroid station of Eros into a spaceship." God drat right, Elvi thinks, the universe is stranger than you think. Major Elvi Okoye is aboard the bridge of her ship, the Falcon. Yes, the Falcon. The Laconian Empire has given her the ship, and Elvi has come upon the newest proof that the universe is just so incomprehensible and strange: a giant crystal sphere the size of Jupiter. I won't say too much about this, because I think my general vibe is captured by the above paragraphs, but this was the exact point I realized that this series was never going to wow me with anything alien. Abaddon's Gate and Cibola Burn were the high points. Here, we have a giant diamond. It absolutely feels like something they wrote in for the TV series, were it to ever get this far. While Elvi's team gawp at the giant space diamond, it's a little dull, isn't it? Based on what Elvi alone saw on Ilus, plus whatever she's learned in the thirty years since, I feel like 'giant space diamond' is positively ho-hum. After an Expansian digression about the mysteries of mouthwash and true meaning of context, we get a bit more info: the only thing in the system is the giant diamond. They are in one of the 'dead systems', where the gates lead to nothing at all. It's a special mission from Duarte, hoping to find anything that might tell them more about the protomolecule builders' civilization or -- better yet -- the nameless enemy that killed them. So far, they haven't found much of anything. Elvi goes off to have a chat with the true head of the mission: Admiral Mehmet Sagale. Sagale doesn't like her and is grumpy that they are behind schedule. Elvi wants to study the giant diamond, but Sagale wants to bring out 'the catalyst' to see if the system has any military value -- which, according to Elvi, may destroy the artifact. Sagale will give her twenty hours to study the diamond. Later, Elvi is griping to Fayez about it. We get a big exposition block about the protomolecule, the gates opening, the lack of the builders, and so on. The catalysts, whatever they are, are apparently the source of Laconia's technological superiority. One of them is apparently on the ship. Elvi goes to see it. The catalyst is hidden in the heart of the Falcon. The catalyst is a node of the protomolecule that has been severed from the wider protomolecule network. The catalyst's room is a cube, and the catalyst itself had "once been a woman in her late fifties." She'd been sent to the Pen, where she was deliberately infected with the protomolecule. But, for whatever reason, she is only a "carrier." She has remained in the early stages of infection, and had never became a "vomit zombie" .Honestly, surprising that they busted that out. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 1 posted:It was normal to sacrifice animals. Rats, pigeons, pigs. Dogs. Chimpanzees. Biology had always suffered the cognitive push-pull of proving that humans were just another kind of animal while at the same time claiming to be morally different in kind. It was okay to kill a chimp in the name of science. It wasn't okay to kill a person. Elvi apologizes to the catalyst. As much as it looks like a woman, it appears that the protomolecule has twisted her brain into something else, that there isn't "anyone really alive in that skin." Elvi promises not to forget what Laconia did to the unnamed woman. Chapter Two: Naomi Naomi misses the Rocinante. The Rocinante is back on Freehold. Amos has vanished on a high-risk mission for the underground. It's interesting that Naomi doesn't miss Freehold, and doesn't at all mention that she's no longer stuck on a planet with inhospitable to gravity as part of it. Naomi's in a cargo container that's been set up with a crash couch, recycler, water supplies, and half a dozen modified short-burn torpedoes. She uses the torpedoes to speak to the rest of the world. You know how I've mentioned that the Coreys drop the ball on Naomi from around Book 5? Tiamat's Wrath is the book where I first realized they don't really ever know what to do with Naomi when she's not Jim's girlfriend. Remember how I said it's noticeable how Naomi just gets stuck in a brig or captivity and kind of gripes about things or does calculations? Well, Tiamat's Wrath continues the trend. Naomi's container is aboard an old ice hauler called the Verity Close. Yet Another Ice Hauler is one of those things that used to be cute but now, like the Donnager-class, just feels like the Coreys aren't sure what other types of ships there might be. Naomi is part of something she calls 'the shell game.' It appears to be Saba's idea, a solution to having the undergound operate under Medina's nose. They're using cargo containers to, uh, smuggle things? Apparently, the crew of the Verity Close aren't aware of Naomi's presence in one of their cargo containers? But she has a contact who'll switch her container to the Mosley. Naomi's contact, Bianca, thinks of heras a hero. Apparently, Naomi is in Sol. She's at Deep Transfer Station Three, located between the orbit of Saturn and Uranus. Naomi goes up to the habitation ring and meets with Alex and Bobbie. They hug. They commiserate about Avasarala. Naomi considers being the "secret diplomatic" of the resistance underwhelming. Man, Laconian security must be poor if these three can end up in Sol. Didn't they break out of Medina? And steal a Laconian warship? Anyway, they eat "white kibble" which appears to be inferior to red kibble. Bobbie mentions that the Gathering Storm is crewed up well. There's a mission coming up. Apparently, the mission Amos is on is due to Saba's orders: he was thrown onto Laconia with a pocket nuke and orders to get Jim back or cut off the head of Laconia. Amos had volunteered, and no one has heard from him since. Naomi thinks that doing a mission with the Storm in Sol is a risk. Naomi says that Avasarala's strategy was always violence as a last resort. She used things like "trade." As if trade deals can't be a form of violence. Naomi thinks they can gain leverage against Laconia which is... awkward. It feels like a crossed wire between Naomi's pacifism and her Belter status, which Bobbie even points out: she's a Belter, she knows, or should know, that you need force. Naomi thinks it doesn't work. "The Belt fought for generations..." and didn't win. Naomi only thinks the OPA got where it did with the Transport Union because of the protomolecule. Bobbie thinks Naomi's pacifism only works if Laconia has a conscience, which they don't. Naomi doesn't want to risk losing Bobbie, too. Not after losing Clarissa, Holden, and Amos. But Bobbie is set on her top secret mission, and Naomi lets the matter drop. Chapter Three: Alex Alex knows they've been fighting but ignores it. He knows better than to get between Bobbie and Naomi. The two ladies start crying and hug each other, because no one can ever stay upset in a found family. Naomi leaves, and Alex and Bobbie head over to the Storm. He still doesn't like the Storm. To Alex, it feels like living inside an alien creature pretending to be a starship. He feels like he isn't in control of it as such, but like the ship is ceding control to him. They're moving the Storm by concealing it between two massive freighters. Alex thinks it looks like a beautiful ship, but it isn't described to us. Alex marvels that they can keep all this conspiracy stuff a secret, and so am I. Tiamat's Wrath is probably the book I remember least, but I feel like this has to be leading to, like, Laconia knowing about it from the start. The fact that the remnants of the OPA can sneak something like the Storm around feels like it clashes with the gates being closely monitored. Bobbie has assembled a team of OPA old-guard types and stuffed them into Laconian power armor. Do you think that's the same armor that was growing into the flesh of Laconian soldiers? Alex goes by the briefing. Bobbie is saying the Sol theatre is the most dangerous theatre yet, with a threat level second to Laconia itself. The UN-Mars fleet is apparently still in operation, and the Heart of the Tempest is present around Earth itself. Bobbie doesn't know what their exact mission is yet. Bobbie's 2IC, Jillian Houston (daughter of Governor Houston) thinks Saba doesn't know what he's doing. Bobbie tells her to shut up. Alex asks what was up with Naomi. Bobbie tells him Naomi thinks they should try to negotiate. Alex says she's just afraid of losing anything else. Bobbie says, with 416 highlights, "In a fight like this, unless you’re willing to lose everything to win, you lose it all by losing.” For some reason, I'm reminded of something Avasarala said to Drummer back in Persepolis Rising, where she told her she was about to gently caress up by trying to chase a victory. Throwing good money after bad, to borrow a phrase. I wonder if that's intentional, given her death and such. Chapter Four: Teresa Duarte's daughter, Teresa, is getting a crash course in protomolecule history from her tutor, Colonel Ilich: Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 4 posted:“Some people call them ‘the protomolecule,’ even though that was really just a tool they made. It’d be like calling humans ‘wrenches.’ ‘Protomolecule engineers’ is closer, but it’s kind of a mouthful. ‘Initial organism’ or ‘the alien society’ or ‘the architects.’ They all get used to mean more or less the same thing.” I just call them the builders.  Teresa asks Ilich what he calls them. He says he calls them -- sigh -- the Romans. "The great empire that rose and fell in antiquity, and left their roads behind." I feel like this is something the Coreys thought was really clever, and I've always thought it was just a touch too goofy. It's an attempt to be serious and yet it's just so banal. It's not fun, it's not interesting. As mentioned, it is exactly as blunt as Ilich describes it. Using real world names for setting elements like this is always dicey, but I'll never say it's a bad idea: I really like Freespace's alien antagonist being called the Shivans, but there's a whole lot more tied up with the Shivans and Shiva and creation/destruction/preservation than outright naming the proto-builders as the Romans.Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 4 posted:She liked the analogy not because it was accurate, but because it was evocative. That was what made analogies useful. At fourteen years of age, Teresa has lived her whole life in the State Building on Laconia. She doesn't really have any friends. She isn't sure if she's lonely, because she's not sure what it's like to not be lonely. She asks what killed the Romans. Ilich isn't sure, but they're trying to figure it out. Teresa mentions the thing on the Tempest, and we get a reminder of what that was: everyone's consciousness got disrupted. To Teresa, though, the biggest part of it was that Jim Holden ended up in the palace. Ilich says it's the biggest problem facing Laconia: either the Romans came up against a natural force they weren't prepared for, or they came up against an enemy. Teresa wonders how they can figure out the difference. Ilich presents her with the prisoner's dilemma, and a brief explanation. Basically, Laconia is going to try and tit-for-tat the whatever-it-is that killed the Builders. Like a puppy that isn't house-trained. If the proto-killer force changes after Laconia slaps it in the face, then they know it's intelligent. If nothing changes, then it's a law of nature like gravity or the tide. It's interesting Ilich is saying this given Duarte's conversation with Holden, where he mentioned storming Heaven. Teresa goes back to her room. She has a pet Labrador, Muskrat. She enjoys stories about girls being trapped in castles and palaces. Duarte comes by to visit her and asks her to come with him to a briefing in two hours. Duarte is very proud of Teresa's studies and the reports from Colonel Ilich -- she's a bright kid. Duarte thinks working with people is difficult and Teresa says it is because, sigh, "people are terrible, terrible monkeys." I get it, Coreys, come on. Duarte is grooming Teresa to be his successor, although he doesn't anticipate needing such a contingency. But if there was some kind of problem, then he needs someone who knows "the shape of the whole plan" -- and that is Teresa. Teresa thinks it is dumb: why should she be good at it just because her father is? Duarte says that it's a mistake that people have made all throughout history, but if they know that then they can account for that, which means the smartest man in the universe, the God-Emperor of Laconia, just delivered to is this meme:  But, like Duarte says, he's only training her up just in case something happens to him. Just in case.
