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As this Let's Read goes on I'm going to gripe and complain about a how lot of Miller's chapters open, but heck if that initial back-and-forth with Havelock isn't one of my favorite bits in the entire book. I also have to give the TV show's wardrobe department serious credit for nailing the look of his stupid hat: it's tough to find an article of clothing that silly-looking but still something you're willing to believe a human being would wear on purpose.
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Mar 19, 2020 05:31
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Yeah, so this is jumping ahead a bit but my biggest structural complaint with Leviathan Wakes is that Miller and Holden's stories aren't obviously connected for the first third, and the story visibly creaks and warps as both authors struggle to get the two characters involved with each other. On top of that, Miller's early chapters do an absolute crapton of Ceres-specific worldbuilding to the extent that we probably know more about it than any other location in the first book. When the plot really gets moving, all of that kinda gets left by the wayside. If you place the Eros stuff on Ceres you get rid of a lot of those problems: Miller's early bit now feeds directly into the story, and the things that happen on Eros feel a lot more like personal failures on Miller's part if they happened right under his nose on his own station.
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Mar 19, 2020 07:33
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I read the first 4 all in a row recently, and my theory is that they didn't really start planning out the characters until book 4. One of the early running themes you're going to see in our writeups is that book 1 Amos, in particular, sounds like a completely different character. (Later book spoilers) What's particularly weird is how he constantly makes crude sex/dick/prostitute jokes. We later learn that he grew up in a crime brothel and is a mostly-asexual/chemically castrated crime genius who acts like a big, dumb guy because it disarms people. A lot of his lines in LW are either cruder or more emotional and aggressive than the guy who hangs out with Holden in books 3 & 4 and casually goes "Yeah I'd be okay with murdering everything I see, except that wouldn't get me anything I want." That's another thing I really like with the show- they had I think 4 or 5 books to work with, so the crew of the Canterbury starts out with traits they didn't acquire in the books for ages.
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Mar 19, 2020 23:00
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I watched the first few episodes of the TV show before I ever touched the books, and I actually completely missed the fact that (some) belters have noticeably different physiology. There's a bit where TV Havelock lampshades this, by pressing his palm against the palm of a belter corpse (whose hand is way bigger and more spidery than his, presumably all those shrugs helped with conditioning). Having read the book it's obviously Havelock going "Man, Belters are weird," but when I first watched it I thought he was just being an oblivious rookie and playing with dead bodies for fun.
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Mar 21, 2020 05:05
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FPyat posted:A bit of a missed opportunity to emphasize the living conditions inside small, enclosed ecosystems, where food wastage would be one thing that people would surely want to minimize. This is something I've gone back and forth on a few times. It stands out to me too, even with the recyclers, largely because the story goes so far out of its way to emphasize how hard and crappy life in the belt is, and how essential water and closed loop environmental systems are. On the flip side, I get why it wouldn't be fun to read about completely realistic space travel, where everyone lives like a mole person, washes with a damp 2cm cloth and is atrophied from sitting in a cramped cockpit and not moving for months at a time. Ultimately, I think that in a lot of ways the Expanse is a fantasy setting wearing a sci-fi setting like a skin suit: it's more grounded than a lot of similiar stories, but ultimately both authors are happy to handwave reality away when it becomes inconveniently technical or crappy, and I think it's generally something that improves the books. Omi no Kami fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Mar 22, 2020 |
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Mar 22, 2020 01:50
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:That's pretty much Miller's character, yeah, and what leads into the three bits of information we'll learn in a few chapters later. That Dawes and Shaddid think Miller is a joke of a cop, that Muss tells him he's one of the worst guys in the place if not the station joke, and Shaddid firing him for poor performance/lack of trust. Reading purely from the novel, we don't really get much information at all on Miller's thirty years with Star Helix. We don't really know whether he was a good cop who turned into a sorry drunk after his divorce, or if he was just always kind of bad and persisted there because he was a Ceres native, took orders well, didn't make waves, and Ceres was kind of a dump. It sticks out to me that I don't think we learn anything about Candace, his ex-wife, or their life together beyond the fact that she existed and they divorced a few years before the start of LW. There's a bit where Shaddid says he 'was a good cop, once' but it's very much an attempt to soothe what's left of his ego. I've always been really unsure on how much of Miller's thing was "Used to be a good cop," and how much was "Used to be okay, now is trash, always thought he was great." The latter feels like it would fit in better with the setting, but it might be a little too depressing and crummy even for Miller. On the promotion angle I'm not a space detective (IANASD), but I think that can happen in the real world too- as far as I know the police isn't like the military, where you're pressured to promote or perish. A lot of talented guys stay beat cops for years or even their entire career because they like the job. In most departments, detectives are kind of like a specialized role you can apply for and train into, just like K-9, recovery divers, SWAT, and so forth. So if you're career-minded you're going to want to climb the ladder from patrol, to junior detective, to full detective, then up to a supervisor or squad/division lead, but I'm pretty sure tons of guys stay in the flying squad for years or decades and are still trudging through casework when they retire.
