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0765376474
| 9780765376473
| 0765376474
| 4.21
| 207,991
| Feb 23, 2016
| Feb 23, 2016
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liked it
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This book achieves something remarkable: it has no plot but remains entertaining nonetheless! I'd say that makes it a fitting sequel to the first book. This book achieves something remarkable: it has no plot but remains entertaining nonetheless! I'd say that makes it a fitting sequel to the first book. A Darker Shade of Magic likewise prioritized a smooth ride above all other considerations. It really is impressive just how silky, shiny smooth the reading experience of this series is. Like skipping rocks across the silver mirror of a placid, peaceful mountain lake. But seriously, there's no plot. Here's what happens: Kell, our male protagonist, struggles to acclimate himself to his new soul-linked relationship with his brother. Lila sails the high seas and learns magic. And then they're drawn together to a magical tournament, a sort of Tri-wizard Tournament / Olympics, in which they both compete. That right there is 95% of the book. What are the stakes? What are the characters' desires and what conflict is generated by the obstacles to those desires? I... really, I don't know. The other 5%, some stuff involving White London, serves as a continuance of the series' plot and leads in to book three, but that is not this book's plot. Weirdly enough, I found this plot-less aspect actually kind of refreshing. It was nice to simply exist in a fantasy world, without feeling the pressure of conflict and threat. Like a vacation! We got to see outside of London for a bit, which was nice. We got to visit a fancy magical market on some island whose name I can't remember. It had a magical mirror that almost took Lila's soul, an experience I can relate to. We met the other nations of the Big Viking People and the People With Gems on their Faces. So all that was nice. That said, refreshing as it was, the lack of a plot made the story not very compelling. Or perhaps my lack of investment in the story arose from some issues I had with the female protagonist, Lila. She's an anti-heroine, sure, and I'm tempted to say, there's a very fine line between anti-heroine and villain. But honestly? There really isn't - there's a large, obvious line. While it may be challenging to formally, philosophically define "good" and "evil", and there exist edge cases that are hard to classify, for the most it's pretty easy to say "that was good" or "that was evil." Specifically, early on in this book, Lila robs some random sailor. When that sailor confronts her about this theft, she murders him. To put that in perspective, imagine you were at a bar ordering drinks when someone bumps into you. You quickly notice your wallet is missing and follow the thief outside. Angry, you threaten the thief: Hand over my wallet - or else! In response, the thief pulls a gun and shoots you dead. In other words, murder, cold-blooded at that. And what are the consequences of Lila's crime? Nothing. Actually, they're positive for Lila. That's how she gets on her first boat. And does she show any remorse? Nope. Literally one or two lines. Now I'm pretty desensitized to violence, but I'm not so inured that I can no longer distinguish between right and wrong. So all throughout this book, as Lila is, say, fretting over wearing a dress to look good for Kell, I was sitting there going, Uhhhhh.... Yeah you should be in prison right now. As you might imagine, that made it a little hard to root for her. As another issue, this book continues the trend from the first where much of the conflict stems - in fine horror/zombie film fashion, what sci-fi luminary Ted Chiang calls "an idiot plot" - largely from characters making stupid decisions. In particular, (view spoiler)[Kell's decision at the end to go to White London was so hilariously stupid. Like lol what?!!? Oh hey, yeah sure, I'll willingly go to this place where literally every single person we meet has been a homocidal maniac. What could POSSIBLY go wrong? (hide spoiler)] Still, I do want to emphasize that these issues aside, the book remains a smooth read. So if you liked the first book and want more of the same, you'll find it here. But if you disliked the first book - perhaps because of its simplicity - you'll find that this one also is more of the same. Also, as one final note, the positive (or, at least, non-negative) tone this book takes when discussing how Rhys CUTS INTO HIMSELF to show dedication & get Kell's attention? Bizarre. ...more |
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1
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not set
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May 23, 2019
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May 23, 2019
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Hardcover
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0765376458
| 9780765376459
| 0765376458
| 4.05
| 381,837
| Feb 24, 2015
| Feb 24, 2015
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liked it
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Imagine you’re at an antique store specializing in old furniture. The merchant shows you table after table, all quite different, yet all equally marre
Imagine you’re at an antique store specializing in old furniture. The merchant shows you table after table, all quite different, yet all equally marred in some way: scratches, dents, abrasions, warps, miscolorations -- scars of their ancient lives. And that’s how the merchant sells them too. “These imperfections,” he might say, “grant it character, a unique flavor missing from the smooth, shiny modern mass productions.” Well, this book is the exact opposite of those tables. It’s smooth and shiny and new. There’s nothing wrong with it, but there’s nothing all that great about it either. Take the characters, for example. They’re as much types and tropes as they are unique individuals: Kell, the male protagonist, is a powerful wizard, one of only a few Antari, magicians capable of using blood magic (which sounds cooler than it is - in practice, he cuts himself to do it but then it just heals soon after) to travel between worlds. He’s rather gruff, stoic, not very forthcoming about his inner emotions. Oh and he’s a prince - and this annoys him because he’s an adopted prince, rather than by blood. *shrug* He struck me as a YA, magical version of Mr. Darcy, not quite to the same degree as Uprooted’s Sarkan, but very much evocative of that type. Delilah Bard, the female protagonist, is a plucky anti-heroine. A thief, with a heart of gold, who early on gets into trouble when she decides to help out a poor beggar who gets robbed. And all the while claiming she’s amoral. Basically Han Solo, with a touch of tsundere. Rhys, Kell’s adopted brother, is everything Kell is not. Charming, personable, social - and largely without magic. Not surprisingly, that means he is totally jealous of his brother’s power. And if that suggests to you a plot point, yes. Holland, Kell’s magical counterpart from another dimension, is all cruel competence, a foil to Kell’s more earnest, bumbling ways. Etc, etc. Now if there’s one thing I’d give props to, it’s the premise. There are four parallel worlds: Grey London (our and Delilah’s non-magical world), Red London (Kell’s magic-dense utopia), White London (Holland’s magic-starved dystopia), and Black London (a destroyed world that has been sealed off). That sets up some potential for political dynamics as well as some interesting exploration of cultural evolution. How does the abundant and easy access to a powerful energy alter that culture? Or, in the case of White London, how does the LOSS of an abundant energy source alter that culture? Unfortunately, the potential goes largely unrealized. For starters, we never leave London. We never see outside the city. You might think then that we’d get a lot of city culture, but we don’t. It’s just not the focus of the book, which, for me at least, left the world feeling less like a world and more like a painted stage background. What it boils down to is that this series wants to be smooth, shiny, and simple and succeeds perfectly at it. Everything about it is designed to provide as smooth a reading experience as possible. No real moral debates, no idiosyncratic or subversive characters, no surprising prose, no digressions to expand on culture. Which I don’t think makes it a bad book, but it is a book designed to offer a very specific reading experience and you should know what you’re signing up for. Because it’s so built on tropes, it’s not for someone deeply experienced in the fantasy genre. Because it’s so simple, it’s not for someone who craves complexity. Now I'm very emphatically NOT suggesting enjoyment of the book makes you simple, no more than enjoying a Big Mac or a Bud Light makes you simple. It’s just that, if you’ve grown accustomed to the richer, more complex flavors of other beers or non fast-food cuisine, it can be challenging to appreciate simpler fare. In short, A Darker Shade of Magic is an urban fantasy, with YA and romance genre flavorings. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, then this book/series would be an easy recommend. But if you, like me, tend to skew towards hard sci-fi (or soft sci-fi for that matter) or complex tomes of epic fantasy or - God-forbid - non-fiction works of philosophy or psychology, then the reading of this book will still be entertaining - it’s smooth and shiny, remember - but will ultimately leave you feeling unfulfilled. Since I earlier referenced Mr. Darcy, it's fitting I end by quoting Charlotte Bronte on Jane Austen, when she wrote, “[Austen] ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound.” For better or worse, that is exactly how I would describe my experience of reading A Darker Shade of Magic. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 23, 2019
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May 23, 2019
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Hardcover
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0765377101
| 9780765377104
| 0765377101
| 4.42
| 132,553
| Nov 2010
| Sep 20, 2016
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it was amazing
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>>load ThreeBodProbTxtAdv.brv Loading… 25%… 50%… 75%… 100% Seen from the bridge of your ship, the star mall glows like a miniature star. The light from >>load ThreeBodProbTxtAdv.brv Loading… 25%… 50%… 75%… 100% Seen from the bridge of your ship, the star mall glows like a miniature star. The light from its many neon adverts pierces the black void with a kaleidoscope of color. The largest sign is a red-limned silhouette of Rodin’s sculpture, The Thinker, wearing a viking helm. The strangest is a skeleton in heels gyrating its bony hips and offering lascivious winks. >>dock star mall You follow the instructions of a bored traffic controller speaking heavily Chinese-accented English. After a few moments, you’re in the mall’s docks. They’re empty except for large cargo containers, though the dim light obscures their markings. A bright light illuminates an elevator at the end of the docking spindle. >>move elevator You ride the elevator down to the main concourse, and the doors open onto a long, narrow lane crowded with shops on either side. The shaded lights and lack of people suggest the mall is currently in its night cycle. >>look shops On the left, you see a mechanic’s shop; a fuel/gas exchange; and three dried food-stuffs vendors, each with a sign written in a different language. On the right, you see again the sexy skeleton in heels, advertising a VR arcade; a tea shop whose name is written in old Norse Runes; a local Prospector office; and a blaster shop featuring several prominent models. >>move tea shop Upon entering the tea shop, a man forged from threadbare light appears before you. He has a serious, yet youthful face. The hologram does not surprise you. A star mall this far from Jupiter could not afford the wages of flesh labor. The man speaks, “Welcome to the Philosophozerker Viking tea shop. You look like a customer who appreciates only the very best teas. Is that so? Of course it is.” He beckons. “Come this way.” As the hologram man leads you into the depths of the teashop, he flickers in and out of existence each time a light projector in the ceiling clicks off and another one clicks on. The shop itself is full to bursting with tall cabinets divided into innumerable small wooden boxes labeled with teas of all type and flavor: an aged Arrakis pu er; several of the Thorn-Cha cultivar; the famed Ubikuro, of the PKD plantation; and a modified-carbon tea, to name just a few. Their herbaceous, smoky scents leak out to form an aromatic gestalt, and for the briefest of moments, you have the wildest idea that each individual scent is like a single neuron of some larger, grander cosmic tea monster. After passing several aisles, the hologram man comes to a halt before a small display shelf featuring three tins. “These,” he says, “are our three latest teas, exported from the Chinese station by Liu & Martinsen shipping company. We call them the diqiu wangshi cha: Memories of Earth Tea, in celebration of our ancestral home.” He gestures to the first tin, labelled san ti cha, the three body tea. “Have you had a Chinese tea?” he asks. “Not many have, in this sector. The flavor profile differs from those produced here in the Western Jovial plantations. Some tasters struggle to acclimate, but to them, I would say, To close one’s heart to novelty is to keep a flower in the shade.” His semi-transparent grin is not dissimilar to that of the Cheshire cat. He continues, “Like many Chinese teas, this award winning tea does not concern itself with the individual character. It does not focus on any one characteristic, not the beauty of its leaves nor its infused soup, not the aroma, nor the taste, nor the body. Rather it is concerned with the holistic experience, what some call the communal cha. Thus, to drink of this tea is to drink of Chinese culture itself.” “Would you care to try some?” he asks. >>speak “no” You say, “No.” “A shame,” says the hologram. “But could be you have already sampled it? Then perhaps I can interest you in the second tea of this set?” He gestures to the second tin. “We call it the senglin de hongcha, red tea of the forest.” He chuckles as if he has made a joke. “Take a sniff, if you will.” >>smell second tin You lean in and inhale the aroma. Its rich earthy tones bloom into a more complex bittersweetness, that of dark chocolate mixed with apricot. “Distinctive, no?” says the hologram. “For this tea, the growers attempted to correct the criticisms of their first tea by giving it a stronger, more distinctive character. In addition, each bud was hand-picked by blind monks of the Wallfacer Sect. It is said that their blindness has granted them a gentleness and sensitivity that allow them to harvest only the best buds while causing the least damage in the process.” “That said,” he continues, “this is my least favorite of the three. The taste has a strong, complex finish, fulfilling the promise of its rich aromatics. But it has a very bland opening. Perhaps this honesty makes me a bad salesman.” He shrugs unapologetically. “But that is only because I am so enamoured of this third tea!” He snaps his fingers. After a minute pause, a little box-shaped robot rolls up the aisle. It holds a small tray on which rests a bowl of liquid. The hologram gestures to it. “Have a taste.” >>look robot The robot’s tray holds a beautiful bowl; its glazed enameling is mostly white, peppered by black star-bursts, an effect like that of a color-inverted field of stars. The tea infusion is a golden-green reminiscent of the sun reflected over a mossy garden pool. >>drink tea You reach to the robot, grasp the bowl, and take a sip-- ...moment the Ring entered three-dimensional space, the universe seemed to be cut in half. The cut surface glowed with a blinding light, as though a star had been pulled into a line in an instant. From the spaceship it was impossible to see the end points, but it was if God had held a T-square against the plan for the universe and