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Oct 23, 2023 08:31
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It worked a lot more in Freespace because it was long-established in the setting that the human government codenames all alien stuff with mythological references, being intentionally symbolic with them. They called their own ships Roman deities, the Vasudans Egyptian Gods (the Vasudans were very honored when they found out this fact after studying the Egyptian gods)... and the Shivans are named after destructive or antagonistic deities.
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Oct 23, 2023 13:20
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I think Naomi in the shipping containers might be, for me, the nadir of the series. It's such a...nothingburger of a plot about something that should be so exciting and important. It's the ultimate in the Coreyist tendency to take the dramatic or extreme and make it banal as possible (well, until the final sentence of Jim's plot in book 9). Naomi running an interstellar resistance movement and orchestrating the climactic battle should be so good but it's all boxes, kibble, feeling lovely, passively described administration and distant narration.
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Oct 23, 2023 16:26
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Naomi as they write her does not seem like a character who has any fun. She's doing the same stuff Avasarala used to do but Avasarala was obscene and ferocious even when badly wounded. Naomi is like...many people I've known who are excellent at their jobs but should've retired a long time ago because they are deep into burnout. She's not an acute portrait of that kind of person, she just sort of rolls into that slot because she's fatalistic and tired. Characters don't need to have or be fun, but they do need to be compelling, and Naomi doesn't (for me) compel in this book. She's not ferocious, brutal, yearning, passionate, driven to become the good version of Marco Inaros, willing to die to be with Jim again, willing to kill Jim to save him from whatever Duarte's doing to him, or even viscerally terrified of the Laconians hauling her in front of a firing squad. She's just kinda running an interstellar resistance because if she doesn't do it nobody else will.
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Oct 23, 2023 16:38
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Kchama posted:It worked a lot more in Freespace because it was long-established in the setting that the human government codenames all alien stuff with mythological references, being intentionally symbolic with them. They called their own ships Roman deities, the Vasudans Egyptian Gods (the Vasudans were very honored when they found out this fact after studying the Egyptian gods)... and the Shivans are named after destructive or antagonistic deities. That's true! Whereas a part of me wonders, very basically, why would Laconia -- naming themselves after the Greek Spartans -- name the ancient empire the Romans? It's very obviously so they can go with the Goth nomenclature later, I think, but how did the Laconians know that at the time? My mind immediately goes to the Bronze Age. Call the proto-builders the Babylonians and tie it into the Bronze Age Collapse. See, the Roman comparison just doesn't work because it doesn't fit. Our records of Rome are pretty decent, as much as records from that time can be. Whereas the protomolecule builders are an enigma where not even written records survive, just ruins and artifacts. Is that not closer to the ancient empires of Babylon? The Bronze Age Collapse left us with nothing, to such an extent that scholars still aren't certain what happened. And then this would tie back to the enigmatically-named sixth novel, Babylon's Ashes. People used to think it was the attack of a mysterious 'Sea Peoples' that brought on the collapse of the Bronze Age states, but these days people think it was more a combination of factors, such as draught and famine, of which the Sea Peoples were only one factor (and were likely starving climate refugees.) Doesn't this fit better with the idea that Laconia isn't sure why the proto-builders vanished? Instead, it feels a little like the Coreys worked backward, or came up with Rome/Goth in this novel and stuck with it out without much consideration for whether it fits. I imagine they'd say it's like Teresa says: it doesn't need to be accurate, just evocative. Which is probably true -- for most people, Rome/Goth is easier for people to grasp than Babylon/Achaeans. General Battuta posted:I think Naomi in the shipping containers might be, for me, the nadir of the series. It's such a...nothingburger of a plot about something that should be so exciting and important. It's the ultimate in the Coreyist tendency to take the dramatic or extreme and make it banal as possible (well, until the final sentence of Jim's plot in book 9). Naomi running an interstellar resistance movement and orchestrating the climactic battle should be so good but it's all boxes, kibble, feeling lovely, passively described administration and distant narration. General Battuta posted:Naomi as they write her does not seem like a character who has any fun. She's doing the same stuff Avasarala used to do but Avasarala was obscene and ferocious even when badly wounded. Naomi is like...many people I've known who are excellent at their jobs but should've retired a long time ago because they are deep into burnout. She's not an acute portrait of that kind of person, she just sort of rolls into that slot because she's fatalistic and tired. It's a real low point. I think the whole of Babylon's Ashes is the nadir for me, but Naomi's part in this novel comes close. For me, a lot of the dissatisfaction with it comes from it being the standard holding pattern for Naomi Nagata: she doesn't really do anything since Book 4. In the first three books, she has some nice moments and goals: she breaks up with Jim (for a few chapters), she fights Clarissa desperately, etc. Then we have, like... Cibola Burn: she can't participate planetside, so she comes up with a pretty silly plan and gets thrown in the brig for the whole novel (and makes a fair few threats for a pacifist.) Nemesis Games: she goes off to meet Filip as part of a pretty silly plan and gets thrown in the brig for almost the whole novel (and engages in some heavy suicidal ideation.) Babylon's Ashes: she's just kind of grumpy, tells Jim not to worry about the racism thing, does some math to solve the Dutchman issue (and doesn't really care when she seemingly kills her son.) etc. And it's a shame, because on paper she's a compelling character. A Belter who grew up in the fringes of society, who fell in with a charismatic narcissist, had her incredible intelligence abused by said narcissist so he might kill innocent people, and fled but left her son behind in the process. Since then, she refuses to carry weapons, finds sympathy in other broken people (Amos, in particular, something of a surrogate son), and acts as a conscience and restraint on the deeds of Jim Holden, who is more like Marco Inaros than he thinks. That said, I think Naomi's pacifism is overstated by fans. I'm not even sure it's fair to call her a pacifist in any sense. She doesn't like carrying weapons, but she otherwise is quite okay with violence providing she isn't the one pulling the trigger. In Caliban's War, she basically cheers the death of Nguyen, in Cibola Burn she basically gloats and tells Havelock that Jim and Amos will kill everyone on the ship to free her. I'm pretty sure in Babylon's Ashes, she had an exchange with Jim that was basically 'Shut the gently caress up about the Belters, if they're serving with Marco then they deserve to die.' As an aside, in Babylon's Ashes, Naomi and Bobbie had a similar conversation about the danger of overreach versus not acting... except Bobbie was in the first camp and Naomi was expressing dissatisfaction with not doing anything. Of course, it's been thirty years, and Naomi has lost Jim, and Marco isn't involved, but still. When it comes to fun, the only bit I can think of is when Naomi has broken up with Jim and she's hanging out with her pals down at that one bar on Tycho. Oh, and maybe the bit where she sings karaoke and gets drunk in the first novel, and Jim has those Very Weird Thoughts. But like you say, it feels like there's so many more directions they could've taken Naomi than just being a very important person who sits in a container for almost the whole novel. The big space battle from her POV toward the end of this novel is so oddly handled that I thought there was something wrong with my copy of Tiamat's Wrath.