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Mar 25, 2020 23:44
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Something else I really like about that exchange from 105 is how it tells us a lot about the characters in a fairly minimal way: Naomi knows about Belter Stuff and doesn't trust Fred, Holden's naive and groping in the dark for a lifeline, Alex is kinda-sorta in the loop, and Amos doesn't care. In a show as deeply rooted in fantasy politics as The Expanse is that's the sort of character building you need to get on the record and start reinforcing early, and a lot of shows would've resorted to one or two much clunkier scenes in which, like, I dunno- Naomi and Holden talk about politics, Holden says something dumb, and Naomi corrects him while setting up future plot threads in big neon letters.
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Mar 26, 2020 01:31
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That's a good point. I think it also ties into our earlier discussion of just who, exactly, Holden is supposed to be. Because I think in both the book and show he's intended to be (if you'll pardon the tabletop terminology) the chaotic good warrior: dumb, loyal to a fault, generally good and kind, but largely driven by his own personal ethos. But the Holden I find much more interesting is the guy we get hints of here and there, the guy who just isn't a very great person: he's lazy, undisciplined, content to hover in place for years, deals with having his assumptions or views challenged in a very juvenile way, and just isn't a whole lot of anything. Maybe this is just because it's the kind of thing I like, but I think that "Greasy rear end in a top hat space trucker" would've been a way more interesting lens through which to view this world.
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Mar 26, 2020 03:05
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I've always been vaguely suspicious that the party's visit to Eros was where LW transitioned from direct PbP adaptation to new material. I've been writing up some of those chapters recently, and it's really weird- the story kicks into gear at that point, and a lot of my complaints about forced plotting and such immediately disappear.
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Apr 5, 2020 04:49
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Huh, putting Miller on the kill squad is a great idea that honestly never occurred to me before. It solves a lot of the creaky plotting and the obsession that comes out of nowhere- Miller gets fired, and instead of hallucinating Julie he just signs on with Protogen and gets sent to Eros. Miller and the squad leader are undercover in the hotel, when he sees it's Holden he breaks cover and just straight-up goes "Hey you're Holden, right? Do you know anything about any crew members escaping the Scopuli?" Holden does, so Miller coldly executes his boss standing next to him, then calmly turns to confront the remaining members of the fire team while Holden and company dive for cover and frantically return fire. Then Miller's fascinating/obsession can be less "Here is a random chick I'm fixated on" and more part of Holden's mission to find and stop the protomolecule research. When they raid the base and Holden kicks him off the team after seeing him cold-heartedly murder a scientist, the rest of the crew can go "Dude wtf, you just fired Miller for doing literally the exact same thing that caused you to hire him."
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Apr 6, 2020 10:44
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Yeah, that's the really weird thing- conceptually Holden and Miller are set up to piss each other off in a natural and interesting way, but I think that structurally the reader doesn't understand the full scope of how and why these two rub each other the wrong way until quite a ways through the book, which ends up making some of Holden's earlier problems with Miller feel a little over-the-top to me. When they work, though, they're great- one of the big advantages of Miller not being Holden's friend is that he's the character who most consistently gets to say (or think) "...kid, are you a loving idiot or something? Why the hell would you do <X>?"