sketched a line straight across from left to... The hologram’s eyes light up. “Aha, I can see it in your face! There is a depth to this tea, is there not? We call it the singular umami. Compared to the limitation of our language in describing the tea, the scope is infinite. The experience transcends description.” He waits for you to finish drinking the sample. When the bowl is empty, the little robot raises its tray. >>set bowl robot You return the empty tea bowl to the robot, which attempts to execute a three point turn in the narrow lane between shelves. However, whether because of the narrowness or its aging hardware, the robot’s three point turn ends up being a fifty point turn. You watch, bemused, for the several minutes it takes to finally complete the turn and return back into the bowels of the tea shop. The hologram clears his throat. “My apologies. I would have helped but…” He raises his hands in a helpless gesture, revealing their transparent, incorporeal nature. “But back to the tea. Are you aware of their legend? No? Then I shall enlighten you.” He takes up a pose like that of a professor lecturing his students, or a pastor delivering a sermon, and begins, “All three teas are made from the Cixin Liu cultivar, a well-respected variant amongst Chinese growers and tea drinkers. Indeed, legend tells how the first Cixin Liu plant arose: during the Three Kingdom Warring Era, a nameless monk travelled the land, going from village to village, on a quest to ease the suffering of the people. Yet wherever he went, he found that his goodness was but a drop in a deluge of evil. Survivors of rape and massacre trod from one ruined village to another; warlords fought each other, killing wantonly and seemingly without gain or purpose; scholars and clergy far removed from society debated increasingly esoteric theory; all while merchants peddled rice at extravagant prices, deaf to the cries of the starving. At one such market, at the base of the Huang Shan mountain, the monk demanded the merchant feed the famished peasants around him. The merchant laughed and had his guards strike the monk down for daring to demand anything. This cruel act was too great even for the starving peasants to stomach, and they swarmed the merchant and his guards, killing them and taking the rice for themselves. Soon after, the first Cixin Liu tea plants sprouted from where the monk’s blood had soaked into the ground. It is said that this is the source of the cultivar’s bitterness: it is the monk’s bitterness towards humanity.” The hologram pauses after finishing his story, and his gaze takes on a faraway quality, as if he is seeing beyond the material veil. Abruptly, his gaze returns to yours. “Ah, a sad story, yes? But there is some light in it, for it suggests new life can arise even from the blackest darkness. Indeed this tea demonstrates that very idea.” “The bitterness cannot be denied,” he says. “From the first sip to the last echoes of the aftertaste, the tea expresses bitterness. It is much as the legend says: this tea knows a bitterness towards humanity. When you sip of this tea, you are reminded of the many foibles of humanity. Humanity is delusional, easily persuaded by others and itself. It is concerned, first and foremost, with its comfort, both material and mental. And humanity is powerless against its own nature. Even knowing its own psychology, even for its own benefit and longevity, it rarely manages to evade its own biases. So, yes, this tea knows bitterness.” “And yet!” he grins and raises a fist. “And yet! the sample was not overwhelmingly bitter, was it? That raw character is balanced by the spice of wonder. These three teas may all be of the same cultivar, yet it is only this last one that achieves the apotheosis of its potential. This is because its growers used the very latest techniques and technology to bring out new depths.” He opens his arms to the world around him. “I am but a three dimensional creature, and you are but four. These are the bars of our prison. But we would be quite foolish to equate our prison with the universe. Other ideas, other lands, even other dimensions exist outside our limited perspective. So it is with this tea. Its roots have undergone a technique known as inflationary-dimensional-expansion. While you possess only three extended dimensions of space and one extended dimension of time, the plant used to make this tea possesses four extended dimensions of space and two extended dimensions of time. This second temporal dimension, in particular, allows the growers incredible powers of chronohorticulture. They are able to rotate the direction of the plant’s entropy, so that the plant’s first time dimension coordinates - that is, our temporal dimension - can be locked at the most perfect moment, to maintain a freshness as if it were harvested and processed mere moments ago." Unfamiliar with chronohorticulture, you are not entirely sure what the hologram is talking about, but his excitement is nonetheless infectious as he continues, almost breathless, “That is not all chronohorticulture allows either! You are aware of the God-Photon hypothesis? No? Then I shall explain: Because photons travel at the speed of light, relativity’s time dilation and length contraction tell us photons must therefore possess zero dimensions of both space and time. But there’s a catch: it’s zero of OUR dimensions of space and time. There are some who believe that photons do possess PARALLEL dimensions of space and time. Indeed, these folk believe that photons represent the gaze and touch of an Eternal God, who exists beyond our space and time, and for whom our universe is but a simulated dream.” He leans in close, conspiratorial-like,“Well I have heard whispers that, when the chronohorticulturists begin rotating the plant’s temporal coordinates, strange ghosts of light appear around the plants. As if indeed photons do possess a reality wound up in an alternative temporal dimension! The farming angels, these ghosts are called, on account of how they interact with the plants, as if they’re tending them. That is why this third tea is called yongsheng shencha, the eternal life God tea, for it is touched by God himself.” He leans back, arms folded, clearly satisfied with his sales pitch. “Now how much would you like to purchase?” ---- >>load PatternTxtAdv.brv ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 03, 2019
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Apr 2019
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Mar 28, 2019
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Hardcover
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4.41
| 173,239
| May 2008
| Aug 11, 2015
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liked it
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Of the three books in this trilogy, this is my least favorite, and I give it a decent but not great rating of three stars. There’s a couple reasons fo
Of the three books in this trilogy, this is my least favorite, and I give it a decent but not great rating of three stars. There’s a couple reasons for that: *It has a slow start. The first chapter is told from the perspective of an ant for some reason. No doubt there’s some deeper metaphorical significance there - I mean, with ants, isn’t there always? The great poets of the insect kingdom! - but I found it rather pretentious and unnecessary. That characterizes the first hundred or so pages of the Dark Forest, which concerned itself with exploring how average people would view the events of the series. The graphic novel Watchmen did a similar thing - which I found equally boring and unnecessary. I share the opinion of Elmore Leonard when he advised writers to skip the boring parts. So the first bits of this book were a slog to get through. It was only when the author described protagonist Luo Ji’s obsessive relationship with a fictional woman he invented that I felt the book began to offer something interesting (albeit ludicrous) and worthy of reading. *The translation was not as good. The translator of books 1 & 3 is Ken Liu, an actual bonafide writer, with quite a few awards or nominations to his name. The translator of this book was Joel Martinsen, NOT a writer. You can tell the difference. Joel Martinsen took a far more literal approach, which resulted in some cases with idioms or cultural quirks that fell flat. *It explored fewer BIG ideas. Or I might say it was less wildly imaginative than the other two books, especially the third one, which I consider the best of the three. That said, it was still plenty imaginative. The book spans something like 200-300 years and showcases some rather drastic swings in the evolution of human society. Furthermore, the protagonist Luo Ji (and others) are large improvements, in terms of characterization, over the protagonist of the first book, whose name I don’t even remember. In fact, I’m not even sure whether that character even appears in this book. Good riddance, if so. All said, I enjoyed this book and, especially, the trilogy. It falls into the same category as my FAVORITE sci-fi book of all time: Diaspora by Greg Egan. Both of these are what I call “science mysteries” in that they’re using scientific ideas and thinking to explore the mystery of the universe. In this case, it’s not much of a spoiler to say Dark Forest is exploring the mystery of Fermi’s Paradox. You probably already know what that is. If not, here’s a very quick recap: The Milky Way is HUGE. The universe is even HUGER. Scope and probability suggest that there should be other life out there. But in the thousands of years human civilization has been a thing, we’ve never found any signs. Where the hell are all the aliens? This question is one of the greatest mysteries of all time, and many an evening, I’ve worked myself into an anxious frenzy pondering over its solution: Anxious because (A) I don’t want humanity to perish and (B) I also don’t want our galaxy to be empty. Both just seem… sad. A waste. This book actually takes a (relatively) optimistic view in that the galaxy is FULL of life, but they’re all just very silent. Personally, after witnessing how utterly glacial and nonsensical our response to climate change has been, I’ve come to hold a rather pessimistic view: All civilizations inevitably destroy themselves. This, combined with how incredibly hostile the Galaxy is (cosmic rays, black holes, supernovae, GRBs, meteors, rogue exoplanets, to name a few threats), suggests life is just incredibly rare and that rare intelligent life which does spring up kills itself. In other words, we are alone and we are doomed. Luckily, I’m no prophet. Some part of me holds out hope that I’m wrong. Certainly I continue to live under the assumption that I am. Anyway, returning to the book: If the exploration of such a mystery piques your interest and you liked The Three Body Problem, I would recommend continuing with the series, if just to reach the third book, the crown jewel of the Trilogy, the apotheosis of its ambitions. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 14, 2019
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Mar 14, 2019
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Hardcover
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4.08
| 392,818
| May 01, 2006
| Nov 11, 2014
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really liked it
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Before I write anything else, I must talk about the Hugos. This novel, The Three Body Problem, won best novel in 2015, at the height of the Rabid and
Before I write anything else, I must talk about the Hugos. This novel, The Three Body Problem, won best novel in 2015, at the height of the Rabid and Sad Puppy shenanigans. In fact, The Three Body Problem didn’t even make the original finalists list; it was a replacement for an author who requested his work be removed, to avoid association with the Puppy movements. Now the story of the Sad and Rabid Puppy movements is, to my mind, a tragedy, a woeful tale involving a Faustian bargain and corrupted good intentions. The two movements have become conflated, but they were quite different in the beginning. The Rabid Puppies name is not accidental. That movement was rooted in rabid alt-right conservatism. Which was and is and always will be garbage. The Sad Puppies movement, however, focused on the interesting question of what matters most in sci-fi and fantasy: the message or the adventure? The politics or the science? Skilled writing or diversity of perspective? Not that any of these are mutually exclusive, but it’s the rare gem that manages so many sparkling facets simultaneously. So, thought I, these are questions worth asking. However, in an omen of things to come, rabid extremists hijacked what might have been a meaningful conversation and turned it into an ideological, tribalist battle. Meh. Regardless, at the time this Puppy issue occurred, I’d already begun to have my own doubts about whether the Hugos truly represented the “best” sci-fi and fantasy. Back in 2012, I’d read Blackout by Connie Willis, the 2011 winner of Best Novel. It is one of the worst books I’ve ever read. Flabbergasted by its Hugo win, I did some research and discovered that Connie Willis is a super nice human being, deeply enmeshed in the sci-fi community, and had quite a lot of name recognition as a two-time Hugo winner already. Ah, I thought with some disappointment, so the Hugos are just another popularity contest. Which, to be fair, is exactly what they are designed to be. With that idea in my head, I read Ancillary Justice - which won the Hugo in 2014 and, in my opinion, deserved it. I then read the sequels Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, both of which were nominated, and both of which are terrible. I actually had to cut my one-star review of Ancillary Mercy by 70% because I went so far over Goodread’s character count. Insofar as it’s meaningful to describe a subjective experience as being objectively bad, Ancillary Mercy is an objectively bad book. This is no criticism of anyone who enjoyed it, but there's a giant gap, a critic's no man's land if you will, between subjective enjoyment and objective quality. Plot holes, abysmal characterization, minimal world-building, lack of tension, unrealistic depiction of humanity, small mindedness. Those are objective flaws, and Ancillary Justice's sequels has them all. Which, apparently, warranted Hugo nominations...? But again that is because the Hugos, as fan awards, do NOT denote objective quality, but subjective popularity. So that is the mindset with which I approached the Three-body Problem: optimism tempered by a great deal of caution. I mean, I bought the book so I hoped it would be good, but, as a non-conformist who severely dislikes tribalism and its attendant mechanisms (e.g. mere exposure effect or the fallacy of vox populi), I no longer put much stock in a Hugo award. A few hundred pages into Three-body Problem, I believed my fears were justified. I wrote: “I’m about halfway through and enjoying it. But nothing about this makes me think Hugo. Very basic science so far. Characters made out of cardboard. Glacial plotting. And the translation effect, if you will, gives the prose a stilted quality. Have the Hugo awards become less about storytelling and more about politics?” But very soon after I wrote that, I encountered back-to-back chapters that turned the book around. The big ideas started rolling in. But before I get into those ideas, I want to talk about the book as a story. Honestly, it’s not great. Starting off with some interesting Chinese history, involving the Cultural Revolution (and its devastating effects on scientists and other intellectuals), the book quickly proceeds into modern/near-future times. Here we are introduced to a shadow war, wherein some scientists are being targeted and murdered, or somehow forced to commit suicide. Connected with this conspiracy is a virtual reality game, called The Three Body Problem, about a group of aliens who live on a planet in a trinary system - that is, it has three stars. As you might imagine, this doesn’t exactly lend itself well to stable life. Giving much more would enter into spoiler territory, but it’s enough to say that this is a first contact story, and while the