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Oct 24, 2023 01:09
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Tiamat's Wrath, Chapters 5-8 Alex and Bobbie engage in their secret mission, and it goes wrong. Elvi ponders the Chapter Five: Elvi Chapter Five opens with a brief recounting of Cibola Burn -- the Rocinante brought a tiny protomolecule node to Ilus, and it began activating all kinds of crazy stuff on the planet. This experience has led Elvi and her team to be very careful with their "catalyst." If anything goes wrong, they're prepared to send the Falcon racing back to Laconia at enough acceleration to kill everyone on-board but to preserve the valuable data they might gain. They figure the diamond is five billion years old, which puts it at about a third of the age of the entire universe. They place it at about the start of the builder/Roman civilization. From memory, the protomolecule was sent to Sol about two billion years before, which is, as an aside, about the time the gate network shutdown as mentioned in Abaddon's Gate. Admiral Sagale only cares about what it can give them regarding the "ghoulies from beyond time and space", according to Elvi. Eighteen hours later, it appears that Elvi and Fayez have something: the object appears to mirror the catalyst's brain activity, but not one really knows what that means. But the diamond is also putting out radiation that's the same as the gates put out when a ship transits through. Long story short, they think the diamond is a data-storage device that uses lots of tiny wormholes to store data because the protomolecule builders were a hive mind, and that this diamond is "a backup drive for their entire civilization." Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 5 posted:“That,” Elvi said, “is one gigantic loving logical leap.” I think we'll talk about more about the protomolecule builder/space demon conflict in the final book, because I think it is really intriguing -- up until the point where the Coreys try to weave it back into the story, and this is where we're seeing that happening. But an immediate thought to chew on is just, like, what's the value in this galactic Library of Alexandria when not only did the builders fail to stop the ghoulies but, according to Holden's vision back in Abaddon's Gate, may not have had any idea what they were dealing with? And is even just stumbling upon a space diamond knowledge repository the most interesting way of uncovering something that might help against the bad space demons? Elvi meets with Sagale. Sagale is tired of Elvi saying everything they find is the most important discovery of all time. She mentions Fayez's theory, and Sagale accepts it as impressive. Elvi wants to study the diamond some more, but Sagala tells her that they've moving on to the Tecoma system. Laconian ships have a new kind of "full-submersion crash couch" that allows it to make a "journey of weeks" in a matter of "days." Elvi gripes to Fayez that she doesn't understand what Sagale wants or is looking for, some hidden agenda. Fayez is like, well, duh. Chapter Six: Alex Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 6 posted:The Gathering Storm was the absolute state of the art in Laconian naval technology. The first ship of her class to be fielded... Anyway, Alex is thinking about the Storm's capabilities. And it's kind of interesting comparing it to the Rocinante. The Storm is armed with a keel-mounted railgun, just like the Rocinante. The Rocinante fires "two pound" slugs whereas the Storm fires "three-and-a-half" kilo slugs. It's weird that Holden thinks in terms of pounds but Alex thinks in terms of kilos, but I digress. Either way, after conversion, it means the Storm's railgun fires slugs that are about four times the weight. I am not enough of a physics nerd to know what this means, or if it would be that much more of a benefit given the Rocinante's railgun seems pretty potent as is. It's not like it's a shell loaded with four times as much gunpowder. The Storm has two seperate batteries of torpedo launchers with four tubes each. This is a substantial increase over the Rocinante which only has two tubes. The Storm likewise has twelve point-defense cannons, whereas the Rocinante only has six, and with coverage that is roughly equivalent. On the other hand, the Storm should probably outshoot the Rocinante by more than that! The Rocinante is a light frigate, whereas the Pulsar-class is an attack destroyer. The Rocinante is a modified fleet escort, whereas the Storm is designed for independent operations. The Storm is also thirty-years newer, three times the size, requires three times the crew, is built with protomolecule-related technology and methods, and is depicted as over-powered for its size. But it doesn't seem particularly different or impressive, does it? I suspect this is just to allow the writers to consider the Storm as a sort of Rocinante 2.0 for Alex to pilot. Alex is just kind of idly chatting with his copilot, Caspar. Caspar wonders if Alex knows any more about the mission than he does, but Alex says he doesn't. Caspar lost his boyfriend on Pallas, but says he's ready to fight Laconia. The mission begins. Alex remembers that a "destroyer" like the Gathering Storm destroyed the Canterbury, as they both have stealth tech. It's been thirty years and all, but the Protogen ships were frigates and roughly equivalent to the Rocinante. And, wait, the Gathering Storm has stealth tech? I guess it does. The target of the mission is a Transport Union freighter protected by two Laconian frigates. The attack is happening while Jupiter is between Earth and the battle, thereby blocking the line of sight of the Magnetar-class Heart of the Tempest orbiting Earth. The freighter has come straight from Laconia as part of some secret Laconian project, possibly carrying replacement parts for the Tempest. They think it's carrying enough equipment to keep the Storm running for years, and it might even have a political officer on-board to capture. All Alex needs to do is knock out two frigates and get Bobbie's dropship to the freighter. Or, I guess, her breaching pod as it says in the next paragraph. Again, bit of a difference between the two. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 6 posted:The two frigates were not a trivial threat, but the Storm massively outclassed them in tonnage and firepower, and he didn’t worry too much about flying straight at them fangs out and trying to end the fight quickly. Bobbie boards the freighter while the two Laconian frigates bracket the Storm. The battle isn't very exciting because it makes it pretty clear that the two frigates, even attacking from different directions, can't overwhelm the Storm. Realizing they can't destroy the Storm, the Laconian frigates fire on the freighter. The Storm pops one of the frigates with a "plasma warhead" (but wasn't the Storm armed with nukes?) and then it feels like geography takes a bit of a twisting when everyone gets into PDC range and the freighter gets chewed up and then the remaining frigate and Storm chew each other up. The Storm takes a hit in its main computer nexus, but the freighter is tumbling through space, out of control, and maybe everyone on-board is dead... Chapter Seven: Bobbie We hop over to Bobbie, hopping back to the mission kicking off. Bobbie reflects that her father had been a great marine and then a great instructor at Hecate base, "legendary" is the word she uses. "An entire generation" had learned how to be a marine under his tutelage. But back in Nemesis Games, Bobbie didn't know much about it or seem to know anyone there. She had to use Alex, because she said that Hecate was a naval base and that they didn't like marines. Was she buttering Alex up? Alex didn't seem to see anything wrong with what she said. Bobbie reflecting about the legendary status of her father doesn't feel accurate, either. Yes, Caliban's War (very briefly) mentioned people respected him, but Bobbie makes him sound like one of Mars' most esteemed figures. poo poo, we don't even know his first name. He always struck me as just a solid career officer with a good history, not this "avatar of Olympus Mons" stuff. Her father's status never came up in Nemesis Games, for example. After a bunch more introspection, the breaching pod hits the freighter as the Storm fires "a pair" of railgun shots. Bobbie's strike team is herself, her 2IC Jillian the space libertarian, and five Belters. All of them are wearing Laconian power armor. I don't know if this helps my idea of the Coreys forgetting what Belters are. The idea of a Belter wearing power armor, especially Laconian power armor, makes me think of the scene in The Fall of Reach where the MJOLNIR suit breaks every bone in an unlucky marine's body. And, like, could you even cram an eight-foot tall mantis-thin Belter into a Laconian suit? Wouldn't they be too tall, wouldn't their big heads have trouble with the helmets? My skull is slightly elongated and finding a helmet that fits me is really tough! They board the freighter. Jillian and her people go to take engineering, whereas Bobbie and her people head to the bridge. Much like Bobbie's old armor, she has a gun with a rotary barrel under her wrist. It occurs to me that I'm not actually able to determine if she is wearing her old armor or she's wearing a new Laconian suit like the rest of her team. No one's mentioned 'Betsy.' I'm assuming it's the new armor based on Bobbie's internal monologue, but it'd be interesting to know for sure. Like, how different is this new armor to her old one? Or what's it like wearing Betsy, the thirty-year old relic? It reminds me of the Storm basically being the Rocinante 2.0. Anyway, there's a gunfight and it goes well. They save two Underground spies on the ship and capture the political officer. Then, just as one of her people is saying they win, a PDC round blows him to bits. It's not dissimilar to Shed's death back in the first novel, but it's a bit of a This is something that we'll return to in the final novel, too.So, the ship gets holed. The Underground partisans die. The political officer dies. The ship loses power. Bobbie can't hail the Storm. But she tells her people to start gathering what they can from the freighter's cargo hold, and that's a moral victory. Jillian points out: Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 6 posted:“You know who talks about moral victories?” Jillian asked as she floated out of the room. “The team that lost.” It's interesting somewhat that the previous chapter says they are tumbling through space, which implies falling away from Jupiter, whereas this chapter says they're falling toward Jupiter. Chapter Eight: Naomi Naomi is thinking about the problems of communication. Laconia controls the communication infrastructure. It's difficult to sum all this up because it's just, well, boring. Naomi thinks about messages in bottles. The underground fires out torpedoes which broadcast a message and then detonate, and then Naomi listens in on some frequency and hears everything from Underground intel to "rebroadcast messages Duarte made Jim send out to her." Wait, what? Maybe we can see one of those instead of Naomi thinking about space communications? No, that'd be too interesting. Instead, it's just paragraph after paragraph about how the Underground communicates while Naomi sits in a box. She is now heading to Auberon aboard the Bhikaji Cama. She thinks about some new project in the Bara Gaon system that she wants to take control of. Not to get all Writing 101, but there's this little rule that I think almost everyone picks up or gets drilled into them after writing a chapter like this: do not keep one character in a room by themselves. Especially don't keep them in a room by themselves with nothing in it. Putting my finger on the page here, by my count, this chapter is at 1630 words of internal monologue and exposition dumping so far. Like I've said, I think this is unfair to Naomi as a character, and I think it's a just a bad idea to shove the leading lady of the series in a box with nothing to do. It feels like they outlined a Naomi chapter here and just went, gently caress it, keep it in. Naomi imagines Bobbie, Amos, and Jim needling her about her pacifism. Naomi mutters to herself that what she's doing is a fight they can win. Like Battuta said, it really is just miserable, and not in a fun way. Naomi does a workout. She picks up a security alert from Sol, and knows Bobbie and Alex are risking their lives, but tells herself that she chose this war. Then, Naomi thinks she has to get out of the box. And it's like, yeah, Naomi. That's what we're all thinking.
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Oct 31, 2023 06:07
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The new James S. A. Corey book got officially announced. Out August next year and called The Mercy of Gods. Interestingly it's premise basically sounds like some The Expanse fan-fiction/what could of been. I'm willing to bet a lot of these ideas came out of brainstorming for the Romans and Goths. James S. A. Corey posted:How humanity came to the planet called Anjiin is lost in the fog of history, but that history is about to end.