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Apr 11, 2020 11:27
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Incidentally 1,500 words is the shortest you generally want a chapter in a tradpub novel, and 3,000 words is about the longest. It's not a hard rule but it's one a lot of structural editors swear by since that's the length that generally feels right to most readers which in turn increases engagement and makes the whole thing easier to parse. Sometimes you can see the seams where an editor had to grab a crowbar and stretch or crunch something to fit, but in the Expanse's case it feels to me like both authors are pretty good at writing to form. I've heard LW described as "The most TV-ready scifi novel ever written," and I'd agree- it's not a negative thing by any means, but the first four books I've read all show a lot more polish and greater business awareness than you expect from a lot of new fiction authors.
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Apr 15, 2020 11:26
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Khizan posted:Daniel Abraham already had a published four book series under his belt when he wrote the Expanse books and Franck, while not a published author, was GRRM's personal assistant while the GoT HBO series was being developed. I'm not really that surprised that it came out all but Netflix-ready. Yeah, I know GRRM and his publishing buddies gave them an absolute crapton of C&C and advice when they were getting the first two books ready for publication and I was always curious if this was their first idea for the collaboration or if they chewed through a few before settling on something. Because yeah, holy crap- I've really enjoyed the ones I've read, but everything absolutely screams Made For TV: the Novel. (Also props on them for threading the needle between good sellout and bad sellout, because holy cripes there's a lot of generic fantasy/scifi that dies on the vine.)
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Apr 17, 2020 06:29
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Milky gets serious points for his excellent writeup of 31, because I think the sum total of the notes I contributed were "Gunshoots in a space station, meh." That's the weird thing with these books- their action scenes are really, really serviceable, and if any point in LW deserved an awesome extended action scene it's the Eros dustup, but I always struggle to stay engaged. Shoreh Aghdashloo is an absolute treat. I'm fairly sure I started watching season 1 at the same time I was reading Caliban's War, and enjoyed Avasarala about a million times more after I started picturing book her with Aghdashloo's delivery and mannerisms. Now that we're talking belter shrugs though, Havelock might've actually worked great as an exposition pet early on- have Holden pay attention to who gesticulated a lot with their hands in chapter one, then in two Miller can shrug, and Havelock can go "Why do all the belters do the hand thing? I'll bet you don't have two and a half paragraphs of interesting exposition about belter culture prepared for just this occasion." (Spoiler: Miller always has exposition prepared.)
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Apr 17, 2020 11:43
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I suspect that Holden is the captain because his player in the original pbp game was the party face- big, dumb, well-intentioned but excessively idealistic chaotic good dude with a high charisma stat. That sort of overly simple setup works great in a tabletop setting because it gives other players an obvious thing to work off of and build around, but it doesn't work so swell in a novel. If I recall correctly in the show Naomi was in command- after his first stunt with the irresponsible broadcast Alex and Amos basically told Holden that Naomi in charge now, which lasted until... Eros, I think, when Holden just kinda-sorta became captain? I forget if there was an obvious reason for the switch. I honestly think that the story works much, much better with Naomi in charge. Holden's kind of an idiot, and he loves doing stupid things, and I think he has much more interesting directions to grow in if the dynamic is "We're a family and you take care of family, even when your brother keeps doing stupid poo poo that inconveniences the rest of us." But what we get is this weird compromise where in every single book the crew of the Roci go "You're the leader Holden, you're the one who keeps us together and takes care of us," Holden immediately charges in a stupid and dangerous direction, and his crew promptly set about desperately running damage control and trying to get him out of his own way.
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Apr 23, 2020 15:02
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Probably my favorite early book/show change was when TV Holden did his first Big, Dumb Broadcast it wasn't a dude standing there talking for 5 minutes, it was a wild-eyed space trucker screaming into his webcam like a crazy person while the entire rest of the crew dragged him away because wtf, Holden.