pacing was slow at times, I didn’t really have much issue with the actual plot. The problem is the characters. They’re simply not good. With the exception of one scientist, there’s no character arc or journey to speak of. The PoV character is almost a complete blank. He’s there to observe, and nothing more. So if you require excellent characters in your sci-fi, Three-Body Problem likely will not satisfy. That said, I *don’t* require excellent characters. I like them, I prefer my sci-fi to have them, but I appreciate that characterization is often sacrificed on the altar of science fiction's main concern: ideas. Unlike most other genres, which merely juggle character and plot, sci-fi isn’t sci-fi without some big ideas. As Ray Bradbury said, “science fiction is the fiction of ideas.” So while a sci-fi book can, in theory, do well at all three, the simple reality is that an author who spends a great deal of time studying philosophy and physics is not spending that time interacting with people. Or an author who spends his time writing poetry and honing his word craft is not spending that time studying AI, in order to better write about it. So the characterization, not great. But what about the ideas? Well, as I said, I didn’t find much of worth in the first half, but as the plot started to offer some revelations, I perked up and got interested. First, I want to talk about the actual mathematical three body problem, in particular about analytical vs numerical solutions. One of the major motivations in the virtual game, The Three Body Problem, is an attempt to solve the mathematical three body problem, which involves calculating the equations of motion for multiple bodies exerting a gravitational influence on each other. (And yeah the phrase 'three body problem' can be confusing. The math problem, the virtual reality game, and the actual book are all called The Three Body Problem). To appreciate the difficulty of this problem, imagine you’re driving on an empty highway and you see a car headed toward you, driving on the wrong side of the road! Well naturally you don’t want to collide, so you move to the side of the highway the oncoming driver isn’t on. A two body problem, not that hard. However suppose that in addition to a crazy driver coming at you, there’s also one travelling super fast, coming at you from behind! Well you don’t want to get hit by either one, so you try to dodge both. But they also don’t want to collide, so when you move aside, they see they’re headed straight toward each other and both move and now you’re back in the line of collision, so you move, but then they move, and OH MY GOD, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE. You see how adding a third body can complexify what was a rather simple affair? Where this becomes fascinating to me is that the three body problem doesn’t really have a (practically feasible) analytical solution: it has no specific, precise, 100% solvable solution. Unlike, say, the simple algebra equation x + 5 = 10, which can be solved ‘analytically.’ Instead, the three body problem must be solved ‘numerically’ via an algorithm (and probably a computer) to find an approximation, a close guess. And you might be thinking, well, so what? Well… the existence of physics problems which have no analytical solution - even in theory - has impressive metaphysical implications: Either (1) our mathematics is incomplete or broken in some way or (2) nature herself is non-deterministic. Or both, I suppose. While it might be tempting to say, obviously just #1... I wouldn't be so sure. And if you ponder Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, it seems that a 'complete' mathematics might well be impossible, which also has its own metaphysical ramifications. So this is an interesting topic to ponder. Three Body Problem doesn't delve into the gritty details, but it lurks at the edges, providing a nice subtle flavoring. The next big topic, which Three Body Problem certainly does explore in great depth, is humanity's hatred of itself. Misanthropy isn’t particularly new. Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived around 500 BC, was a famous misanthrope. He hated the common man because the common man didn’t seem to ever understand reality. But the notion that widespread misanthropy can have real consequences on human civilization IS new. With climate change a current existential threat, wide-spread misanthropy could mean the actual end of humanity. And what about AI? I sometimes jest that I would be quite willing to betray humanity to our future robot overlords. But honestly... it's no jest. If I am ever confronted with such a choice, I might well help our future silicon children destroy us, if I believe they will be better caretakers of humanity's virtues and values. Such is a core element of the Three-body Problem, both those who view aliens as a means to reform a failed humanity and the true misanthropes who view aliens as a means for destroying humanity altogether. As I wrote above, the existential threat of climate change demands we grapple with this question: At what cost is humanity worth saving? Right now, the cost willing to be paid is essentially nil. Apparently, no amount of convenience nor any amount of partisan politicking will be surrendered to increase the odds of humanity’s survival. Another big idea, and equally core to the Three Body Problem, is the Quantum Mechanical conundrum known as the ‘measurement problem’ which in this book takes the form of what, exactly, our experiments are actually measuring - and whether these experiments might be interfered with by an outside force! However, I’m not going to write anything more about this, as such will be the major focus of the next review I’m writing. There are other big ideas, of course, but I've run out of energy for writing about them and it's time to wrap this review up: Science Fiction has its own sort of "three body problem": how to successfully solve the equations of characterization, plotting, and ideas (and you could add more, like prose or setting). Ironically, I think this book FAILS to solve that problem. Its characterization is simply bad, and while I have nothing but respect for the translator, I’ve never found translated prose to be equal to natural prose. Now, personally, I don’t think any book should be considered ‘best novel of the year’ unless it does manage to solve this ‘three body problem’ of sci-fi. HOWEVER, that’s a very high bar to set. Ultimately, I was quite satisfied with the Three Body Problem. I enjoyed it, and it made me think, and that’s what I want out of my sci-fi. ...more |
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Jan 02, 2019
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Jan 20, 2019
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Jan 02, 2019
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Hardcover
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0345490177
| 9780345490179
| 0345490177
| 4.02
| 2,299
| 1967
| Oct 31, 2006
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really liked it
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This collection of related stories was way more awesome than I had expected. I essentially started reading it on a whim, as I had stol– ahem, borrowed
This collection of related stories was way more awesome than I had expected. I essentially started reading it on a whim, as I had stol– ahem, borrowed the full Robert Howard series from my father’s bookshelves but had promptly forgotten about them once they were on mine. But the other day I was bored and noticed them and said Hey, I love the Conan films (the snake palace / harem scene, my god! So well done! Not the battle itself but the stealth infiltration / build up to it. It was like a fantasy version of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western duel - the anticipation was everything). Now typically I don’t like short stories. For a year or two, I did a whole regimen of writing & reading them, even getting subscriptions to Asimov’s and Analog and SF&F. But a whole slew of rejections and a lot of unread stories later, I finally had to admit I’m just not that interested in the medium. Short stories are just too, well, too short. I like the long plot and character arcs, the slowly accumulating lore and world detail, the sense of falling into the deeper rabbit hole of a novel’s fictional universe. But Kull? Loved it. These stories are pure pulpy fantasy deliciousness. And because they all focus on Kull, and his trials and tribulations as King of Valusia (his ascension to kingship is literally a single paragraph at the end of the first story), they can maintain a longer sense of character arc and world building. And some of the stories are themselves longer, multi-parters, while a few are shorter. To my surprise, these shorter ones turned out to be some of my favorites. Special standout: The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune. It begins: “There comes, even to kings, the time of great weariness. Then the gold of the throne is brass, the silk of the palace becomes drab. The gems in the diadem sparkle drearily like the ice of the white seas; the speech of men is as the empty rattle of a jester’s bell and the feel comes of things unreal; even the sun is copper in the sky, and the breath of the green ocean is no longer fresh.” The story becomes this fascinating philosophical meditation in which a wizard and mirrors act as metaphors for depression / ennui. Kull sees himself in the wizard’s mirrors and says, “Nay, by Valka, am I the man or is he? Which of us is the ghost of the other? Mayhap these mirrors are but windows through which we look into another world. Does he think the same of me? Am I no more than a shadow, a reflection of himself--to him, as he to me? And if I am the ghost, what sort of world lives upon the other side of this mirror? What armies ride there and what kings rule? This world is all I know. Knowing naught of any other, how can I judge? Surely there are green hills there and booming seas and wide plains where men ride to battle. Tell me, wizard who is wiser than most men, tell me are there worlds beyond our worlds?” Even these small excerpts reveal the sense of grandeur that permeates the writing. For sure, Kull and his stories harken from a different era, one in which men could be unashamedly masculine and warriors need not apologize for their blood-letting. At risk of turning political what ought to be a simple review, I’ve only grown more sympathetic to the cause of the Sad Puppy movement (not the Rabid Puppies - they were all wankers). This collection demonstrates the power of simple story-telling, one in which any political agenda is incidental. That said, contrary to the popular narrative regarding golden age sci-fi & fantasy, Kull and his stories are by no means misogynistic and regressive. In fact, Kull is constantly striving against conservative tradition. A noble and his slave wish to marry each other? Kull would make it so - but it is against the Old Laws of Valusia. And Kull himself is explicitly asexual. He simply isn’t interested. Thank Valka for that. The idea that in olden times masculinity was synonymous with a sort of predatory promiscuity is just… eugh. Frat boy values do not equal masculinity. Anyway, Kull was my first Robert Howard reading experience and a genuine delight. If you’re at all a fan of fantasy, it’s worth reading at least one of these collections. *One downside is the absolutely egregious usage of adverbs on said. 'said Kull dazedly' 'said the other cryptically' 'answered the other tranquilly'. Yikes! ...more |
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not set
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Dec 28, 2018
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Dec 28, 2018
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1466828455
| 9781466828452
| B00WR9L08I
| 4.06
| 17,371
| Mar 15, 2016
| Mar 15, 2016
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it was ok
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When I reviewed the first book in this trilogy, The Emperor’s Blades, I compared it to Grandma’s chocolate chip cookies. Sure, neither the writing nor
When I reviewed the first book in this trilogy, The Emperor’s Blades, I compared it to Grandma’s chocolate chip cookies. Sure, neither the writing nor the characters nor the plot of this Epic Fantasy were surprising or genre-advancing, but the whole package was just plain tasty. It made me nostalgic for my childhood, in which I’d often skip school to read sci-fi & fantasy. In continuing with this metaphor, this last book reminded me of cookies that, well… that just plain don’t taste right. Something went wrong in the making of them. Was there not enough salt? Was the mixture over-beaten? Were they baked for the wrong amount of time or at the wrong temperature? Did someone leave them out too long and they got stale? Now I’m going to get into several specific issues, but I want to stress that, ultimately, I just didn’t mesh with the package as a whole. I didn’t find it enjoyable to read. I didn’t care for any of the PoV characters and because of that, I didn’t care for anything that happened. If you’re going to write epic fantasy, you need some epic heroes - Conan, Jon Snow & Arya Stark, Logan Nine Fingers, Kaladin, Aragorn, Moiraine Damodre, etc - worthy of such a story. None of the PoV characters were like that. They were whiny and constantly second-guessing themselves. All low self-esteem Debbie Downers, every one of em. I can handle one or two of those, but every single PoV character is like that, with maybe the exception of Gwenna. But I think she went too far into the other direction and lacked any sense of humanity. Still she’s definitely the best PoV character in the book, ironic given she’s not even one of the ‘Emperor’s Blades.’ But let me get into some specifics: Adare. Her character arc from book was an omen for her arc in this one. In Blades, she follows the cliche path of a woman trying to prove herself in a man dominated field. So I was dismayed - but not surprised - when her motivation in this book was equally cliche. She has a child, and she wants to protect him. And boy o boy does this motivation do some serious lifting. We see Adare with her child for about one chapter. And then - for the entire rest of the book - that’s her motivation. Sigh. The author seems to be invoking a sort of Cersei Lannister vibe, but Adare is no Cersei. Cersei’s motivation works because it’s a subversion. George RR Martin took what is typically considered a positive impetus - a mother protecting her children - and shown how that motivation can be used to justify the most horrific of acts. Adare, though, is supposed to be a protagonist. I think. Oh and the whole subplot about her having a contact with a Goddess? Pointless. Valyn. Yes, small spoiler here, he’s still alive. What the hell happened with him? He was the star of book one, and here he becomes, I don’t even know, some S&M junkie. There was this big plot about him becoming a leader but does he become one? Nope. The Flea shows up. Which makes sense because The Flea is way more heroic than Valyn. In fact, I kept wishing the PoV characters were different. I’d rather have followed Rampuri Tan, The Flea, Il Tornja, than Kaden, Valyn, or Adare. My issues don't stop with the characterization. Some of the writing bugged me - sometimes quite a lot. To put it simply, it was too descriptive. But it’s a little more technical than that. In sci-fi & fantasy, you have to be really careful with metaphors. Suppose I wrote, “Politicians are all snakes.” In a regular novel, it’s clear I’m being metaphorical. But in science fiction & fantasy? Maybe they really ARE snakes. The very first chapter suffers from this problem. It describes a giant man / soldier cutting his way through a sea. I thought it was some dream or prophecy or reference to a God. But nope (and it takes a full page and a half to make this clear), it was just a soldier walking through a giant map. In another instance, there’s a character named Valyn as a young boy in a forest. I thought this was like a flashback or some metaphor for the regression of Valyn into a child-like mental state. NOPE. The author literally introduced some other character named Valyn, for a pay-off that was not at all worth the confusion. *facepalm* And so on. Now, I’m very clearly in the minority with this review, and my two star reflects that I consider my criticism at least partially subjective. But, for me, I simply didn’t enjoy the reading experience. I needed better characters. An epic story needs epic heroes. ...more |