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Nov 10, 2023 13:07
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Admittedly, that's an early blurb but, man, when they said their next series was going to be a Dune-esque space opera, I kind of imagined something... different. The fact they're calling it a sci-fi retelling of the Book of Daniel doesn't ignite my excitement much, either. Alas!
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Nov 11, 2023 15:43
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Tiamat's Wrath, Chapters 9 - 12 Theresa encounters the man with an amiable smile, Elvi realizes that Duarte built his empire on the back of Blindsight, Alex gets a chapter, and Bobbie gets ready to play pétanque. Chapter Nine: Teresa Teresa is observing while Duarte has a meeting with Carrie Fisk, who is still the president of the Association of Worlds. Fisk is so important that she can meet with Duarte while he has breakfast. They are discussing a trade compact between Auberon and the "five-world group." By focusing on that group, Fisk says, they can bring the systems up to self-sufficiency within the decade, and then those systems can do the same to others, etc. Duarte indicates for Theresa to ask about corruption on Auberon, which Fisk says is being addressed. While it's been mentioned previously in the main novels, Auberon was actually the subject of a novella between Persepolis Rising and Tiamat's Wrath. I have no idea what took place in it. The only novellas I have read have been The Churn (Amos' backstory, pretty good!) and Strange Dogs (which I skimmed through.) A small touch in this scene is that the three of them are eating what we'd consider typical food (toast and eggs) which is a nice indicator of how well off Laconia is, I think. In fact, and I'm not really able to skim back and check, but I think this might be the first meal we've seen that isn't some combination of noodles and kibble. Alternatively, it's just a sign of how well the Duarte inner circle eats. In the end, Duarte thinks it is a good idea, but he does agree with the selection of worlds -- he'll review the plan and get back to her. Fisk leaves and Duarte asks Teresa what she noticed. Teresa mentions she noticed that Fisk was nervous and Duarte says that's normal because if she was comfortable she'd be sloppy. Teresa thinks that by focusing on Auberon, it meant Fisk didn't have to mention how the five worlds were selected and that while she's not trying to cover something up, she was oddly relieved that Auberon didn't come under discussion. Duarte agrees. He asks Teresa if she wants to go over a briefing from Admiral Trejo, and she'd rather not, but offers to, only for Duarte to say she can go and study with Ilich. Teresa goes off to her classes. The other students are avoiding her. One student, an older girl by the name of Muriel Cowper (what a name), comes up to Theresa and tells her that everyone went on a camping trip last week and -- gasp -- she kissed Theresa's crush, a boy named Connor. The realization that everyone involved knew Theresa liked Connor hurts her, but she tells Muriel that she doesn't care. But after class, she cries. On the one hand, I can't say I'm engrossed by teen drama, but I also feel like the Corey team's drive to render everything banal and boring almost makes the faux-drama of Teresa crying about a boy she likes kissing someone else resonate better than when they're writing about things that should be, well, grandiose and exciting. It reminds me of what I've said about the parenting stuff. Sometimes I think the skill set of these two is to basically write a family drama. Anyway, Teresa gets cheered up by Muskrat the dog. Teresa wanders the halls of the State Building and reflects she could use her status to have Muriel kicked out of her peer group, or have Connor made to spend time around the State Building. But "everyone would know why she was doing it" and, so, she can't. Muskrat races ahead, into the gardens, and Teresa comes upon: Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 9 posted:Graying, close-cropped hair. Laconian uniform without an insignia of rank. An amiable, empty smile. Holden pets Muskrat. Theresa sums up Holden as: Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 9 posted:She didn’t like Holden. Didn’t trust him. But whenever they spoke, he was polite and unthreatening. Even a little amused by everything in a vague, philosophical kind of way that made it easy to be polite back. (It's somewhat interesting that Holden doesn't merit a physical description beyond hair color, especially given how the early books implied he was white, but of late the Coreys have said he is and always has been ambiguously brown.) Anyway, Holden and Teresa chat for a bit. Holden says that Teresa doesn't need to be afraid of him, but she counters that he's a terrorist and a killer. "I guess I was," Holden replies, "But I'm not anymore." Teresa wonders why he isn't in prison and Holden says he is Duarte's "dancing bear" and explains: Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 9 posted:“Old kings used to have dangerous animals in their courts. Lions. Panthers. Bears. They’d teach them to do tricks or at least not to eat too many of the guests. It’s a way to show power. Everyone knows a bear is a killer, but the king is so powerful that a bear’s just a plaything for him. If Duarte kept me in a cell, people might think he was afraid of me. Or that I might be a threat if I got out. If he lets me out, lets me roam around with what sort of looks like freedom, it tells everyone that comes to the palace that he’s cut my nuts off.” Dang, I'm actually digging this scene. Ilich calls Theresa home and she leaves. Holden mentions that if Theresa is worried about him then she should keep an eye on him, stressing the point. She's bothered that Muskrat likes Holden but she doesn't. Theresa finds Ilich. Ilich says her father wants to her discuss a piracy incident in the Sol system. Ilich wonders if something was bothering Theresa earlier that day, and thinks to tell him about Muriel and the camping trip, but remembers Holden's words about trust and danger and tells Ilich nothing. Chapter Ten: Elvi Something's wrong. Elvi regains consciousness. A medical tech named Calvin is attending to her, and Fayez bursts in to check on her. It appears that Elvi had some kind of a reaction to the acceleration juice. But she's okay and they've arrived in Tecoma. There's nothing there. A rapidly spinning neutron star, and nothing else. No planets, no planetoids, no asteroids, no micrometeors, no dust, no spare protons -- nothing. Elvi wonders how that's possible. Fayez says it isn't, unless something is keeping the system sterile. The gate is also in an unusual position: five rimes farther out from the local star, and above the ecliptic plane at a ninety degree angle. And the star itself is not particularly far from collapsing into a black hole. Elvi and Fayez figure that someone's created a neutron star that's so close to collapse that just about any additional mass could do it, and they've set up things so nothing can trigger it. But why, and for what purpose? This is much cooler than the giant space diamond. Elvi still prefers the "big green diamond" though. Sagale appears unimpressed: he considers it an unusable star in an empty system. But then he asks Elvi to come along to his office. It is, Elvi notes, the first time he's ever engaged in hospitality. Sagale tells her that have identified a system of "no utility" then the "military phase" of the operation can begin. Two ships have entered the system already, remote controlled from the Falcon. One is empty, and the other is carrying twenty kilograms of antimatter. Sagale says the true mission of the science expedition was to find a system just like the one they've just found. It's need-to-know, and Elvi is cleared for it. The mission concerns Duarte's "first priority": a way to defend humanity against whatever destroyed the "gate builders." I guess Sagale thinks Romans is tacky, too. It's interesting that he doesn't use the Romans when a few people have done the 'we can't call them The Wrenches' bit. Sagale says that the test they are about to perform is the first step of that process. The test involves monitoring the gate system until it reaches the Dutchman threshold (my words, not Sagale) and then they'll send the freighters through the gate, triggering the antimatter bomb. They should vanish, but the timer will be counting down. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 10 posted:“Because one of two things is true,” Sagale said. “Either there is an intelligence that lies beyond those gates that is making the choice to destroy our ships, or there is some natural effect of the gate system itself that does it. This is how we will determine that.” Elvi then points out exactly what I'm thinking: the problem is that Laconia assumes that whatever is targeting the ships will deescalate if slapped in the face, and she points out that the last time something happened, it involved the consciousness in the Sol system turning off temporarily. They flat out defy humanity's understanding of reality, and they're going to throw a bomb at them. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 10 posted:“If we could send a sternly worded letter, we’d try that. But this is how you negotiate with something that you can’t speak to. When it does something we don’t like, we hurt it. Every time it does something we don’t like, we hurt it again. Only once. If it can understand cause and effect, it will get our message.” Uh. Hmm. Blindsight by Peter Watts posted:This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams. My brain is humming about this. Blindsight is one of my favorite novels. There's something that makes this stick out to me, but I can't quite gather my thoughts on it. It feels like a pretty deliberate invocation, but it's also surprising because it also feels like the most obvious reference/homage to another work of sci-fi yet seen in this series. Sure, they had that Reddit-rear end The Martian reference, and they've started using some Babylon 5 terminology from Book 5 onward, but this is... I think the danger of doing a homage is that it risks the reader going, oh, you're doing the thing I saw done well, and you're doing it worse. Sagale says they didn't strike first, and they haven't struck back until now. Elvi thinks it's a bad idea. Sagale considers it the empty Bikini Atoll of their age. I don't know enough about the history of atomic weaponry to know much about Bikini Atoll beyond that it was a testing site. I do know that it wasn't empty, which Elvi immediately points out, and beyond that there were plant and animal life that was annihilated. But Elvi... You thought it was normal to sacrifice animals in the name of science, didn't you? I know, I know, normal doesn't mean morally right, but she didn't seem particularly opposed to the idea: she was opposed to using humans because it was normal to use animals, she wasn't particularly fussed about using animals in the first place. Anyway, Elvi points out that they have no idea about the capabilities of the gate entities. As far as she's concerned, they could conceivably respond against multiple systems, and they'd have no way of knowing about it until it happened. Sagale counts that passivity didn't save the gate builders, which is odd because the gate builders tried to fight back in Holden's vision, cauterizing star systems and so on, and still fell. If we go by Holden's vision, what we know is that the gate builders had no idea what was happening, to such an extent that almost seemed to consider it a sickness. So, I wouldn't say they were being passive, as much as they didn't understand what they were facing. It's that murkiness where it doesn't feel clear as to what everyone knows versus maybe what's changed behind the scenes between the earlier books and now. The gate builders appeared to be caught off-guard, but then responded by sending stars supernova, which worked for a time -- only for the entities to strike back harder and faster. To me, that is proof that it was not some law of the universe, but an attack. That's documented proof that the entities can and will escalate in response. Now, Laconia might not know this. However, at the end of Persepolis Rising, Holden tries to tell Duarte about the record he viewed about the ring station, only for Duarte to mention he'd already read the report on it. So, shouldn't Duarte know that? Shouldn't that influence his plan of action? Or did the report not mention any of that? And the idea of storming Heaven implies a military operation against an intelligence, doesn't it? Duarte calls them "the killers in the abyss" which implies a mind, an intention, a motivation. Like, if I jump out of a plane and hit the ground, no one says that there's a "killer in the fall." The really cool thing about that epilogue is how it feels like Duarte knows, and is somewhat prepared for, the real confrontation with the proto-killers. But now? It feels like he's still figuring it out, or keeping his subordinates in the dark, or willingly playing dice with the fate of humanity. It's a shame. It feels like we're bordering back on that 'the bad guy isn't as smart as he thinks he is' Coreyism. And it's a shame, because the epilogue of Persepolis Rising implied that Duarte had a plan -- but here, ten chapters into Tiamat's Wrath, it's like 'game theory, bro, I've read Blindsight.' After implying they weren't going to do anything so stupid and pointless as poke the killers with a stick, Duarte is like, well, actually, we're going to get a really pointy stick and see what happens. Even Steve knows that's a bad idea! Blindsight talked about game theory, too, by the way. Right down to the tit-for-tat being the optimal strategy. Blindsight posted:After a moment Bates picked up the ball. "Bad game theory, Suze." Blindsight posted:"I swear, if the aliens end up eating the lot of us, we'll have the Church of Game Theory to thank for it," Sascha said. Food for thought. Chapter Eleven: Alex Alex is on Callisto and has been there for eight days. He doesn't know what their next step is. For the moment, he's eating at a restaurant with Caspar. We're getting some classic Expansian padding: did you know that Callisto is where the Free Navy hit the shared MCRN/UN base? Did you want to know about the particulars of the restaurant and their space food? Or what he and Caspar are wearing? Or information about what's going on in Sol? Did you know that a space singer sent photos of himself to an underage fan? Engrossing. Laconia has, of course, covered up the loss of two frigates and a freighter with important cargo. Alex thinks that, back in the day, it would've been all over the news. But now Alex is grumbling about how all the news feeds and talking heads feel like the same thing. Buddy, we're grappling with that poo poo in 2023. Alex reflects how brittle their fake identities are. So, when Caspar immediately says he's going to go off and get drunk at a bar, he's like, hey, go nuts. Alex goes for a walk and reflects about his past and his family and he goes back to his apartment and wonders if he'll go through some "neo-noir crime thrillers" because that is Alex's Character Trait. Alex wonders if Laconia can construct a full image of Alex Kamal based on his various movies, food choices and so on. Huh. Much like how Caliban's War was when the Coreys discovered crowdfunding, I guess this is when they discovered metadata and digital footprints. And after wondering about all that, it turns out he's been making encrypted calls to his family and receiving their replies. His son Kit is seeing a girl -- whatever. Then, a message from Saba. The Tempest has broken orbit and is heading for Jupiter. Later, Bobbie and Alex-- Wait, Bobbie is here? I had to skip back and make sure I hadn't missed anything. Bobbie's chapter made it seem like they'd lost contact with the Storm, and Alex's chapter mentioned the freighter was tumbling through space. I honestly assumed Alex had to abandon the field and wasn't able to recover them. Maybe I'm just an idiot. Either way, Bobbie's not concerned about the approaching Tempest. She'll come up with a plan to deal with it before it arrives. Alex wonders why they're even fighting: like, what is their goal? What ideology are they fighting for? To restore the Union, to allow all the other colonies to self-determinate? Bobbie accuses him of being pro-authoritarianism (what). Alex says he's just demoralized. Bobbie is like, yeah, the political officer could've given them something to "break these fuckers back to the Stone Age." Huh? Anyway, she doesn't care about ideology, she just wants to ensure the world is a little bit freer, kinder, and smarter by the time she dies. Alex wonders if Naomi was right, about changing the system from the inside. Bobbie says she is (????) but that she is right too and the difference is just that Naomi doesn't want any blood to be spilled in the process. Bobbie thinks the way forward is pushing back as hard as they can, and outlasting Laconia. Which is kind of absurd! But then Alex has an interesting point: the only reason they have a resistance is because it's made up of old OPA who grew up resisting Earth and Mars. But once that core erodes, they'll have nothing -- because Laconia is doing pretty well for the new generation. People like his son Kit. In Alex's estimation, no one "after the Transport Union was born" would fight Laconia. It's an unwinnable fight. But does Bobbie agree? Chapter Twelve: Bobbie Yes, she does. Bobbie is grappling with the thought "in unwinnable fight" in a little goof. Down the page, it's spelled correctly as "an unwinnable fight." She's thinking about the approaching Tempest and what it did at Medina. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 12 posted:Bobbie had been at Medina Station when the Tempest came through the Laconia gate for the very first time. She’d watched it use its primary weapon on the rail-gun defenses, and turn them into spaghettified atoms in a single shot. Anyway, Bobbie knows the Storm can't stand up against the Tempest. But she's wondering about Alex. Maybe he's right. And if Alex is losing heart, then there'd be others. The old guard of the OPA can only keep them fighting for so long, especially when the Storm is their only naval asset. No one is interested in signing on with the resistance, which Bobbie attributes to Laconia being that good with speeches. She goes back to the cargo they took of the freighter. It's all spare parts, and it seems to be too much for the Storm to carry. But surely everything they took to Callisto, they carried on the Storm? Checking Chapter 11 and 12, they don't seem to imply the freighter was brought to Callisto. Eventually, Bobbie finds a crate labelled MAGNETIC CONTAINMENT EXPLOSIVE DANGER. She opens it and realizes she's looking at very powerful explosive. In fact, there's four of them. Not fusion reactors -- they're to small and they're using power, not generating it. It is, of course, a quarter of anti-matter containment devices. But Bobbie has to make a call and ask her pal Rini about it, who tells her it's antimatter. The Magnetar-class ships must use an antimatter power system, especially to power that main gun. Bobbie understands why the Tempest is coming to Jupiter. And she realizes that they have a way to deal with it.
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Nov 12, 2023 04:16
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Admittedly, that's an early blurb but, man, when they said their next series was going to be a Dune-esque space opera, I kind of imagined something... different. The fact they're calling it a sci-fi retelling of the Book of Daniel doesn't ignite my excitement much, either. Alas! I mentioned this in the scifi thread but the plot description is basically the anime/manga Bokurano except presumably without the giant robots. I already see the influence of Zone of the Enders all over the Expanse, so it wouldn't be new.
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Nov 12, 2023 04:56
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Posting in the Mass Effect thread just made me realize the similarity between Ilus and Ilos.
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Nov 14, 2023 05:10
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 Vomit Zombies 
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Nov 15, 2023 23:13
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Strategic Tea posted:
No way, I completely forgot about that.