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Apr 23, 2020 19:49
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Something really weird about the Expanse books is that they're more towards the popcorn thriller end of the spectrum than deep, thoughtfully commentaries on anything, but they're also way more anchored in talking and thinking than action, and it's in the slow sections that they tend to shine the brightest. So, like, on one hand it makes sense for bad guys to be evil corporate sociopath men- hell, I know if I saw an army of Don Draper clones wearing stormtrooper armor I'd run the heck away. But at the same time, so much of the ambiance and general flow of the novels is built around contemplation and discussion that I keep wishing they were given more interesting antagonists to think and talk about. At least for me, it's enough of a problem that the shallow antagonists are maybe the one explicitly noticeable, bordering on bad speedbump that I hit every book. (Abaddon's Gate was probably the worst for me, I found the crazy evil captain man an utterly uninteresting antagonist.) This is getting into straight-up fanfiction territory, but I almost wish that they'd gone one step more abstract, and made the inescapable compromises that come with high office the real antagonist. Like, Avasarala was great in Caliban's War, the story very effectively sold her as a well-intentioned politician who wasn't above doing awful poo poo when she felt it was necessary... so how cool would it have been for her to play an antagonistic role in Abaddon's Gate, not because she changed but simply because she and Holden were on opposite sides of that particular problem? Between Earth, Mars, and the Belt, you could pretty much cycle through all of the major political leaders across several books, and it'd be an interesting foil to see the idealistic and inflexible Holden coming to terms with the fact that even though he wanted to live in a black & white world, his definitions were built a lot more strongly around who opposed him in particular than on any overarching ethical or moral framework. I dunno, I could see that getting tired and exhausting over time, but I think it'd be pretty neat.
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Apr 29, 2020 00:58
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It's interesting how well Miller and Holden work together in a scene- as far as I know the meat of both of their stories was written independently, since Holden was part of the pbp party and by all accounts Miller never actually met up with the rest of the group- I think all of Abraham's stuff was one-on-one with Franck and never left Ceres Station. I wonder how much of their chemistry was a happy accident, and how much was found in the edit.
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May 2, 2020 11:48
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Then again, even on my first read through, I'm pretty sure I found all the Holden chapters past this point to be thoroughly uninteresting. Let's see if that holds up! We'll get to this when we get to it, but one of my comments on an upcoming Holden chapter is basically "This should've been a Holden paragraph between two Miller scenes, not an entire chapter.
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May 13, 2020 01:16
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Something that's really standing out to me upon re-reading LW is how little setup Eros being a weird quasi-sentient alien AI thing gets. It's not necessarily bad, but it doesn't feel like the moment really builds on anything that's come before it. It makes for a great "Oh poo poo!" beat, but after that it was a bit of a shrug for me- "So the station's alive and can teleport? Okay." I wish we'd gotten more and better integration of the protomolecule stuff, so bits like this could land harder and feel like a finishing blow to the arc instead of just an interesting twist. I can't remember if I wrote it in the comments but I thought this is especially an issue in Miller's next chapter (I think), where he wanders through Eros making random guesses about how the protomolecule works and what's going on, and ends up being, like, 95% correct.