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Oct 29, 2018
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Nov 15, 2018
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Oct 29, 2018
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Kindle Edition
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0316517917
| 9780316517911
| 0316517917
| 4.11
| 31,279
| Feb 18, 2013
| Jan 16, 2018
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really liked it
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There’s a point, I won’t say where for fear of spoiling it, in Senlin Ascends that utterly delighted me. It was a stroke of utter genius, enough that
There’s a point, I won’t say where for fear of spoiling it, in Senlin Ascends that utterly delighted me. It was a stroke of utter genius, enough that I actually messaged the author here on Goodreads, writing, “…I really can't overstate my marvel, as if I witnessed an ant lift a car. So few words, with such great effect...” (to which he responded politely and nicely enough). For those who have already read the book and are interested in post-read brainstorming, the point I’m referring to is (view spoiler)[at the end of part one, when Ceph says, “What I wanted to ask is, do you think I might be more suited to the role of a nurse? Do you think that character would be more appropriate to my talents? The role is traditionally played by a woman, but the potential for—“ Senlin responds, “Role? What do you mean? You’re an actor?” Ceph could hardly contain his delight; he bit his knuckle and blushed. “Oh. Mr. Senlin, what a wonderful review. You have absolutely made my day!” (hide spoiler)] Even reading it over again now, my impish delight is renewed! Genius! Such dark hilarity! It’s a supreme punctuation mark to the chapter it ends. And it’s the single best characterization of the novel’s setting, the monumental Tower of Babel and its ringed kingdoms, and the cynicism and corruption that runs rife and rampant throughout Senlin’s experiences there. But what makes it especially genius is how it connects to our world. It immediately brought to mind thoughts of famous psychology experiments, like the Stanford prison experiment which demonstrated how even normal people can mutate into monsters, if they adopt the cloak of a persona. And really isn’t that the point of literature? To provide our minds with a fictional arena of words, where we can test our non-fictional moral theories, our predictive empathy, our sense of proper causality and character? So this was a high point, a very high point, in fact. The bad news is the rest of Senlin Ascends came up short by varying degrees (take this criticism for what it is: It’s like my saying that all American presidents come up short when compared to George Washington or Abraham Lincoln). In particular, I found the beginning of the book a bit slow, though perhaps unengaging might be the better word. The story begins with protagonist Thomas Senlin, a punctilious headmaster/teacher of a small one-room school of a provincial fishing village. For their honeymoon, he and his new wife Marya take a vacation to the famed Tower of Babel, a MASSIVE tower with entire cities contained within, a kingdom unto itself, really. Neither Senlin nor Marya have ever been before, and Senlin is a bit of a fanboy about it. Based off what he’s read, he expects it to be amazing. Well he and his wife very swiftly get separated, and, as he spends the rest of the book ascending the tower in search of her, Senlin is very quickly disabused of the notion that the Tower is anything but a cesspool – at least its lower levels. Now the problem is that Senlin’s character arc demands he start out as a bit of a staid. In contrast to his wife, he’s just not very adventurous and even a bit naïve. He’s a bit arrogant, a bit stuck up, a bit of a coward even. Worse, he’s fairly… passive. Not the author of his own destiny, if you will. That’s not to say I wasn’t sympathetic with him or his quest. The story does an incredible job of providing emotionally dense flashbacks to demonstrate Senlin’s love for his wife, who we otherwise don’t see much of. It’s just… his character voice and actions and the construction of the plot itself didn’t hook me, to begin with. This resulted in a strange sort of accidental self-experimentation. Now it’s not entirely the book’s fault. A lot of factors were at play, such as a switch in my work hours and a focus on writing my own book. But basically I took a two month break in the middle of reading Senlin Ascends. I call this a strange sort of accidental self-experimentation because not reading has historically resulted in hefty psychological effects. I was already aware that not reading causes me to get depressed, but I wasn’t entirely sure why this is the case. So throughout this two month hiatus from reading longer material, I paid close attention to my mental state and especially the nature of my thoughts during idle moments. Not surprisingly, the decline was marked. Maybe a week prior to my writing of this review, I reached a state of such emotional exhaustion that I found myself spending hours just lying on the couch, doing nothing, simply to allow my mind to rest. Now, of course, this can’t be attributed solely to a lack of long reading sessions. I’m stressed about the current state of politics in my country and work issues and all that jazz. But… none of that is new and, normally, I’m not overly affected by it. But now, suddenly, it was overwhelming. So it must be that reading somehow energizes or fortifies my emotional state. In fact, I noticed the longer I carried on with my not-reading experiment, the weaker my imagination became. In particular, my mental descriptions of the interiority of other human beings atrophied. It was as if other human beings became… less human. Not intellectually or schematically, of course. Rather, the emotional strength or raw neuronal potency attributed to these descriptions became far weaker. The result: My patience, my compassion, my empathy towards others lessened considerably. Even in general, my control over my own mind grew weaker. I’ve become convinced that language is an indexing system of the mind (mine, at least), and that the stronger your language capacity, the better you’re able to navigate the labyrinth-library of your subconscious. Well, without reading, my language capacity weakened, so it’s no surprise I began to get feel lost within the dark recesses of my own subconscious. And now – forgive me for it, but I thought it might be interesting – digression over. I stopped my little self-experiment as being self-destructive, and returned at last to Senlin Ascends. I discovered that, while the title refers to the actual plot, how Senlin ascends the Tower of Babel in search of his wife, it also refers to Senlin’s journey as a character. Yes, he begins in The Basement, the Tower’s slums, with its strange beer-providing ‘carousels’; ascends to The Parlor, where plays a strange role in a strange play; ascends to The Baths, with its villainous Commissioner and his strange henchman the Red-Hand; and ends in New Babel, with its strange ceiling of lightning. But throughout each ascension, Senlin grows as a character. By the time he reaches the end of the book, he’s shed some of his less interesting attributes and especially his passivity. He’s no longer so reliant on the actions of others and instead becomes an active plotter in his own destiny. It helped too that the plot opened up beyond merely Man Searches For Wife, and began to suggest some of the mysteries of the Tower. Thus, my weird self-torture aside, Senlin Ascends was an enjoyable reading experience. Truly a GoodRead, and I intend to continue the journey upwards with our reluctant hero Thomas Senlin in books two and three (which is not out yet, grrr!! January 2019!). ...more |
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1
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Jul 28, 2018
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Sep 19, 2018
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Jul 28, 2018
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Paperback
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1942948018
| 9781942948018
| B00TOZI7J8
| 4.13
| 10,243
| 2013
| Feb 15, 2015
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liked it
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For my review of this book, see my (spoiler-free) review of the entire series at Apex: Book 3
For my review of this book, see my (spoiler-free) review of the entire series at Apex: Book 3
...more
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not set
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Jul 26, 2018
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Jul 26, 2018
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Kindle Edition
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0857662937
| 9780857662934
| 0857662937
| 4.04
| 20,423
| Dec 16, 2012
| Dec 18, 2012
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really liked it
|
For my review of this book, see my (spoiler-free) review of the entire series at Apex: Book 3
For my review of this book, see my (spoiler-free) review of the entire series at Apex: Book 3
...more
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not set
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Jul 26, 2018
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Jul 26, 2018
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Paperback
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0857664018
| 9780857664013
| 0857664018
| 4.17
| 7,589
| May 05, 2015
| May 05, 2015
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it was ok
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Transhumanism In his essay ‘Why Socialism?’ Albert Einstein remarks upon a concept that lies at the heart of this sci-fi series, the extinction of the Transhumanism In his essay ‘Why Socialism?’ Albert Einstein remarks upon a concept that lies at the heart of this sci-fi series, the extinction of the human race: I recently discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war, which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I remarked that only a supra-national organization would offer protection from that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly, said to me: “Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?” Yikes! To be comfortable with the extinction of the human race. That’s some ice cold stuff right there. Well… I feel the same. Not because I hate human beings, though. Rather, I feel the way I do because I love humanity. I’m not deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race – but I AM deeply opposed to the disappearance of humanity. Which is not a distinction without a difference. Let me explain: Last year, in my studies of Artificial Intelligence, I discovered a large proportion of AI experts share the sentiments of the late Stephen Hawking when he said in a 2014 interview, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” The end of the human race! Oh dear! …But, said that little devil on my shoulder, would that really be so bad? I mean, don’t we all understand where Einstein’s ‘intelligent and well-disposed man’ is coming from? Look at what we’ve done to our home, Mother Earth. Look at what we do to our neighbors, the other animals on Earth. We kill over TEN BILLION chickens per year! Hell, look at what we do to our own fellow human beings. Our history is replete with exploitation, genocide, and hatred. So would the end of the human race really be so bad? When I pondered the extinction of the human race as a real possible event, I wondered on which side I should stand. Which is the side that represents goodness? If I add up all the good of human beings and all the evil, which side weighs more? If I want to minimize suffering, should I contribute (in my own very tiny way) to the survival of the human species, or to its extinction? Ultimately, I decided it was impossible to weigh humanity’s good against its evil. I am not God. I lack the knowledge to make even a remotely confident assessment. Instead what I do know is that, for all the evils human beings perpetrate, there is plenty of good in us too. Imagination, creativity, kindness, love – millions and billions of human beings both throughout history and alive today have cultivated these traits. I decided, therefore, I want the positive traits of humanity to continue into the future. And I want the negative traits to die off. But y’know what? I’m not sure the extinction of the human race would impede this desire. Quite in fact, I suspect the opposite is true. Homo sapiens may well be an obstacle. Whether you want to chalk it up to Original Sin or evolution or what have you, human beings can’t help but be bad much of the time. Humanity’s progress hasn’t occurred in the DNA of human beings – modern human beings aren’t appreciably different from cavemen, after all – but in civilization and the body of knowledge that underlies it. Civilization’s power over the fate of humanity has its limits, though. For example, humanity knows climate change represents a serious existential threat to itself. We know we’re on a time limit too before positive reinforcement cycles render us powerless to stop & reverse the tide. But are we frantically altering our habits and regulations of energy production and consumption? Are we doing all we can to protect the earth and maintain its habitability for our children and grandchildren? Nah. Large-scale human structures (governments, corporations, etc) are too slow and ponderous while individual human beings care primarily about their own comfort. Which is not a criticism. You should no more expect human beings (on average / in bulk) to suddenly stop prioritizing their own comfortable survival than you should expect your smart phone to cook you dinner. That’s just not how either is designed. Of course, the human design has worked for thousands, millions of years. But in this new era of nuclear weapons, of increasing technological potency, of a densely crowded Earth? There’s too many of us, and we are simultaneously too powerful, yet still too stupid. Our design, I don’t think, is going to cut it, not if we want humanity to survive. What we need is a better human. What we need is the post-human. And so I have described what the Nexus trilogy is, essentially, about. Nexus Set some 20 years into the future, Nexus explores the arrival of post-humanity (sometimes called transhumanity) and its political repercussions. Specifically, the trilogy is named after the mind-altering nano-drug Nexus that gives human beings (A) unprecedented access to their own cognition and (B) unprecedented access to the minds of OTHER HUMAN BEINGS. All the good and ill that might come from that (mind control, purer expressions of love, communal knowledge sharing, etc) is explored. As is the inevitable division and pushback against anything that threatens the status quo. So you can expect the added spice of government conspiracy, dystopia, and political thriller. We see this from rotating PoVs that include the designers of Nexus 4 like Kaden Lane and Rangan Shankari, government super-soldiers like Samantha Cataranes and Watson Cole, and a whole slew of American, Indian, and Chinese government officials, revolutionaries, and even an Artificial Super Intelligence. That much for the series’ topics and themes. They’re clearly right up my alley. I could talk about control strategies for Artificial Super Intelligences all day. And yet here I am, sitting on a 2 star rating. What’s the deal?! I’ll just come right out with it. The artistry of the Nexus series is shit. These are not well-written books. Regardless of the plot, the characters, and the themes, the writing itself is inelegant. It’s ugly. To be fair to the series, this took me time to fully appreciate. I had my first HUH? moment