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Nov 15, 2023 23:18
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Reaper tech is even a bright blue, like the protomolecule!! Tiamat's Wrath, Chapters 13 - 16 Naomi exists. Theresa has a chat with her best friend. Elvi seems game theory in action. Wheels spinning within wheels. Chapter Thirteen: Naomi Naomi is aboard the Bhikaji Cama, discussing recent events (that is to say, listening to messages.) Saba is wondering why the freighter was carrying a political officer in the first place. All Saba knows is that he was headed to the Earth transfer station. Saba "shrugged eloquently" and I wonder what that looks like. As this is a Naomi chapter, and she is still stuck in a container, there's a lot of words to pad out the dialogue, and none of it feels that relevant. Naomi thinks about the missing ships. She thinks about technological progress. She thinks about Auberon and Bara Gaon complex. Naomi sends a message back to Saba: the loss of the informants sucks, they need to send someone to the transfer station, and they need to figure out what was on the freighter. Then, Naomi gets a message from Jim. It's nice but not really interesting: I'm in prison, people are watching me, etc. Then, Naomi gets a message from Duarte, as it's been attached to the end of Jim's message. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 13 posted:The image changed again, and a new face appeared. A man with dark eyes, acne-scarred skin, and a calm in his expression that landed him directly in the uncanny valley. Two things here to note. The first is that Naomi doesn't notice anything odd about Duarte's face, not like Holden noted in the prologue. Perhaps the signs of protomolecule 'infection' are only notable to Holden, or perhaps it's an oversight. But also, I said previously back in Nemesis Games that they wanted Edward James Olmos for this guy and, observe:  Duarte offers Naomi the opportunity to surrender herself and come live with Jim on Laconia, allowing her to advocate for the changes she wishes without bloodshed. Otherwise, there'll be consequences. Naomi, of course, does not accept, even if she knows Duarte wouldn't break his word. Consequences come fast. A Laconian destroyer is already heading for the Cama, and it'll arrive in eighteen hours. They need to cover up Naomi aboard the ship, otherwise the 'shell game' will be exposed. Were she younger, Naomi thinks she might've taken Duarte's offer. Chapter Fourteen: Tessa Tessa is sneaking out of her room, managing to overcome the security designed to notify anyone were she to do exactly that. She's going off with Muskrat to see her friend Timothy, whom she considers her "first real friend." He lives in a cave some distance from the State Building. There's a brief encounter with strange biological creatures, the "repair drones" but we don't really get a description of what they look like. It turns out Timothy is a rather Spartan sort. He has a backpack reactor, a recycler, a cot, and so on. Timothy is "bald and pale, with a thick, bushy beard, wide shoulders, and arms with muscles like ropes." They'd met each other months ago. So, I'll cut to the chase -- Timothy is Amos. And I don't say things like this often, but I think this is a really interesting development and one that comes across very differently if you've either paid close attention to Nemesis Games or read The Churn. Nemesis Games mentions "Timmy" four times and "Timothy" once, for example. So, yeah, Tiamat's Wrath flat out tells you that Theresa's friend Timothy is Amos pretty early on! It's really cool. One of the few things that's stood out to me as making a re-read better. That said, there's another thing I find interesting. What got me interested in doing this Let's Read back in the day was a post on these forums that argued that a character like Amos -- a sort of sociopath who shackles himself to an upstanding person -- is the Corey's 'ideal specimen.' What was it that Sherlock liked to say? A high-functioning sociopath? Amos also tends to get some of the 'wisdom of the common man' moments, and so it leaps out to me when Timothy is said to look like "an old-fashioned guru meditating on a mountaintop." It's hard not to think that the authors idealize Amos on some level. Theresa like Timothy/Amos because he feels like he actually listens to her without judgement. They talk for a while. Theresa mentions Holden and Amos refers to him as 'the captain.' Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 14 posted:“Your dad’s kind of an rear end in a top hat,” Timothy said, his expression philosophical, his voice matter-of-fact. “And he’s killed a lot more people than Holden ever did.” Babylon's Ashes, Chapter 30 posted:It took Filip an extra try to talk past his throat. “Didn’t drive us into those rounds, me,” he said. “Gunner, me. Not the pilot. And didn’t have a rail gun, yeah? Pinché Holden had a rail gun.” Amos says that Theresa's childhood is more hosed up than his, which is a pretty big claim given what we can infer about his childhood, but also I think apt for him to say. Theresa counters that her life is perfect, but Timothy notes she's always looking over her shoulder when she sneaks out to see him. Theresa goes back to her room and can't sleep. She brings up some security footage of Holden. She finds footage of him having wine with Dr Cortazar. Cortazar is talking about jellyfish. Holden and Cortazar do the whole 'is mad science unnatural?' 'everything humans do is natural, we're natural' sort of thing. But Cortazar seems upset that Duarte's experiments into immortality are having the benefits go to Theresa and not to himself. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 14 posted:“Only one person can ever be immortal. That was what he said. But then he changed the rules. She can be too because he’s found a justification for her. That she’s really just an extension of him. I’m not mad about that. That’s just the organism we are. I’m not mad. But it doesn’t matter.” As Cortazar says this, Holden looks right up into the camera, and Theresa remembers his words to her: you should keep an eye on me. Chapter Fifteen: Naomi Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 15 posted:Getting what you want fucks you up. Naomi pushed the thought aside as she had a dozen times before. It turns out that the thought came from something Clarissa said at a bar. Basically, Clarissa wanted nothing more than to get out of jail and walked right out into the apocalypse, and it took her years to figure out who she was outside prison. I don't think that thought is quite right, and I'll throw in the quote that I think the Coreys may have been thinking about instead. It's Slavoj Zizek: "We have a perfect name for fantasy realized. It's called nightmare." Either way, it's an odd statement for these novels because I'm not sure anyone is hosed up by getting what they want. Holden and co. get an awesome ship and become interplanetary cool dudes. Miller goes out with a bang. No bad guy gets what they want, except maybe Singh. Naomi has some hypodermic work done to make her look like someone else. They can't insert her into the crew roster because they don't have proper authorization. The Laconians come aboard and do an inspection, and immediately note Naomi's presence. The ship's chief engineer says she is an apprentice, and manages to confound the Laconian officer enough that he lets the matter drop. Afterward, Naomi thanks the chief engineer for covering her, and the captain is like "You're Naomi Nagata" and Naomi hates the fact that people think she's a celebrity. Chapter Sixteen: Elvi Elvi and Fayez aren't happy about Duarte's plan to throw a bomb into the gates. Soon, the experiment begins, and Laconia sends the bomb ship through the gate. Nothing happens, and consciousness remains normal, and then: Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 16 posted:On the screens, the space around them boiled. As Elvi watched, confirmation started rolling in from the outlying probes. One after the other, they all reported the same thing. An uptick in quantum particle annihilation. The underlying hum of the vacuum cranking up to a shriek. Then it turns out that someone is creating matter inside the dead system. A few hydrogen ions, but enough to be noticeable given the emptiness of the system. And Fayez is like, hey, I know I'm the geology guy, but remember how that neutron star is right on the edge of collapse? And so they do some readings and, yep, the neutron star isn't so stable anymore. Sagale tells the Falcon to head for the gate at high-gee.
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Nov 17, 2023 07:22
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Again, what sticks out to me about Tiamat's Wrath is that it feels like it has the same issue that the series has had since Cibola Burn. Each novel begins with an interesting hook and a initial set of chapters that tends to build on it, and then you get to about this point of the novel (Chapter 14 or so, about 25-35% of the way through) and the story just loses momentum. It's like the novel has to recalibrate itself to the actual plot. In Cibola Burn, it's about when Murtry suddenly blasts Coop. In Babylon's Ashes, it's when they've brought in the Azure Dragon. Persepolis Rising is interesting because it feels like they're aware of it, so it's the point where the Laconians assault Medina. The exception is Nemesis Games, although Chapter 14 is that odd Naomi flashback chapter, which basically has to retcon Naomi so the plot she's in makes sense. I've noted it before as either the plot trying to jump rails or the character start waiting around, and Tiamat's Wrath feels like we're in the waiting around pattern.
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Nov 17, 2023 12:59
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:It turns out Timothy is a rather Spartan sort. He has a backpack reactor, a recycler, a cot, and so on. Timothy is "bald and pale, with a thick, bushy beard, wide shoulders, and arms with muscles like ropes." They'd met each other months ago. Is the idea that Duarte has gotten more people killed than Holden even true? Holden got a lot of people killed with his whole "Oh yeah lemme blast everything I find to the universe without even thinking about it I'm so smart!" antics.
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Nov 17, 2023 13:47
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Kchama posted:Is the idea that Duarte has gotten more people killed than Holden even true? Holden got a lot of people killed with his whole "Oh yeah lemme blast everything I find to the universe without even thinking about it I'm so smart!" antics. I guess Laconia destroyed the Independence (Void City) in Sol? It has a population of around two hundred thousand and is probably the biggest cause of mass causalities in the main conflict. Of course we can also attribute other deaths to Duarte. Surely a lot of people died when everyone in Sol lost consciousness but that's a very nebulous figure. Timmy is probably also counting Duarte's role in the asteroid attacks on Earth as being attributable to him, in which case, he certainly did kill more than Holden, but does Timmy even know about Duarte's connection to that? PriorMarcus fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Nov 17, 2023 |
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Nov 17, 2023 13:49
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Quote is not edit.
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Nov 17, 2023 13:52
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PriorMarcus posted:I guess Laconia destroyed the Independence (Void City) in Sol? It has a population of around two hundred thousand and is probably the biggest cause of mass causalities in the main conflict. I actually totally forgot Duarte had anything to do with the asteroid attacks.
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Nov 17, 2023 14:01
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I think it's fair to say the Coreys really do admire 'sociopaths'. When they're baddies they're presented as these near supernatural apex predators who control everyone around them (Marco, arguably Great Man Duarte). When they're goodies like Amos they're Buddha in a cave. It's just humans reaching for an emotional explanation for why bad people can do upsetting things and get away with it and aren't we all just monkeys after all?? All this for a medical condition that I understand is no longer believed to exist outside a general lack of empathy spectrum?
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Nov 17, 2023 22:09
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Strategic Tea posted:I think it's fair to say the Coreys really do admire 'sociopaths'. When they're baddies they're presented as these near supernatural apex predators who control everyone around them (Marco, arguably Great Man Duarte). When they're goodies like Amos they're Buddha in a cave. I kind of wonder if it isn’t a trope they’ve gotten by osmosis from the anime/games they’ve clearly played. It’s a very common idea that being a ‘sociopath’ makes you into a superhuman badass and a genius. It isn’t uncommon in Western stuff (Ender’s Game and its sequels love it, though the superhumanness is usually attributed to ‘genius’) but I usually see Amos-types in Eastern art. Usually when you need a REALLY badass bad guy, they’ll be a sociopath and get superhuman powers and genius intelligence. Monster and Battle Royale come to mind.