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May 13, 2020 13:26
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I figure people in the Expanse might just be better at numbers and such as a consequence of their work, especially if they're engineers or engineer-adjacent. But, I mean, you'd probably also have really powerful computers to do it, too, but the setting generally keeps any kind of AI in the background. I read something interesting the other day- apparently if you hold up a whole lot of careers next to each other, having a college degree actually massively reduces the amount of math you do. If you're in certain specialized careers like engineering or scientific research it's different, but the vast majority of the time fancy white collar guys are gonna be monkeying around in giant excel spreadsheets. But skilled tradesmen have to do tons of algebra and trigonometry, and there's generally just a heck of a lot more using mathematics to abstract and solve a rational problem without a pre-existing framework to guide you. In a lot of ways Amos reminds me of an underwater welder: technically yeah, he's a big, burly hunk of man meat who acts and speaks in a rough fashion, but he's also gotta calculate gas mixtures in his suit on the fly, fix plumbing and electrical systems with hilariously low margins of error, and do a ton of deceptively tough Math Crap. Omi no Kami fucked around with this message at 15:16 on May 18, 2020 |
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May 18, 2020 15:14
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Since we're between books, this is as good a time as any to solicit other people's opinions on something I've thought about a lot: how do you guys feel about Holden and the Rocinante crew as recurring protagonists? Because I'm really split- I like them as characters, and I have fun every time they show up in the books, but I honestly feel like they could be removed from every single book without much trouble. Leviathan Wakes is very explicitly Miller's story, and I think the upcoming Caliban's War has it even worse: it's pretty much all Bobbie and Prax's story, with Avasarala providing a critical supporting role to fill in the gaps. So yeah- this is a weird take when you consider that I actually like Holden and company but it kinda feels like they're in this universe because they're the PCs, and I wonder what the series would've been like if instead of formal main characters, it was just one long line of "Major space politics, as seen by random blue collar space workers."
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May 28, 2020 15:52
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In a lot of ways the Expanse series feels to me like the authors thought they were writing schlock action, but wrote really interesting slow-burn conversations instead. Like we already saw in Leviathan Wakes the story is at its best when people are talking or thinking, and (usually) at its worst during the action scenes, but it's still plotted and paced like a popcorn action thingie. So you end up with this really weird hybrid where (at least for me) you tolerate the action and stay for the conversations and background stuff. If you're at all on the fence I'd recommend giving Caliban's War a try- it's probably my favorite of the first four, and (if I remember correctly) it's much less Holden-centric, and a lot more "Three really interesting characters do things, Holden was there too." That having been said it's very definitely a book by the same guys who wrote LW, and in my writeups for the prologue and first chapter I'm already finding correlates to patterns we already discussed in LW. So I dunno! I think CW is the best-executed of the bunch, but there's definitely less space opera, and more like what you'd get if Michael Bay wrote All The President's Men.
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May 31, 2020 00:55
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Spacewoman told me about Corey's predilection for "large Polynesian women" before I started the book and it was impossible to unsee. Amos' time on earth is such a radtastic bit of character detail that I'm honestly kinda miffed it took so long for us to get it- it makes the character so much more interesting than the Greasy McCrimer guy he presents himself as in the first 3-4.
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Jun 10, 2020 11:40
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I assumed the giant mirrors were cheaper because the cost of making and positioning the mirrors was lower than the electricity bill you'd run up lighting industrial-sized greenhouse domes, but I suppose a civilization that can build giant farming operations on Ganymede could conceivably have a cheap, plentiful way to generate electricity.
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Jun 11, 2020 04:03
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I for one am super-psyched to read and talk about imaginary space politics!
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Nov 15, 2020 23:39
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One big missed opportunity with this chapter was to more explicitly acknowledge something that the book gradually builds into the cracks (spoilered because I can't remember where in CW this becomes explicit): Avasarala is pretty much the de-facto head of state, using a dinky cabinet position to hide from time-wasting nonsense while she puppeteers a shitload of plots all over the government. I believe it'll become a point later on when Nguyen still thinks she's a stubborn holdout while literally everyone else on the committee knows that he's poking the bear, and I think this chapter would've been a better time to set that up. Show the (comparatively) younger, more inexperienced top brass try to push his weight around, express surprise when the tired old lady pushes back, and be caught off-guard when, after the meeting, a mentor figure corners him and frantically whispers "What the gently caress are you doing?? Do you want to get us all fired or worse?"
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Nov 19, 2020 19:27
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My guess is that the TV show cut the boarding sequence because they thought it wouldn't play well on film- both it and the terrible disguise are fun bits that primarily work because we see them from inside Holden's head with his thoughts, and I'm betting it wouldn't work nearly as well if we were watching actors pretend to be dudes pretending to be other dudes, who were super-nervous and/or wearing a terrible glue-on beard.