near the end of the first book, but it wasn’t until about halfway through the last book that I fully understood my problems with the writing. But once that understanding was developed, the series become almost unbearable to read. The last 300 pages were a true slog. To back up this claim, I have four pieces of evidence, given in the order with which I noticed them: Exhibit A: The Characterization of Sam Cataranes I was enjoying book one, Nexus, quite nicely until about page 350-400, at which point (view spoiler)[Samantha Cataranes does a complete 180 in her characterization. She’s a willing tool of ERD, not batting an eye in the slightest at the abduction and blackmail of civilians (Kaden, etc), nor presumably at the other sketchy, evil shit the ERD gets up to. And then, in the span of 10 pages, she mind-melds with a girl and suddenly, magically, she’s completely against the ERD. (hide spoiler)] Now I’m not against characters changing. That would be silly. But it’s simply not an accurate depiction of human beings to show such a reversal in so short a period of time. We’re incredibly good at justifying our actions. We build up whole world views in this process. Dismantling those world views takes a lot of time and a lot of energy – even aided by advanced technology. This transformation here struck me as totally inauthentic, more a matter of plot convenience than of genuine humanity. Exhibit B: The Sudden Drop in Average Page Length / Chapter So, yeah, what the hell is up with the super short chapters? I first noticed this in Crux, after encountering a dense point where several 2-3 page chapters were back-to-back. It’s annoying. Just as I’d get accustomed to the setting, to the new character dynamics at play, NOPE, time to move on. It was like trying to fall asleep in an airplane, only for a bump of turbulence to wake you up just as your eyes started to close. I hated it. Chapters need some length and heft, some space to bloom. Instead it’s just PLOT POINT, PLOT POINT, PLOT POINT. Where’s the exploration? Curious, I calculated the average page length per chapter of the three books (which were all from the same print-run). Average for Nexus: 9.9. Average in Crux & Apex: 6.66 and 6.44, respectively. That’s massive. A 35% reduction. What happened? I began to suspect Ramez Naam had lost his interest and engagement in the story and writing process. He didn’t really want to put himself into the world and characters he created, not to the degree he had when writing book one, anyway. But he felt compelled to finish what he’d started, so again, PLOT POINT, PLOT POINT, PLOT POINT. The skeleton of a story, without the meat on the bones. Exhibit C: The One Sentence Paragraphs Oh God, the one sentence paragraphs. As if the short chapters weren’t enough. They’re everywhere. Here’s an indicative example: Yuguo grabbed for the controller they’d built, the controller for the electronic weapons, the ones that disabled tanks. It’s like reading a children’s book, only with more explosions and unprecedented pain. Or, better yet, here’s an analogy in movie form. These books are edited like this: Bourne Ultimatum scene instead of like this Children of Men scene The excessive one sentence paragraphs are only a fraction of what’s wrong with the above writing sample. Why is ‘the controller’ and ‘something’ repeated twice back-to-back? Why’d the author add ‘on the ground now’ after gunfire? Was gunfire previously in the air? Why does the author keep using sense words? In the writing profession, we call phrases like ‘He saw’ or ‘He heard’ distance words because they create a distance between the reader and the PoV by reminding them of the artificiality of the narrative. You don’t need such words. You can just directly describe. So instead of writing something like, ‘More gunfire, on the ground now. He heard the crack and whoosh of Molotovs breaking, fireballs erupting. He heard screams’ the author would have been better off writing something like, ‘More gunfire, on the ground now, followed by the crack and whoosh of Molotovs breaking and fireballs erupting, and the screams of burning soldiers.’ etc, etc. Exhibit D: The Stream-of-Consciousness Escalatory Structure This one’s amusing to me because it is a stylistic mistake that I used to make all the time until a critique partner kindly pointed it out to me. Here’s a few examples from Apex: “Around the whole world he feels that solidarity, a million minds crying out in righteous anger. Ten million. Who even knew how many?” OR “Men and women are crying out for justice. Crying out together. Crying out in unison.” OR here’s a good one: “A peace, a stability, formed of a base so broad, a base of not one brain, not one life, not one perspective, but thousands, complementing one another, embracing one another, encircling and intertwining with one another.” I used to write this type of structure all the time, but I eventually realized it’s a form of micro stream-of-consciousness. Writing is challenging, intimidating, exhausting. Every word is a choice among a hundred synonyms, every sentence one of a million permutations, every page a universe carefully captured from among the infinite multiverse. So we naturally write out these different words and sentences in order to test them out and see which one fits best. After all, that’s how good conversation often works, as we struggle to pin down exactly what we want to say. But writing is not speaking. A good writer is supposed to edit the mess down to the single best choice – not leave the entire stream of drafting in there. That isn’t to say such a structure doesn’t have its place. There’s nothing wrong with repetition or parallel lists. But they need to be used sparingly. They are not used sparingly in the Nexus series. This structure happens again and again and again, often back-to-back-to-back. More egregiously, its use cuts across PoV, so that nearly every character’s voice begins to sound identical. The End All of that is far from comprehensive of the issues I ended up having with the series. I especially started to become super annoyed by the pop-culturey way Buddhism was depicted (peace! meditation! monks!). The depiction of human beings was pretty simplistic in general, but I don’t want to get into that, as I don’t want to end on a negative note. Truth is, I understand few readers have as much editing experience as I do and are therefore less likely to be annoyed by, or even notice, the writing issues I’ve mentioned above. And, actually, this harsh critique notwithstanding, I imagine Ramez Naam and I would get along pretty well. Even if I don’t admire HOW he wrote these books, I admire what he was attempting to do with them. So, let us return to Einstein’s essay. Shortly after referencing the ‘gentleman’ who apparently cares little for the extinction of the human race, Einstein goes on to write about every human being’s dual nature as both a solitary and a social being and concludes: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society. If nothing else, the Nexus series confronts this problem directly and offers a solution: hive mind – or at least a closing of that gap between our individual minds. Maybe human beings as we know them don’t have to go extinct. Maybe we just need better tools to join our minds together, so we can better share our knowledge and overcome our hatred-incubating tribalism. With such tools, maybe we have a chance to beat Fermi’s Paradox. Maybe, Ramez Naam suggests, we’ll not just make it to the future, but actually thrive there, in a Golden Age of Humanity that will put all the past Golden Ages to shame. I can’t help but hope he’s right. ...more |
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1435122968
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| Mar 18, 2011
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liked it
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HP Lovecraft, the Complete D&D5E Character
Name: HP Lovecraft Class & Rating: Warlock, 3 stars Race: Human Alignment: Chaotic Neutral HP Lovecraft is fHP Lovecraft, the Complete D&D5E Character Name: HP Lovecraft Class & Rating: Warlock, 3 stars Race: Human Alignment: Chaotic Neutral HP Lovecraft is famously nativist (i.e. racist) – his way of describing non-white personages isn’t by describing the color of their skin so much as using a word like ‘mongoloid’ or ‘savage’ – AND female characters are almost non-existent in his works as anything besides window dressing. Nevertheless, if you delve into Lovecraft’s life, you can’t help but feel pathos. He was devoted to his mother, becoming near suicidal when she was committed to an asylum. He visited her and wrote her regularly, and was quite broken by her death. He struggled all his life to make ends meet and sometimes had to choose between paying for the postage to mail his latest story and feeding himself. So evil? By no means. For the other axis, nearly every Lovecraft story explores some aspect of how people respond when their perceptions of reality and cosmology are shaken. The result is, invariably, mental chaos. Stat Block Strength: 7 The emotional strength of a HP Lovecraft story is low. They sometimes sort-of-kind-of have character arcs, but these arcs aren't compelling. His stories aren’t horrors either. There’s no sense of dread when turning the page. Rather, I would classify them as mysteries and more milieu mystery than character mystery. Any page-turning quality of a Lovecraft story arises because we’re interested in exploring the world-building and uncovering the truth of the story's strange cosmic mystery. We don’t particularly care about the fate of the protagonists, especially as most of the stories are narrated after-the-fact, anyway. Dexterity: 16 Lovecraft’s stories often remind me of how nudity was depicted in early film. It was never shown directly. The Hays code didn’t allow it. Instead, you might see a silhouette. Or a dress fall to the ground at the woman’s feet. Or there’d be a bannister in the way. Lovecraft likewise has this propensity to avoid actually describing his cosmic horrors. His characters will instead simply say, ‘I cannot describe it, for my very mind rebelled against grasping such a reality! Mouth and teeth and tentacles!’ or ‘I refuse to share this knowledge, for it will inspire madness in all who hear it.’ It is, frankly, annoying. Constitution: 13 My copy of HP Lovecraft, The Complete Fiction is highly sturdy and well constructed. When it became temporarily possessed, I struck it with a hammer. It survived this blow intact. Intelligence: 16 HP Lovecraft was clearly a man of high intelligence. In particular, he possessed a certain arcane vocabulary that gives his stories an other-worldly aesthetic. I was delighted to discover him use not one but TWO of my favorite rare words: chiaroscuro (a word I once used in a story, which earned me a rejection note from the editor: ‘pass. too pretentious.’ bwahaha) as well as tenebrous, which I snuck into the opening for my review for PKD’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. I even encountered a few words whose meaning I had to look up, which is quite the feat, given I am a connoisseur of words: fulgurite and noisome, for example. And of course there’s the classics that you’ve no doubt encountered if you’ve ever played a Cthulu game, words like eldritch or daemon or aeons or what have you, all of which serve to imbue his stories with a sense of vast cosmic mystique. Wisdom: 5 I’m probably least impressed by the humanity of HP Lovecraft’s stories. Despite his clear intelligence, I’m quite certain Lovecraft didn’t understand people. Because of this, the characters come across less as human beings with rich inner lives and more as generic passive receptors of the world. At the least, the book displays a profound lack of insight when compared to modern psychology. Today we know that ‘insanity’ isn’t a single affliction at all – it’s not even a term used in medicine anymore. Rather, what might once have been called ‘insanity’ now has a much more specific classification, such as dementia or schizophrenia, and we have some grasp of the neurological reasons behind these illnesses. Thus the madness we encounter throughout Lovecraft's stories is less a specific ailment of a specific human being than it is the general madness of our entire race as a whole. Charisma: 6 The stories aren’t charming or magical or inspiring or anything like that. Which is fair, they’re cosmic horror. But don’t expect to come out of reading these stories energized to do good in the world or to treat your fellow human beings with greater love and kindness. Unless you think doing good in the world involves sacrificing a goat to the Elder Gods to stave off their hunger and imminent return. In which case you may well be plenty inspired. Class Features Otherworldly Patron: The Great Old One In Lovecraftian mythos, the universe contains vast and powerful beings - Gods to some - who are beyond mortal ken. To them, we are but ants, and we draw their attention at our peril. Thus, science is in many ways foolish to so wantonly sift through the mysteries of the universe. What happens when we uncover something that is beyond our comprehension – or, worse, our control? Pact Boon: Pact of the Tome …Yeah. Eldritch Invocation: Knowledge of New England Much like Stephen King, HP Lovecraft set most of his stories in New England, where he lived all of his life. His knowledge of its towns, history, and geography comes through strongly and confidently. Eldritch Invocation: False Knowledge of Ancient Tongues HP Lovecraft didn’t know Sumerian, Babylonian, or Aramaic. But that didn’t stop him from making up incantations in other worldly languages. ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! Yi-nash Yog-Sothoth-he-lgeb-fi-throdog-Yah! Eldritch Invocations: Frame Narrative HP Lovecraft’s stories consistently use a literary technique called the Frame Narrative, which was popular at the time but is now rather antiquated. Most of HP Lovecraft’s stories actually consist of an outer framing narrative, within which the (outer) narrator encounters someone who relates the inner, usually more interesting story. The result is that each story is actually being told AFTER THE FACT. This technique makes Lovecraft’s stories more philosophical/reflective, but at the cost of drastically lowering the tension. Spellbook Dagon 1st-level conjuration Components: Madness, Deep Ocean, Elder Gods Casting Time: 5 pages A man shipwrecked at sea finds himself on a strange island… Dagon is to Call of Cthulhu what Magic Missiles is to Fireball. It’s not that one is superior to the other per se, but Dagon is the clear precursor, containing many of the same elements while being generally shorter and simpler. Given that, Dagon was a quicker, lighter read, but with less oomph than Call of Cthulhu. (...and yes I know Magic Missiles and Fireball aren't Warlock spells.) The Outsider 2nd-level divination Components: Death, Otherworldly Casting Time: 6 pages A man who lives in a remote land seeks to escape… This is a short and fairly simple story that, while undeniably atmospheric, is also undeniably juvenile. It all builds toward a twist that is – these days at least – a bit overdone. Whereas many of these other stories are uniquely Lovecraftian, I found this one derivative. The Lurking Fear 4th-level transmutation Components: NE, Madness, Rural, Death, Atavism Casting Time: 17 pages A rural legend tells of a haunted abandoned mansion, and creatures of death who lurk within… The Lurking Fear is a bit different than others on the list, and consequentially, I found it refreshing. For one thing, it’s less of a frame story. The narrator is the one who actually experienced the events of the story, which grants it a much better immediacy than the other stories. For another, instead of the horrors coming from outside of us, this is more about the horrors that dwell within us. The Call of Cthulhu 7th-level conjuration Components: Frame, NE, Deep Ocean, Madness, Elder Gods Casting Time: 25 pages A landmass rises from the sea, and the Call of the Priest of the Elder Gods tolls forth… Probably my favorite spell in the book. It’s one of the better plotted, with a real sense of unfolding layers of mystery. And, rarely for Lovecraft, it actually directly addresses the greater mythos. Most of the other stories indirectly reference a world-view in which humanity is insignificant. For example, the following spell - The Case of Charles Dexter Ward - contains some necromancy, sure, but it never actually talks about where the souls of the dead reside or what that might mean for us. Call of Cthulu, however, specifically speaks of the Elder Gods and humanity’s place in a universe where such beings exist. This made it more coherent and interesting. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward 3rd-level necromancy Components: Frame, NE, Madness, Death, Doppleganger Casting Time: 104 pages A young historian becomes obsessed with an ancestor who delved deeply into arcane matters… Not a big fan of this spell. That casting time. 104 pages! And it hits this slump in the middle where there’s a REALLY OBVIOUS plot-twist every reader will guess, but the characters are totally oblivious, and it just drags on and on and on. To the point that I began to feel a little embarrathy (this is a word I invented and am foisting upon you: it means second hand embarrassment) for Lovecraft because a huge chunk of suspense in the story hinged on this reveal. The Colour out of Space 6th-level evocation Components: Frame, NE, Rural, Madness, Otherworldly Casting Time: 23 pages A strange meteor falls from space, and it begins to warp its environs… I don’t think I’d call this Lovecraft’s most iconic story – that one must be Call of Cthulu – but I might consider it his most prototypical. Many consider it his best. You have an otherworldly visitor. In this case, it’s a comet or meteor with an, umm, let’s say a chromatic passenger (Dexter reference...). It strikes in a rural New England locale. And it’s largely told by proxy. That is, the (outer) narrator himself didn’t experience the primary events of the story. Even the (inner) narrator can only offer a first-hand account of SOME aspects. So the story is actually a frame-within-a-frame! This second-hand, third-hand approach just drains the tension from the story. That said, I had great fun because it’s dripping with horrific wonder, a uniquely Lovecraftian emotion. In fact, hey wow, actually, what? Did I just roll a 20 with that phrase, that ‘horrific wonder’? Was that a critical hit? Because really those two words are a perfect summary of what makes Lovecraft Lovecraft, and why he’s endured for over a hundred years. He combines two emotions that are usually considered completely different – wonder and horror – and he shows how, really, they’re two sides of the same coin. When something new rises up from beyond the depths of our current experience, we experience either a fear that our world-view is under threat or a sense of wonder at the evolution of our world-view. Or, as is the case in many of Lovecraft’s stories, we manage to experience both, simultaneously. A horrified wonder. Let us say, we are wondrrified. ...more |
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Jul 03, 2018
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Leather Bound
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076532637X
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| 4.62
| 269,966
| Nov 14, 2017
| Nov 14, 2017
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it was amazing
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Another great entry in one of the best epic fantasies ever written. I was especially impressed once I realized the subtle undercurrents of mental illne Another great entry in one of the best epic fantasies ever written. I was especially impressed once I realized the subtle undercurrents of mental illness that Sanderson had been weaving in. While I originally mistook these for mysticism, it suddenly struck me, no, absolutely not. It was a purposeful modernizing of epic hero: Shallan very clearly suffers from a disassociative disorder; Kaladin very clearly suffers from depression, possibly bipolar disorder. Pretty neat. ...more |
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0765326353
| 9780765326355
| 0765326353
| 4.66
| 535,357
| Aug 31, 2010
| Aug 31, 2010
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it was amazing
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Basically, the penultimate Epic Fantasy by (probably) the penultimate currently living Epic Fantasy writer. It's got the shifting perspectives from di
Basically, the penultimate Epic Fantasy by (probably) the penultimate currently living Epic Fantasy writer. It's got the shifting perspectives from diverse characters, it's got the complex magic system, it's got the ancient history and mythos, it's got the massive, fully realized world. It's a testament to how superbly written the book is that, despite all this, it nevertheless feels intimate and personal. I'll leave it to other reviewers to tell you about actual plot details; instead, I just want to share a strange response I had: These books stealth depressed me. See, I read the first three books (over 3000 pages total) in about a month. For weeks afterward, I felt a weird sense of displacement and loneliness. Now, don't mistake this for the usual postpartum bittersweet awe one feels when finishing an engrossing story. That, to me at least, feels as if I am a sort of deity, who is closing shut the door on an entire universe. I felt that too, when I finished book three, but a subtler, more pervasive feeling lingered past that. I felt a sense of sorrow each night as I went to bed, unable to return to the world of The Stormlight Archive. Eventually I decided that it was if I had lost a set of very close friends - or rather that I had said goodbye to them, for that long long wait before I will return, when Brandon Sanderson finishes the tenth book (Yes, there are ten books planned - I was foolish and mistakenly thought The Stormlight Archive was a trilogy!). In short, yeah, one of the best epic fantasies ever written. ...more |
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0765326361
| 9780765326362
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| 4.76
| 382,263
| Mar 04, 2014
| Mar 04, 2014
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it was amazing
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SH: Safehand. E: ...Words are Wind? SH: No. Wrong book. This book: Say the words. E: Alright, alright, fine, I admit it. I ship Sylphrena and— SH: Let me SH: Safehand. E: ...Words are Wind? SH: No. Wrong book. This book: Say the words. E: Alright, alright, fine, I admit it. I ship Sylphrena and— SH: Let me guess: Kaladin. E: No, Safehand, I ship Sylphrena and... MYSELF! SH: Ummmmmmmmmm no. E: Ummmmmmmmmm yes. SH: Yeah, no, that's not how shipping works. You can't ship YOURSELF, a REAL person, with a fictional character. E: That's weird. How do you explain this shipping notice I got from Amazon then? [image] SH: What?! Did you just photoshop that image solely for the purposes of this joke of a review that isn't actually about anything? E: Oh I don't think so, Safehand. Because, PLOT TWIST, this review isn't about nothing. It's about something. It's about Manic Pixie Dream Girls saving brooding young men from their depression, and how I just don't ship that way. ...more |
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0345539842
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| 4.52
| 252,133
| Feb 09, 2016
| Feb 09, 2016
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it was amazing
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After writing my reviews for Red Rising & Golden Son, I struggled to write this one for Morning Star. Did I have anything left to add besides “So, uh,
After writing my reviews for Red Rising & Golden Son, I struggled to write this one for Morning Star. Did I have anything left to add besides “So, uh, yeah it’s a great ending to a great trilogy”? Months later, I decided, yes, I did: the weakness of wealth. Here’s four quotes to start us off, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald One of the most interesting themes of the Red Rising trilogy is this notion that wealth has an atrophying effect: wealth makes the wealthy complacent and jaded. That, indeed, this complacency has, historically, lead to social revolution and the upending of civilization (e.g. Fall of Rome, French Revolution, and now, with globalization, America/”the West”). Such thinking was, in Red Rising, the explicitly stated motivation for the existence of The Institute. The violent ‘game’ was meant to remind the elite Peerless Scarred of the necessary brutality needed to enforce the social order. And throughout all three books, Darrow references his own impoverished upbringing as the source of his greater strength: How can these Golds – who have experienced a life of luxury and comfort – hope to compete with him, a Red, a Helldiver, whose own iron will was forged in misery? And we see this theme, too, in those Golds (Virginia, Sevro, Sevro’s father, Victra, to name a few) who choose to side with Darrow. Each of them has their own tragic past, which is what motivates them to make a change to the system. It is not their wealth, but their poverty (of joy, peace, morality, etc) which defines them. I’m fascinated by this topic, as understanding it is important to my profession. I’m a teacher, and it so happens that most of my students belong to the upper class, i.e. I teach Golds. As a teacher, I'm tasked with the rather difficult task of understanding my students' minds (and lives), so I can help them overcome any obstacles to their education. Now, at least for these students, the root cause of most academic struggles is not actually academic in nature. It’s, first and foremost, a matter of excess time burdens. In particular, excess homework and over-scheduling of extracurricular activities results in a less-than-zero-sum game because sleep deprivation is ruinous to long term retention, if not mental health in general. Honestly, I can't stress this enough. Sleep deprivation in (upper class American) students is so pervasive and so harmful, it's become an epidemic. But all that was a bit off-topic. Getting back to this theme of the Weakness of Wealth, I bring up the second cause of academic struggle: a lack of motivation, or more precisely, the devaluation of education. Basically, many of students ask, “Well what is the point of any of this?" Which is a completely fair question to ask. However, I've fielded this question hundreds and hundreds of times, and I've answered it in practically every conceivable way. I've cited specific applications (e.g. I talked about how I used trigonometry to program collision detection in a game, or how matrices/linear algebra is essential to machine learning, or how scientific understanding helps me make sense of mental illness); I've answered it by analogy (e.g. reading books is like taking a vacation to another world); I've attempted pathos (e.g. learning to understand language helps you understand other people and improves your humanity); I've invoked grand philosophies (e.g. I compare math and science to 'the language of God' and talk about how living in the universe without understanding them would be like living in France without understanding French); etc, etc. In answering to this fair question, however, I've learned is it isn't a real question. For the vast majority of students, the question "What is the point of any of this?" is actually a statement: "I have decided there is no point to any of this and nothing you say will change my mind." And why should they think otherwise? They were born and raised in wealth and don't know any different. It's THEIR wealth, THEIR socioeconomic status. Just as it is with MOST of the Golds in the Red Rising trilogy, the notion that wealth and status must be earned and maintained is, at best, an abstract idea. So why value education? For example, I once tutored a student whose final grade in Latin class was a 7. Yes, a 7 out of a 100. Up to that point, I’d never seen a single digit course grade and couldn’t even understand how it was possible. But then I learned more about him. This was a kid whose first car was a $50,000 BMW and who expected to go to an Ivy League school, as his parents had done, via Legacy admissions or as a DevA (this is a classification for college applicants who are ‘A’ ranked in ‘development’, aka there’s the expectation of future donations of large amounts of money). I tried to explain to his parents that such a low score can’t be understood as a matter of academic weakness, nor could it be fixed with academic remedies. Until their son was motivated to learn, I told them, there was no point in trying to teach him. I suggested that maybe it was unwise to simply give him an expensive car, as human beings tend to value only those possessions they worked to obtain. Further, I suggested that telling him that they’d simply get him into an Ivy League school using their connections and wealth was robbing him of his motivation to excel at academics. Naturally, their response to these words was to hire someone else. In a non-fiction book I recently read, Factfulness, the author tells a story about how, as a Swiss medical student, he did a stint in a medical school in India. In one of his first classes there, the teacher put up an MRI and asked for a diagnosis. The author immediately recognized it as a form of lung cancer, but he didn’t want to “show off” his superior education in front of the native Indian students. So he kept silent. The other students began answering, however, and not only did they recognize it, they listed off treatment options, further tests needed to be run, and other knowledge that was far beyond what the author knew. ‘Oh,’ he thought, ‘I must’ve been put in the wrong class, with actual doctors.’ So, after the class, he went up to one of his fellow students and said as much. “No, no,” said that student. “You’re in the right class.” Turns out, most of them read the textbook religiously, cover-to-cover, because none of them took it for granted that they could “be whatever they wanted to be.” Rather, to them, education was a privilege that had to be earned. The conclusion of the author because of this (and many other factors) was that the economic center of the world was very swiftly moving from Europe/The Americas to Asia. Returning now to Morning Star, that’s basically the plot: a shifting of power from the Golds, back to everyone else. Whereas Golden Son was primarily focused on Gold political dynamics and Darrow’s struggles to decide WHAT to do and WHY, Morning Star is about the actual execution of his revolution. In the pursuit of this, the book shows us more about the other Colors. This is especially the case with Obsidians, the recruitment of which is a major plot arc. Morning Star is great. I loved it as much as I loved the first two books. It’s got space battles, twists, political machinations... everything to make a story fun to read. But, as I’ve tried to show with this review, it's not without its depths either. It gives you plenty to think about too. And what this book has made me ponder, more than anything, is this: those of us born to wealth (i.e. most of the people reading this) need to realize that, globally speaking, we’re Golds. The rest of the world wants the wealth we have (they want their children not to die from basic preventable diseases, for starters), and each of us needs to decide – in our choice of career, our voting habits, our efforts at conservation, what we teach our children, etc – whether we’re going to be a good Gold or a bad one. ...more |
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May 20, 2018
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May 20, 2018
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Hardcover
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0345539826
| 9780345539823
| 4.47
| 305,810
| Jan 06, 2015
| Jan 06, 2015
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it was amazing
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If all the evil in the world were perpetrated only by evil individuals, it would not be so difficult to create on Earth a paradise. Any one person, ev