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Nov 17, 2023 22:20
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Kchama posted:Is the idea that Duarte has gotten more people killed than Holden even true? Holden got a lot of people killed with his whole "Oh yeah lemme blast everything I find to the universe without even thinking about it I'm so smart!" antics. It's hard to argue against it, although I don't think we know how much of Marco's plan came from Duarte's direction. The TV series, at least, makes it clear that Inaros was already working on it back during the events of Leviathan Wakes (although I don't think that's the case in the novels.) Either way, Holden himself almost certainly got people killed due to his big speech back in the first novel, which I think Miller called him out on, but the numbers are never quantified. Either way, we know that the Free Navy campaign resulted in billions of deaths. Duarte bears some responsibility for the attacks on Earth, even if only as the guy who gave Marco his hardware. PriorMarcus posted:I guess Laconia destroyed the Independence (Void City) in Sol? It has a population of around two hundred thousand and is probably the biggest cause of mass causalities in the main conflict. Yeah. Even if it can be reasonably inferred given how quickly the connection was made after the attacks, Amos was there in Persepolis Rising when Bobbie and Alex were acting as if they'd only just then figured out the connection. Kchama posted:I actually totally forgot Duarte had anything to do with the asteroid attacks. I do think the Coreys may have misjudged how soon Duarte should've been connected to them. The characters definitely knew it during Babylon's Ashes, and I think even in Nemesis Games. But it's a little odd that they let the greatest architect of mass murder just sit on the other side of the Laconia gate with one battleship and a bunch of frigates for three decades. But still, it makes one wonder: did Duarte tell Marco to throw rocks at Earth, did he know about it when he gave him the ships, or was it something Inaros did of which Duarte had no knowledge? Strategic Tea posted:I think it's fair to say the Coreys really do admire 'sociopaths'. When they're baddies they're presented as these near supernatural apex predators who control everyone around them (Marco, arguably Great Man Duarte). When they're goodies like Amos they're Buddha in a cave. As far as I know, it's referred to as Antisocial Personality Disorder these days, but I don't think it fits any of the characters. You can't exactly diagnose fictional characters, and I feel like Amos could be anything from schizoid to antisocial to just maladjusted as a victim of abuse. They're sort of 'pop culture' sociopaths. That said, I believe the difference in terminology arose from psychopathy having connotations of violence, which was replaced by sociopathy to put focus on the social transgressive aspect of the condition, and then ASPD to make it something you can be diagnosed with (a Doctor can't diagnose you with sociopathy.)
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Nov 18, 2023 02:22
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:
Sounds interesting let's look up the plot synopsis. Ok, Alien Comet seems good, mysterious signal, k still on board. One character is a reincarnated vampire  uh....what. some more stuff that never mentions vampires again. Then an ending with a vampire revolt on earth. Hmm. Well I didn't see that coming. Guess I'll check it out.
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Dec 3, 2023 03:52
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Huh, there's an Expanse game from Telltale. Well, published by Telltale, but by the Life Is Strange devs. It's about Drummer. No idea what it's about beyond that.
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Dec 3, 2023 19:12
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banned from Starbucks posted:Sounds interesting let's look up the plot synopsis. Ok, Alien Comet seems good, mysterious signal, k still on board. One character is a reincarnated vampire I think almost everyone, including myself, has a bit of an 'uh, what' response to that element of Blindsight. I think it's a very cool part of the story and I like a lot of what Watts does with them, and they do have thematic relevance, but I also think they're there because, from memory, Watts challenged himself to try and take such an idea seriously. Kchama posted:Huh, there's an Expanse game from Telltale. Well, published by Telltale, but by the Life Is Strange devs. It's about Drummer. No idea what it's about beyond that. My understanding is that it is short, on-rails, and just kind of boring. It appears to have been met with a resounding shrug. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapters 17 - 20 Bobbie sets her sights on her own personal Carthage, and Alex is there, too. Naomi and Elvi are on ships. Teresa meets Elsa 'Monster' Singh. Chapter Seventeen: Alex Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 17 posted:Hiding a ship in space wasn’t all that different from hiding on a school playground. Find something bigger than you, and put it between you and the person looking. Even without something to hide behind it wasn’t impossible. Space was vast, and the things that floated through it were mostly cold and dark. If you could find a way not to radiate heat and light, it was possible to get lost in the mix. (Also, space is big , y'all.)Alex is analysing a map of the Jovian planetary system. It's notable as I believe this is the first time we've seen this sort of 'haptic map plotting' in the books, although it was a pretty regular occurrence in the TV series itself. Alex is looking to find a path through the moons that keeps the Gathering Storm concealed from any prying Laconian eyes. I'm also recalling the odd scene in the TV series during the events on Ganymede where Alex slingshots his way around the very same planetary system and it comes across as taking him all of five minutes. Alex finds a path that might work. But the Storm has advanced stealth systems that should mean if anyone spots it'll look "too small to fit the profile" of a "salvaged military ship" or a "standard rock hopper" regardless. It's good not to take risks, but the Pulsar-class' stealth capability still feels odd to me. And beyond that, I'm already getting the vibe this is a chapter of padding. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 17 posted:It was pretty drat thin, as escape plans went. But they were living in thin times. Anyway, Alex is living in a dingy apartment on Callisto. He has a headache. He takes an aspirin. He's listening to his favorite song by the Dust Runners band, who have never been mentioned in the series before now. Bobbie calls him and tells him to meet up with her, and he goes to meet up with her. Alex passes off his hand terminal to Caspar to go wandering randomly around the station, assuming if anyone is tracking him via the terminal they'll now be distracted -- but wouldn't that just risk them catching Caspar instead? The guy who lives with him? Just leave the terminal behind. I do like how Alex tries to 'dad' Caspar a bit, though. Alex goes to meet Bobbie. She's very tense. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 17 posted:“Something’s been bothering me. You’re right. And Naomi’s right,” she said. “The timer’s running out on our little resistance, and what have we accomplished? We’ve annoyed the empire. Snatched a few ships, some supplies. Killed a few Laconians. And maybe I used to think it was enough to spit in my enemy’s eye while he strangles me. But I’ve been thinking about Jillian’s assessment of the objective value of moral victories, and she wasn’t wrong either.” Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 17 posted:“Yeah, taking out their resupply is great,” Bobbie said. “But that’s just a tactical victory. That’s my kind of target. It’s not yours. Or Naomi’s.” Bobbie thinks taking out the platforms would only worry Duarte and his Admirals, and not do anything to inspire the common people. Alex figures Bobbie wants to drop the antimatter on Laconia itself (????) and Bobbie says, no, she wants to kill the Tempest. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 17 posted:“We show Earth and Mars and everyone in the Belt and every other colony out past the gates that Laconia’s battleship isn’t invincible. Show them that we can win. We’ll create a whole new generation of people willing to fight by lighting the biggest god drat signal fire the human race has ever seen.” It's like the Blindsight thoughts in the last update. My brain gets caught on the similarity, but I don't know if it means anything or if I just have sensitive pattern recognition abilities -- guy who's only seen Boss Baby, etc. But also, there's that Coreyian quote: once is never, but twice is always. Anyway, Alex says Bobbie is crazy. Bobbie says they've been playing to lose and now they're playing to win. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 17 posted:“You aren’t,” he said. “You’re stung because we had a win in our hands and we lost it. And then Jillian twisted the knife because she was frustrated too, and she’s kind of an rear end in a top hat. And we found this”—he held up the hand terminal with the antimatter information—“so it feels like the universe handed you a way to redeem the loss. But what you’re really doing is trying to win back what you’ve lost by going all in. It’s lovely poker, and even worse as a battle strategy.” Really? Who are we supposed to understand and forgive? The rotating door of corporate sociopaths who'd kick puppies if it'd make them a few cents? Murtry, the guy who had his people murdered and ended the novel by being beaten in his cell by Amos, and it was a feel good moment? Marco Inaros, the guy who covers all the bases from domestic abuser to Most Genocidal Man to exist? Winston Duarte, the guy who pulled Inaros' strings and is now staking all of humanity on the prisoner's dilemma? Santiago Singh is maybe the guy who comes closest, in the sense that he's not wholly without sympathy, but I don't think I'd go so far as to forgive him. Some of you may recall this section from Persepolis Rising, but it was not what I was thinking of: Persepolis Rising, Chapter 13 posted:“How am I about to gently caress up?” Alex says Bobbie is looking for a big symbolic victory, which isn't smart. He suggests they should take the antimatter to Saba and see what he suggests. Bobbie says she'll think about it, but also thinks Alex should think about whether he should be with her if he doesn't think they can win. Chapter Eighteen: Naomi Naomi figures she'll need to abandon the Bhikaji Cama when they reach Auberon. She figures that her mysterious appearance aboard the ship will become legend among the crew: Naomi Nagata just showed up out of nowhere and stayed with us until we got to Auberon, wow! This is a repeating motif in these novels. The Rocinante crew are really famous! Everyone knows Jim Holden! Everyone knows Naomi Nagata! But it's also something that never really inconveniences them, which makes it ring hollow. Sure, Holden finds it a bit embarrassing, and they've briefly mentioned the gap between James Holden and sweet ol' Jim, but this novel points out that the Laconians are so drat stupid that they can't recognize Naomi Nagata. At least, not to the extent that they're willing to create a fuss and bring her in. Now, maybe that's Laconian character. I think it's possible and plausible that Duarte has a warrant out for Naomi and that his orders include general clauses to not try too hard: keep an eye on her, don't force anything, I'll get her with the carrot, but make sure we can grab her if we need to. The thing is, character flaws are only flaws when they inconvenience a character. I've used the roleplaying nature of the Expanse against the series before, and I think I'm about to do that again, but in a different way. Because it was roleplaying that taught me what a character flaw actually was, and how to make them