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Nov 23, 2020 12:43
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Ultimately, though, there's just not much to say about the chapter. I'd honestly blocked it out of my memory and thought Prax's next chapter happened now. No joke, I read this writeup shortly after writing my comments for Prax's next chapter, and thought you were talking about the thing I'd just read. I hadn't thought about it, but yeah- those two could really easily combine.
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Nov 26, 2020 20:31
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Anyway, Martens comes by. They talk a bit, about how Thorrson is a naval spook and isn't a grunt like she is. So, Martens wonders, how messed up is Bobbie that even Thorsson notices it? Hmm that's a good point... when I read it, I think I was picturing Thorrson as basically a glorified office worker: less silenced pistols and poisoned martinis, and more dude who reads tons of reports and goes "Whoops, Earth's wheat prices dropped by 0.2% this quarter, that must mean the unidentified base they built on the far side of the moon is an orbital farm." So when Martens talks about Thorrson recognizing Bobbie's symptoms, I thought he was basically going "Yo- nobody knows what being in combat arms is like unless they've been there- we've all got scars, and we recognize those scars in others. How screwed up do you have to be for someone without those experiences to recognize your trauma?"
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Dec 1, 2020 00:45
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I think if I had free reign to edit CW I would've probably cut the Holden viewpoints entirely and run alternating Prax/Bobbie chapters with an Avasarala chapter starting and ending each act and framing the high-level politics that drive the boots on the ground stuff. I think that Prax, in particular, suffers because of the size of the cast- Holden and his crew are fun, and Prax is fun, but together the two often feel redundant and vaguely clunky.
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Dec 9, 2020 13:30
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I also like how Amos was like "We proooobably shouldn't take Prax, because he'll totally run ahead and gently caress everything up," then they took Prax, and he immediately ran ahead and hosed everything up.
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Dec 23, 2020 05:58
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Oh hey, stupid thought that just occurred to me reading your writeup: this is a little hollywood, but what if instead of whatever the gently caress her new job was, Bobbie was hired explicitly to extract Prax and/or Holden? Like, Avasarala goes "poo poo's hosed and I don't wanna get stuck with the bill- Bobbie, how would you like to get paid to fly to Ganymede with some muscle and kidnap a dude off the books?" Then Bobbie can arrive, realize it's about the protomolecule, team up with Holden, and all three governments can start calling their respective Holden-adjacent operatives and going "What the gently caress is going on over there??"
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Jan 4, 2021 16:09
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Hmm, this is a lot less feasible than even my original flawed idea, but I'm wondering if there would've been some way to put the UN stuff on Ganymede instead of Earth. It would require removing Avasarala and a lot of the military brass, since senior leadership wouldn't get anywhere near that mess, but I could see Bobbie being part of, say, a multi-planetary crisis response task force that was sent to figure out what the heck is going on. Either way I think the core point we're all hammering at is inertia: it simply takes too long to get the not-Holden pieces into position, and that's something that I think could've been resolved with some story wrangling early in the writing process.
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Jan 5, 2021 01:24
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The Expanse has always been a bit inconsistent when it gets into military jargon... I remember Holden keeps calling the ship's PA system the "1MC channel," which sounds fine until you realize that 1MC stands for "one main circuit," and calling something a "circuit channel" is redundant and is also redundant. That's a good catch with the frigate/corvette stuff though- I completely missed that, I'm so used to sci-fi getting its naval parlance twisted around that I don't think I even read it anymore... my eyes just kinda glaze over every time we hit technobabble.