If all the evil in the world were perpetrated only by evil individuals, it would not be so difficult to create on Earth a paradise. Any one person, even a tyrant, is like the flame of a single candle: oh so easy to douse. But when evil is perpetrated by normal people under the sway of an evil system, it is so much harder to make things right. If a person is a candle flame, then a system is a forest fire, a nigh unstoppable inferno. If you attempt to impede its progress, it will turn you to ash and carry on its merry way, with hardly a sulfurous burp to note your passing. This is one of the major themes of the Red Rising trilogy, and Golden Son in particular. While the books have their share of villainous characters, the true villain is the Golden society as a whole – all the institutions, the economics, the traditions that have become fixed in the hearts of the entire Caste spectrum, from the Golds above to the Reds below. How do you change this? How do you fight the all-consuming inferno? In my review of Red Rising, I argued that, rather than compare the book to Hunger Games as is commonly done, we would be better served by a comparison with the Count of Monte Cristo. In reviewing Golden Son, I’m going to continue that comparison by engaging in a bit of New Historicism (that's a fancy literary criticism term to say I'm going to look at the historical context). The Count was written & published in 1844, a rather tumultuous time. That same year Friedrich Engels published a famous essay on the negative effects of industrialization, and four years later, he and Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto. This was the natural culmination of Karl Marx’s earlier theories, including my personal favorite, the theory of alienation which can be summarized as follows: As a consequence of living in a society of stratified social classes (sound familiar...?), the working class will feel alienated from their humanity. If they are treated as just another component in an assembly line, they will naturally cease to think of themselves as the director of their own actions, nor will they be able to enjoy the fruits of their own labor. Indeed, their internal mindset begins to reflect the way they are treated, as mere cogs in the machine of industry, as directed by the upper class. That is, to say, they are dehumanized in their own eyes. It’s no surprise, if you take this to be an accurate summary of the way working class people felt, that the Count of Monte Cristo saw such success. Revenge stories of this nature – power fantasies, basically – find a welcome home in the hearts of the powerless. Is it any accident the three villains in the book each represent a different pillar of the system: Danglars the banker, Villefort the judge, and Fernand the noble? By no means. Meanwhile, the Red Rising trilogy has also been published into a similar atmosphere. In the United States today, wealth disparity is approaching levels not seen since the Great Depression: the top 0.1% and the bottom 90% now hold about equal levels of wealth. Which, by the way, is worse than it was in the 1850s and also worse than it was in 1774 – even accounting for slavery, mind-boggling as that may be. In the global view, the world’s 56 wealthiest people have wealth equal to the bottom 50%. So 56 people’s wealth equals 3.5 billion people’s wealth. The disparity is so hyperbolic as to be comedic, if the on-the-ground reality didn’t translate to starvation, misery, and death for those at the bottom. So it’s no surprise that Red Rising, which explores themes of systematic power and wealth disparity, has found great popularity today. In fact, whereas Red Rising was more of a Hunger Games style action-plot, Golden Son is far more interested in an exploration of the system. At the end of Red Rising, Darrow (view spoiler)[finished the Institute in first place, became a peerless scared, and accepted the patronage of the governor of Mars, the man who watched over his wife’s execution (hide spoiler)]. Golden Son begins some months later, at the *END* of Darrow's time at the space-ship version of the Institute, known as the Academy, as he seeks to win yet another game and earn himself a fleet. So it’s not just a repeat of book one, only in space. Rather, Golden Son has Darrow graduating from these “schools” and finally starting to plan and execute his revolution. Now what’s interesting about Golden Son is that we spend almost no time whatsoever with the lower Colors. That’s what the third book, Morning Star, is about. Rather, Golden Son is (like its name suggests) more about the Golds. We get to meet Octaviua au Lune, the sovereign of society, and witness how she rules society by pitting the various houses against each other. We see, too, in Darrow’s friend Roque and others how even the relatively GOOD Golds have been trapped within the system just as surely as the lower Colors. We witness what is probably the primary conflict of the series as a whole: Darrow struggling with how to deal with those who he KNOWS have good hearts or good intentions but who will be opposed to his revolution because they have bought into the system. Or indeed the opposite, Darrow’s internal conflict in making use of those who support his revolution, but who he knows have an evil heart and evil intentions. It’s that classic quandary of ‘Do the ends justify the means?’ In short, any who suggest the trilogy is just another shallow YA dystopian are simply not correct. While I thoroughly enjoyed Red Rising, to the point where I gave it a rare 5 stars, Golden Son is where the series really comes into its own. We get out of the rather isolated Institute and its Battle Royale plot, and escape into the universe at large. All that world-building really starts to pay dividends in Golden Son, which also maintains all the page-turning thrill of Red Rising. Five stars – great book. Read it. ...more |
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not set
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Apr 05, 2018
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Apr 05, 2018
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ebook
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1447273281
| 9781447273288
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| 4.30
| 137,183
| Jun 04, 2015
| Jun 04, 2015
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really liked it
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It has been said, in reference to the academy awards, that they’re more accurate if you replace the word ‘best’ with ‘most.’ It’s not the nuanced, sub
It has been said, in reference to the academy awards, that they’re more accurate if you replace the word ‘best’ with ‘most.’ It’s not the nuanced, subtle acting that wins, but the bold, intense performances that do. Not the precise cinematography, but the breath-taking. This criticism is especially true of more technical categories, like best special effects or best editing. The nominees and winners are not best, but MOST. Case in point would be the Bourne Ultimatum, which won best editing in 2008 and has one of the lowest all-time ASLs (average scene length) at about 2 seconds. Edits upon edits! By comparison, the average ASL of action films in the past twenty years is double that, at about 4 seconds, while the average ASL of all genre of films for the past twenty years is five times that, at 10 seconds. Well, I would apply a similar metric to the praise blurb, from Peter Hamilton, on this book’s front cover. He wrote, “The smartest evolutionary world-building you’ll ever read.” Smartest? Nah. Most? Yes, I could see that. So Children of the Lost is really two stories in one, but both stories begin (and end) in the same place. They begin at a terraforming project, far from the solar system, led by the arrogant Dr. Kern, which is, ah, improperly launched as a result of sabotage by some fanatical Luddites, who believed mankind’s technological might had put us too close to God. The story then splits. Narrative one follows a Generation/Ark Ship searching for a place to call home. Specifically, it follows the PoV of a Key Crew, a classicist (read: historian/linguist of the now extinct empire of humanity to which Dr. Kern belonged) named Holsten. Narrative two follows the evolution of the life on the terraforming planet, usually with each chapter representing a forward jump in time, to a more advanced state of evolution or civilization. The first narrative makes for an entertaining, if not exactly fresh, read (What do you expect to be the sources of conflict in a Generation Ship narrative? Crew Mutiny? Check. Madness? Check. Space battle? Check. Spaceship getting old and malfunctioning? Check.). But it is the second narrative which makes the book what it is and which elicited Hamilton’s praise that it’s the “smartest evolutionary world-building you’ll ever read.” And you know what? It’s very impressive. Since chapters usually jump forward in time, they feature different characters and conflicts, so it would have been very easy to lose the reader’s interest with them. But I never felt that way. The author Adrian Tchakovsky uses the neat trick of re-using names – Bianca, Fabian, Viola, Portia – to create a sense of continuity. And each chapter is like a self-contained story. So it’s really well done and a delight to read, but the SMARTEST I’ve ever read? Have to disagree with you there, Mr. Hamilton. The utmost problem is the point of view of these sections. Whereas Holsten’s point of view is rooted firmly in his character (to get technical, the author writes these sections in limited third person PoV, sometimes called ‘deep’ third person), there’s a very noticeable distance between the PoV and the narration of the evolutionary sections. They’re not from the PoV of Portia, Fabian, etc, so much as they are about them. Which feels like a missed opportunity. Part of the reason I read books – and science fiction in particular – is see the world from other perspectives. It’s fun, it’s interesting, and there’s simply no better method for improving empathy. And to have the opportunity to see from a truly alien perspective? That’s mind-shattering. One of my favorite short stories is “Empty” by Robert Reed, which is told from the perspective of a Machine AI. It felt authentic, real, an incredible feat of imagination and writing. You’re not going to get that here. You’re going to learn about this alternative civilization, but I at least never felt as if I truly got to know them – because of this distance in the PoV. And while there’s no denying the sheer imagination of the evolutionary world-building (example: this other civilization ends up using ants as a form of computation), it’s often unbelievable (example: giant ants acting as a form of computation) and in many cases, too heavily mirrors our own civilization. In particular, I started to get annoyed at the gender dynamic that serves as an on-going conflict in the evolutionary narrative. It’s topical sure, but it’s way too much on the nose. In this civilization, the roles are flipped (males are weaker and get abused by females), and you’ll often get quotes like, “...and Portia is not sure how capable [males] are of finer levels of thought and feeling.” And by ‘often’, I mean easily multiple times per chapter or even page. I mean, really, it goes on and on, again, to the point of annoyance, to the point of it becoming didactic rather than authentic. So, in summary, if we had a sort of academy awards for science fiction books, this guy would for sure get a nomination for “Best Evolutionary Sci-fi Book.” Children of Time is good, maybe even great, and you should definitely read it if you like science fiction and/or biology. But would it win? Not by my vote. When it comes to *smart* science fiction, compared to the sci-fi of a genius like Greg Egan, Children of Time is a step below. ...more |
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Mar 11, 2018
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Apr 05, 2018
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Mar 11, 2018
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Hardcover
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4.27
| 504,146
| Jan 28, 2014
| Jan 28, 2014
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it was amazing
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As with any new (& popular) book, Red Rising gets compared to other popular books, the most common of which is Hunger Games. Of the blurbs/praise on t
As with any new (& popular) book, Red Rising gets compared to other popular books, the most common of which is Hunger Games. Of the blurbs/praise on the inside cover, over half reference Katniss or Hunger Games. Half! Which I can’t deny is an apt comparison, as Red Rising’s primary setting is the Mars Institute, a brutal medieval training ground, where young people have been isolated from civilization and literally told to enslave and/or maim each other, until only one faction remains. So I get the comparison. But I don’t like it, and, in fact, I think it’s actually a rather poor one. See, I didn’t particularly care for Hunger Games. You could say I found it a little bland. Yes, bland. Its style and voice were too… practical. I felt it sacrificed too much on the altar of pacing and thrill. Anything that didn’t keep the pages turning, the heart brimming with fevered expectation was excised. But I *like* the quiet moments, those little oases where the characters can reveal their humanity. That’s why I believe an action movie’s quality is determined more by the power of its still moments than by the frenzy of its kinetic moments. I’d even go so far as to claim the entire purpose of those kinematic moments is to lend power to the quiet moments by way of contrast. What would Matrix be like, without Neo’s conversation with the Oracle? Aliens without Ripley’s interactions with Newt? Gladiator without Maximus’s many recollections of his family? Now I’m not saying Hunger Games doesn’t have its quiet moments, it’s just that, to me, they felt empty of humanity. Because when it comes right down to it, what is Hunger Games really about? Why was it written? When Suzanne Collins sat down to write her trilogy, what motivated her? What message did she really want to portray? How did she want her readers to be transformed by the reading of her book? I struggle to find a satisfying answer to these. You can talk about the Districts as an analogy for third world exploitation and you can talk about the Games themselves as an analogy for the cannibalistic nature of celebrity, but there’s really not much in the actual text to chew on. Rather, I suspect Suzanne Collins set out to write a good story, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just, well, to quote from Red Rising’s sequel: “Anything that believes only in itself cannot go happily into the night.” Ask me, Hunger Games is about Hunger Games. But the best stories are about more than themselves and their characters. The best stories, no matter how fantastical their settings and heroes, somehow become about us, our world, our lives, our struggles. So in terms of Red Rising’s readability, Hunger Games is a good comparison. Red Rising and its sequels are eminently enjoyable to read. I finished the whole trilogy in about nine reading sessions. But in terms of what Red Rising is actually about, this book and Hunger Games could not be more different. Hunger Games is thrill. The end. But Red Rising’s thrill is a tool to explore deeper themes. So let me suggest an alternative comparison: The Count of Monte Cristo. In the Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantes, naïve and powerless, is wronged in such a way that leaves no ambiguity about the evilness of what has been done to him. Through a bit of luck, he gains the power to get revenge upon those who abused him so cruelly. Basically, he becomes Batman. But – and this is what makes The Count so much more than a simple revenge tale – as the story progresses, it begins to focus less on the revenge and more on Edmond’s internal struggle to maintain his goodness. The worst wrong done to Dantes isn’t that his beloved fiancé is stolen, his father killed by means of destitution, and over a decade of his youth lost in prison, it’s that all this evil has threatened to transform his own good heart into one of wrath and vengeance. The Count himself recognizes this when he says, “Fool that I am, that I did not tear out my