interesting. In summary, a flaw has to be a deficiency that gets a character in trouble, and can be used against them. A weakness to silver, a severe phobia of fire, restrictive oaths, etc. If it's an emotional one like, say, anger problems or being prone to violence, then it must affect the character in a negative sense. The holy warrior who only goes into bloodlust at the sight of demons doesn't really have a flaw -- you can't say that is a negative aspect of the character -- unless that bloodlust impacts him negatively. It also has to be something that is interesting to invoke and depict. A flaw that removes a character's agency entirely means that it's unlikely to ever be invoked, and probably isn't interesting to invoke regardless. The fact a vampire is vaporized by sunlight shouldn't be their defining flaw in a narrative, because there's only two ways it works: it is invoked and they die, or it isn't relevant to the scene. A flaw with caveats isn't much of a flaw, either. The one that was always brought up as an example of a not-flaw was along the lines of "Bill is very hot-headed and rushes into bad situations. But if he knows he is being provoked, he's smart enough to avoid it." Now, fame isn't necessarily a flaw, but flaws also depend on context. Holden and Naomi are notably famous to the extent that they get recognized in And I think that's something that bothers me about our core cast -- they don't really have interesting flaws that affect or alter the narrative. Holden's self-righteousness should bite him in the butt, but it doesn't. Naomi's Belter physiology falls into that 'maybe too severe to be utilized' idea, and has arguably been forgotten by the story itself. Alex barely has a character sheet. Amos has flaws in the sense I describe, I think, which is what makes him the most compelling member of the cast... but even then, as I noted in Babylon's Ashes, it feels a little like they don't really keep true to his flaws when it might be inconvenient to his buddies (with the notable exception of how he acted throughout Persepolis Rising.) Amos beating the hacker all the way back in Caliban's War was also a highlight for the reason, although it didn't really complicate the narrative. It's like the writers aren't afraid to let Amos have bad moments and rough patches. Does that have anything to do with that 'ideal' thought? Amos has flaws, but I'd say Miller is notably the exception among our core characters. He has a bunch of flaws, and they come up in fun ways. He's a drunkard and a bad cop with a failed marriage, which complicates a lot of his chapters in Leviathan Wakes. He has no problem with doing justice on his own terms, which leads to him shooting Dresden and earning the ire of both Fred and Holden. He's a cantankerous old jerk and when he slams into Venus, you just know that no one was that broken up about it (except Miller, lmao.) And while you wouldn't want every character to be Miller, I would've liked to see more flaws rearing up at inopportune times across these novels. Especially when it'd make for good drama. (I'm reminded of Expanse reader reactions to the TV series where they were upset that the adaptation added drama.) Naomi chats with her pal Emma. Turns out Emma worked for "Pink-water" and they had a "nofraternization" policy. 379 highlights: Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 18 posted:“Easy to make rules,” Emma said. “Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it’s the person’s fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that’s worth poo poo, we’ve done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people. Laconians making the same mistake as ever. Our rules are good, and they’d work perfectly if it were only a different species.” Naomi thinks Emma sounds like Holden. Emma says when they get to Auberon they'll ensure Naomi is safe. Naomi goes back to her cabin. The Bhikaji Cama is big but her cabin is small. It used to be a colony ship. Someone drew a bunch of stickdeath drawings on the crash couch which is too small for her. Naomi goes back to work on some data, because this is what she does. She thinks Laconia is putting out political officers to try and end the shell game tactic, and she thinks it is going to work. Naomi goes to see Captain Burnham. She wants a quick tightbeam to Medina. Burnham tells her to go gently caress herself. Burnham knows who Naomi is but thinks she's being a nuisance. As Naomi and Emma leave the ops deck, a message comes in: Laconia has suspended all travel through the Gates until further notice. Chapter Nineteen: Elvi The Falcon is burning hard to the Tecoma gate. Is this our first mention of "breathable support fluid?" The star is going to fire a gamma ray burst at any minute. Elvi isn't taking it well. Fayez makes a joke about masturbation. They reach the slow zone. Admiral Sagale is on the line to Governor Song of Medina and he asks for critical priority to get out of the slow zone, but there are twenty-eight other ships on the way out. They're trying to move Medina Station out of the potential line of fire of any gamma ray burst from the Tacoma system, but the station isn't exactly handling being turned back into a ship. Fayez mentions that if the ring station takes a massive energy burst, it'll fire a larger burst out of all the gates. Sagale calls it the 'cannons-on-the-cliffs' strategy which feels like a misnomer. Sagale isn't sure the ring station will survive the blast. Governor Song clears the Falcon for transit to Laconia. Elvi thinks about how the Heart of the Tempest had fired on the railgun emplacement and nothing had happened, but firing the magnetic cannon in the Sol system had provoked a response. She mentions that the Tecoma system was designed to do this. Fayez says that the designers were "some kind of quantum-entangled high-energy physics hive mind thing" so how can we know what they thought. The ship preceding the Falcon in the transit queue, the Plain of Jordan, heads through the gate -- and something happens. Sagale hails Medina Station. It's taken some damage but is still operational. And the ring space, the infinite darkness dotted by the gates, is unbearably white. Sagale asks about the Jordan, if it made it through the gate. Song makes it sound like they got destroyed, but Sagale clarifies that they went dutchman. Sagale promptly lockdowns the slow zone -- no ships come in, and none go out, not without his say so. Fayez points out that the gates have moved. Every single one. Tacoma gate is missing, and so is Thanjavur gate. All the gates moved because they maintain equal distance between each other, and now there are two gates less. And while Tacoma might have been an empty system, Thanjavur was not. (Thanjavur system has never been mentioned before this point, if you're wondering whether we know the implications of that.) Chapter Twenty: Teresa Teresa is out at a science fair. There's over a thousand children there. Teresa looks through some of the various science experiments the various children have done. And Connor, Teresa's crush (or former crush, perhaps) is there, too. But Teresa is still a bit bothered by the fact he and Muriel were kissing. Connor smiles at her and Teresa wonders if that means he likes her or regrets kissing Muriel. In the end, Teresa sits down at a table with a younger girl -- a six-year-old who goes by Elsa Singh. Fun call back. Elsa is upset that no one will play with her. Teresa offers to teach Elsa something: the prisoner's dilemma. Teresa cooperates with Elsa for a few rounds, and then gives her the tit-for-tat as a lesson. Elsa doesn't take it very well. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 20 posted:“You cheated!” The little girl’s voice was more than just loud. It was a shriek of rage. Her face was twisted in a vicious scowl and dark with blood just under the skin. “You said we should be nice!” Teresa says it's part of the lesson, which makes me think she was lying to Elsa from the start, and that it must've been pretty involved on her part because I feel like a child would just defect to see what happens, especially a child like Elsa, and that'd undercut Elsa's rather explosive response to it. In the end, Elsa collapses and cries on the floor. Natalia, Elsa's mother shows up, and claims that Elsa just gets overstimulated and that it won't happen again. Teresa says it's her fault as she didn't explain the game well enough. Teresa is struck by how Elsa's mother calms her without asking questions like what mistake did you make and what will you do differently next time? Colonel Ilich arrives and takes Teresa to see her father. Duarte is watching the reports from the slow zone and asks Teresa about the experiment in the Tacoma system. Teresa recalls it was to see if the enemy can be negotiated with, the tit-for-tat experiment. Duarte says there's good news and bad news, but does not actually explain which is which. The Tacoma star has collapsed into a black hole and, so doing, sent a burst of gamma radiation through the gate, and the Plain of Jordan went dutchman. So, they sent through the bomb ship and the Goths are still eating ships. Duarte asks Teresa what they should do about it. (It feels notable that the gamma ray blast isn't something Duarte talks about. It's brought up very briefly, but surely the fact they just turned energy into matter and turned a neutron star into a weapon, a neutron star that they either deliberately put on a hair trigger or knew how to take advantage of, destroying two gates in the process, is worth putting into your my_enemies_behavior.xlsx spreadsheet. Surely that there's an intelligence involved, and it's one that is basically telling you to cease your investigations.) Teresa does not know. Duarte prompts her that the rules of game theory are that when a ship fails to transit, they punish their opponents. Should they follow that policy, or stop? But another thought: how did the gamma ray burst affect the gate limit, was the Plain of Jordan being taken related to it? It seems to have happened at the exact same time, which I feel should make Duarte adjust his abacus. Anyway, Teresa says to stop. Duarte does not agree. He talks about a time when she was young, and that she had a favorite toy, this carved wooden horse. They took the toy away from Teresa and she threw a tantrum. So, her parents could give the toy back, rewarding her for the behavior, or they could withhold it. Teresa wonders if Elsa's mother has taught her that it's okay to shout and flip over tables. Notably, Elsa did not flip any tables, she just knocked her chair over. But also, if baby Teresa had the ability to detonate suns, then Mr and Mrs Duarte probably would've given her back her wooden horse. All in all, this means that Duarte is going to send another bomb ship, to show the enemy that they are disciplined. He says he has no idea if they'll win against such opposition, but they have to fight regardless. Oh, I see what they're doing here. It's like with Bobbie and Drummer, I guess. Duarte thinks the only way they can defeat the Goths is with "intelligence, ruthlessness, and unwavering purpose." Teresa apologizes for giving him the wrong answer. Duarte says that it's okay, that she'll learn more about it as she... changes. Tiamat's Wrath, Chapter 20 posted:“Transform. Become immortal. I’ve spoken to Dr. Cortázar about beginning the process with you. It will take time, of course, but since I began the treatments, I’ve learned so much. Things I couldn’t know when I was just . . . just human, I suppose.”
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Dec 4, 2023 07:11
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:So, everyone can see that weird opalescence, I guess. But Naomi didn't see it on the video call. Does he disguise it when making video calls? Who knows, but it sounds like bad news for Teresa! I might be misremembering, but doesn't Teresa see the opalescence because she's already being experimented on at this point?
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Dec 4, 2023 15:02
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