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Jan 15, 2021 08:17
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Venus is a weird one- I remember being really interested in what was up with it in the epilogue of Leviathan Wakes, but nearly every time it comes up in CW my eyes glaze over and I start looking for sentences that lead us back to Ganymede. This just occurred to me, but there's a really easy way to improve both the Venus stuff and Avasarala in general: invoke the economics of space war and attrition. Neither Earth nor Mars can really afford a war (which I think comes up here and there throughout the books?), and they definitely can't afford two wars, so there's this constant game of chicken with both sides probing Venus for intel and tech goodies, but neither one wanting to poke the bear and potentially be forced to commit resources to a fight on two fronts. Move Avasarala to whatever her intentionally unimportant-seeming job is into something specifically tied into finance and logistics, and suddenly she's basically the chairwoman of the war production board, sitting unappreciated in a back room with her hand on hundreds of critical supply lines. She cares about Ganymede because food (and shooting war), she cares about Venus because aliens (and shooting war), and Bobbie basically starts the book as a hot-blooded ground pounder spoiling for a fight, immediately meets an enemy she can't kill, then her arc involves learning that soft words in the right ear can kill someone way, way dead-er than a giant mecha suit. Maybe that's just fanfiction that only appeals to me personally, but it feels like a much more natural way to tie everything together than what we end up getting.
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Jan 21, 2021 07:50
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It feels to me like CW has the exact same structural problem as LW did with Holden and Miller, but unlike LW the Bobbie/Avasarala story just isn't interesting enough to stand on its own. It's interesting how long it takes them to step away from this, given what a big structural issue it is. I vaguely recall the third and fourth books fairly exploding with viewpoint characters relative to the first two, but I'm also pretty sure that, like, 90% of them were just used to inform the Holden-centric story, which worked better. (Spoilers for Abaddon's Gate) the one specific plotline I remember not being wired into Holden's stuff was the mutiny poo poo in AG, and that might be tied with the revenge stuff in 4 as my least-favorite plot element in the series. I haven't caught up on the show, but it seems like the TV writers figured that out too- from what I recall Holden's plot is the most consistently unadulterated, and entire swathes of Avarsala/Bobbie/later book characters get completely remixed to slot more cleanly into the A-plot instead of trying to juggle 2-3 major storylines at any given time.
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Jan 23, 2021 01:58
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Soren's betrayal felt so stupid and out-of-nowhere that I legit assumed he was on the level and wrote the backchanneling comment even though I've read the book before. It completely slipped my mind that Soren was a weirdo backstabby guy, and nothing about the way he tries to pull this off convinced me otherwise. Like, this comes off like Soren's planting evidence on Bobbie's desk while she watches, then turning to a cop who was standing there and also saw him plant it and going "Officer, I think she has contraband death sticks in her drawer." That's how obvious and poorly-thought out it was. What's especially weird about this is that, like, Soren should be able to get away with this- Bobbie's smart and talented, but she's spent her whole career as an infantry officer. This is, what, her third or fourth day working in an office? A guy who's been a high-level political staffer for years should have this much trouble fooling Bobbie her first week on the job. It also occurs to me, his actually getting away with it would've been way more interesting. Have Bobbie see some suspicious stuff here and there, but not enough to put things together until he vanishes. Then she and Avasarala can work together to unravel his plot, with her providing boots on the ground and Avasarala mentoring her in the politics and espionage game.
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Feb 3, 2021 10:54
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Yeah, honestly, when you raised that point I broke from my desire to not read ahead and skipped to the next Avasarala chapter because, while I remembered Soren was a spy and gets found out, I'd completely forgotten how it'd happened and had invented something different in my head. The antagonists are all comfortably stupid and overconfident, I guess. That chapter took me completely off-guard, because yeah- I didn't remember exactly what happened, but I had zero memory of Soren being a bad guy, probably because he basically disappears right after this plotline is resolved. I wonder if it wasn't a bit of a structural decision, where they realized that they just didn't have anything for him to do or ideas of where to take him? Because up to this point, he might as well have been a bunch of faceless, nameless staffers milling around Avasarala's office helping her out.
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Feb 3, 2021 13:26
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Yeah, it's kind of a bummer of a resolution to that whole arc, too. If this is how it's going to wrap up we could've almost skipped all of the Bobbie/Avasarala chapters up to this point. Bobbie isn't an appreciably different person from who she was when she woke up in the medical bay, and while some of the backchannel politics stuff is interesting, none of it feels vital (or even relevant) to the core plot on Ganymede.
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Feb 17, 2021 12:21
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