heart the day I resolved to revenge myself.” And that’s one of the great struggles of life, isn’t it? I daresay most people start out as fundamentally decent human beings, but how do we maintain our decency in the face of the corruption, greed, waste, thoughtlessness, and selfishness that we daily witness? To quote Raymond Chandler: “The tragedy of life is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean.” This is exactly how Red Rising plays out. The protagonist Darrow is a Red, the lowest Color (read: caste) in an extremely stratified hierarchical society. He’s a miner of Mars, a so-called Helldiver, and he loves his young wife Eo more than anything. But then because of the most minute of infractions, he loses all. Yet, as with Edmond Dantes, a bit of fortune allows him the means to revenge himself. Darrow is transformed from the lowest Color, a Red, into the highest color, a Gold. And with such power, he begins his quest for revenge, the first step of which is to graduate from the Institute as a Peerless Scarred, the elite of the Gold. But Darrow will discover that not ALL Golds are evil, and he will struggle to balance his hatred with his humanity… Humanity is a good word for this book because Red Rising and its sequels are just so BURSTING with it, far beyond most of the other books it’s compared to. I’d even go so far as to liken Red Rising’s sense of humanity to that of a Hayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli) film. Take Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke), for instance. That film is my favorite: I’ve watched it every year since I first saw it when I was thirteen years old because every time I rewatch it, I feel refreshed by its subtle beauty, its true and yet uplifting depiction of humanity. Mononoke Hime has no villains in it. There are people who do selfish, greedy, evil things, yes. But they’re always portrayed sympathetically. BECAUSE THAT IS HOW PEOPLE ARE. It is just as Sirius Black tells Harry: “We’ve all got both light and dark inside us.” And so it is with Red Rising. It contains intense amounts of violence, cruelty, darkness. But always the author (and Darrow, especially in the later books) is trying to find the love, the kindness, the light as well. Consider this speech from the man that Darrow hates almost above all (this is from book two): “I do not truly fight because I want to be king or Emperor or whatever word you slap above my name in the history texts. The universe does not notice us, Darrow. There is no supreme being waiting to end existence when the last man breathes his final breath. Man will end. That is the fact accepted, but never discussed. And the universe to continue without care. Does that sound like a villain’s speech to you? That’s why I adore Red Rising so and wholly recommend it. Like many of the books with which it is compared, it’s not always easy to read because it takes such an unflinching look at the dark side of humanity. But unlike so many of these others, it manages the marvelous feat of never losing its core of hope, optimism, and friendship. And that’s a wonderful thing. **** [P.S.: I picked up Red Rising and read it and only AFTER I finished did I learn that it is considered “Young Adult.” HAHAHAHAHA. Red Rising may not be Ulysses, but it is not YA. I know what I'm talking about, here. The first book I wrote was YA. For a year, I read nothing except YA. Red Rising is not YA. It is marketed as YA because putting a book in the YA section is gonna sell you a ton of copies. But Red Rising is no more YA than Dune is. A young protagonist does not a YA book make. In fact, after my year of YA reading, I got where I loathed 99% of it because so much of it is thematically identical, the same old coming-of-age, bildungsroman, ‘Oh I’m a special snowflake but actually I’m not,” “I want to fit in but I want to be own person too!” and, of course, the love triangle bullshit. Darrow starts out the book MARRIED and WORKING FULL TIME AS A MINER. There is no special snowflake bullshit. There is no “omgosh I just want to fit in.” There is no love triangle. Red Rising and its sequels are adult science fiction with a protagonist who is biologically a young adult but otherwise not at all a young adult. In the Red mining society in which he grows up, he is practically middle aged at the start of the book. And that is how he behaves 90% of the time. So let the marketers say what they wish, but here, we readers, amongst ourselves, let us call the thing for what it is, and not call it for what it isn't.] ...more |
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Mar 08, 2018
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Mar 08, 2018
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Mar 07, 2018
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Hardcover
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1594205388
| 9781594205385
| 1594205388
| 3.91
| 37,840
| Jun 18, 2013
| Jun 18, 2013
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liked it
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I think a lot about language because, in my view of the world, almost everything is a language. I use phrases like “the language of dance” and think o
I think a lot about language because, in my view of the world, almost everything is a language. I use phrases like “the language of dance” and think of wine as communicating its flavor to our senses. I refer to math & science as “the language of the universe” and consider, for example, a photon’s interaction with an electron to be a form of communication. Honestly, when I think of an electron emitting a photon because it was excited, I really do visualize this little spark singing and dancing, “I’m so excited, I just can’t hide it, la la la.” That’s why, for me, a physics equation is akin to a magical incantation, while engineering is the ritual that undertakes the proper implementation of that incantation. I mean, a wizard consults a book of magic and then draws a pentagram and empowers it with candles/fire, while an electrical engineer consults a book of physics and then draws circuit traces and empowers it with electricity. Are they really that different? In fact, I find it illuminating to draw an analogy between the languages of the universe and those we’ve invented to control a computer system. The machine language would be the language of God/quanta (that is, the smallest units of reality) and is currently beyond our grasp. Our best science and math is an assembly language to describe this machine language, while natural language (i.e. spoken language like English) is a very high level language that allows different operating systems (i.e. different human brains) to share ideas. Thus, language underlies our every interaction with reality, and natural language especially is humanity’s greatest invention, a Dewey Decimal system for our brains whose value cannot be overstated. Lexicon has a similar appreciation for the power of words: in it, language is a primal force, such that certain phrases have the power to ‘hack’ another person’s mind. Basically, mind control. Those who study and wield these magical words are known as Poets, and the entire book centers around them. There’s two narratives here and in good thriller fashion, they intertwine and eventually merge into one cohesive whole. In the first narrative, we follow Emily, a homeless girl, who gets invited to the Poet school. In the second, we follow Wil and Tom, which begins as a high octane kidnapping, transforms into a high octane chase, and basically continues along in high octane fashion until the very end. This book is right up at my alley and fulfills my two Prime Criteria for what makes a ‘Good Read’: is it entertaining? Is it intelligent? Basically, a good book needs to work on both the superficial level and the deeper level. It needs to have thrill in it, suspense. It needs to be an enjoyable entertaining experience. There should be a character to root for. The plot should have mysteries to uncover. The sentences should not be inedible. But there also needs to be more in there. A good book needs to teach, to transform the mind of the reader. That’s my problem with all of these superhero movies Marvel and DC keep throwing out. Sure they’re entertaining to watch, but there is usually zero depth or complexity in them. There’s no take-away, no transformative power. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen em all, really. Lexicon does a good job with both spheres. On one hand, the story offers a split narrative that keeps the story moving, with a nice balance of revelation and pacing, and even a little subversion (view spoiler)[[Emily Ruff’s transformation from protagonist to villain was a nice twist, though her ultimate return to protagonist was, well, not. I mean, the power of love? What??? It was on the order of the latest Star Wars, “We’ll win this war not by killing what we hate, but by saving what we love.” Uhhhhhhhhh… yeah no. Whoever wrote that line has never been within a hundred thousand miles of a war. Which is rather impressive, given the Earth’s radius is less than that. *shrug* But I digress.] (hide spoiler)]. But then the premise, the idea of language as a form of neural programming, provides plenty to ponder. Because, after all, that really is accurate, isn’t it? Sure you can’t utter a single phrase of nonsense words to a complete stranger and magically take control of their mind, but you can bend their actions. Say, to a homeless person, “I have twenty dollars for you, if you’ll follow me” and see what effect that has. Say, to a child, “you are a princess” over and over, and see what effect that has. That’s the point of science fiction, to take a core truth of the world and exaggerate it in such a way as to illuminate it for easy exploration. Lexicon does that. That’s not to say Lexicon is a perfect book, but most of its flaws are more about omissions than actual weaknesses in the text. That is, there’s little to find in the text and say, “This is poorly done.” Rather, there’s a sense that it could have been much more. As other reviewers have done, I’d compare Lexicon with Snow Crash, which shares the theme of language as neural programming. But Snow Crash has an excess and joy in it that Lexicon lacks – such as the utterly absurd (and utterly wonderful) opening of Hiro Protagonist as a badass pizza delivery man. Sure Snow Crash can be quite polarizing, but that’s the sign of a good book, that it’s sharp enough to divide. So Lexicon easy to recommend to basically anyone, but I don’t quite think it reaches the height of five stars. It entertained and illuminated, but, to use the language of the book, it did not compromise me. It was not a bare word, not a member of the Ur-language, the primal and most potent of all books. But it still had a fair bit of magic in it. [Edit: About a month or two after writing my review, I retroactively subtracted a star from 4 to 3. I found it didn't hold up as well and become more forgettable than I typically find 4 star reads. I'm not going to get technical but in basic terms, the writing didn't have as much joy, zest, or imagination in it as higher rated books.] ...more |
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Feb 15, 2018
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4.21
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May 23, 2019
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May 23, 2019
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4.05
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liked it
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May 23, 2019
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May 23, 2019
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4.42
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it was amazing
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Apr 2019
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Mar 28, 2019
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4.41
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liked it
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Feb 14, 2019
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Mar 14, 2019
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4.08
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really liked it
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Jan 20, 2019
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Jan 02, 2019
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4.02
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really liked it
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Dec 28, 2018
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Dec 28, 2018
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4.06
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it was ok
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Nov 15, 2018
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Oct 29, 2018
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4.11
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really liked it
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Sep 19, 2018
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Jul 28, 2018
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4.13
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liked it
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Jul 26, 2018
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Jul 26, 2018
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4.04
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really liked it
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Jul 26, 2018
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Jul 26, 2018
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4.17
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it was ok
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Jul 26, 2018
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Jul 06, 2018
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4.34
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liked it
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Jul 03, 2018
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Jul 03, 2018
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4.62
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it was amazing
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Jun 2018
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Jun 01, 2018
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4.66
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it was amazing
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Jun 2018
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Jun 01, 2018
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4.76
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it was amazing
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Jun 2018
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Jun 01, 2018
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4.52
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it was amazing
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May 20, 2018
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May 20, 2018
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4.47
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it was amazing
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Apr 05, 2018
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Apr 05, 2018
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4.30
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really liked it
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Apr 05, 2018
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Mar 11, 2018
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4.27
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it was amazing
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Mar 08, 2018
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Mar 07, 2018
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3.91
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liked it
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Feb 15, 2018
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Feb 15, 2018
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