I've been a Stephenson fan forever but I feel like he's really gone downhill over the years. He used to get caught up in an idea and cram it into a decent story and the ideas used to be fairly broad ('nanotechnology', for example, in Diamond Age, or 'cryptography' in Cryptonomicon). Since Anathem every book has felt like the ideas are much smaller and more obvious while the supporting story is weaker and thinner. And you can clearly see where, in the process of writing some of his more recent novels, he either lost interest in one topic and moved on to another or else ran out of ideas about the first one. You could chop up Seveneves, Reamde, or Fall into distinct chunks according to "thing characters talk about for pages at a time" and anything from the previous chunk is largely forgotten.
I think I disagree on the change point but agree with in general. Though it kinda doesn't apply to the whole Baroque cycle stuff, which still feels like prime Stephenson to me. The later stuff, including DODO, just doesn't have that same magic to it.
I may be misremembering the ordering of his bibliography and I'm not sure where I'd put the cut-over (Anathem is just the most recent one I can recall really enjoying) but New Stephenson really doesn't feel like Old Stephenson in some fundamental way.
Though I haven't re-read any of his old novels in a while. Maybe my tastes have just changed over the years.
Pretty sure even younger-me would have thought Fall was a travesty, though.
I've been a Stephenson fan forever but I feel like he's really gone downhill over the years. He used to get caught up in an idea and cram it into a decent story and the ideas used to be fairly broad ('nanotechnology', for example, in Diamond Age, or 'cryptography' in Cryptonomicon). Since Anathem every book has felt like the ideas are much smaller and more obvious while the supporting story is weaker and thinner. And you can clearly see where, in the process of writing some of his more recent novels, he either lost interest in one topic and moved on to another or else ran out of ideas about the first one. You could chop up Seveneves, Reamde, or Fall into distinct chunks according to "thing characters talk about for pages at a time" and anything from the previous chunk is largely forgotten.
I think I disagree on the change point but agree with in general. Though it kinda doesn't apply to the whole Baroque cycle stuff, which still feels like prime Stephenson to me. The later stuff, including DODO, just doesn't have that same magic to it.
I may be misremembering the ordering of his bibliography and I'm not sure where I'd put the cut-over (Anathem is just the most recent one I can recall really enjoying) but New Stephenson really doesn't feel like Old Stephenson in some fundamental way.
Though I haven't re-read any of his old novels in a while. Maybe my tastes have just changed over the years.
Pretty sure even younger-me would have thought Fall was a travesty, though.
So Anathem is the sticking point for me. I thought it was great, yes the vocab thing is annoying but there is an actual reason for it and all that. Looking it up, after that was some "okay" books and just a sorta steady downwards slant. Mongoliad/Reamde were okay though not a thing I'd ever bother to reread. (I think Reamde gets a little credit as prophetic sci-fi with the whole cryptolocker ransom plot.) After that they were like parts of good books without all the rest of the work done for them.
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I never got super hard into reading his stuff. I think I started with Snow Crash, then read Anathem, and finally Seveneves (also Good Omens, but that was only half his), and I always felt like his books had some interesting points/theories/things to explore, but I don't know how much I really enjoyed his books by the time they were done.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I've been a Stephenson fan forever but I feel like he's really gone downhill over the years. He used to get caught up in an idea and cram it into a decent story and the ideas used to be fairly broad ('nanotechnology', for example, in Diamond Age, or 'cryptography' in Cryptonomicon). Since Anathem every book has felt like the ideas are much smaller and more obvious while the supporting story is weaker and thinner. And you can clearly see where, in the process of writing some of his more recent novels, he either lost interest in one topic and moved on to another or else ran out of ideas about the first one. You could chop up Seveneves, Reamde, or Fall into distinct chunks according to "thing characters talk about for pages at a time" and anything from the previous chunk is largely forgotten.
I think I disagree on the change point but agree with in general. Though it kinda doesn't apply to the whole Baroque cycle stuff, which still feels like prime Stephenson to me. The later stuff, including DODO, just doesn't have that same magic to it.
I may be misremembering the ordering of his bibliography and I'm not sure where I'd put the cut-over (Anathem is just the most recent one I can recall really enjoying) but New Stephenson really doesn't feel like Old Stephenson in some fundamental way.
Though I haven't re-read any of his old novels in a while. Maybe my tastes have just changed over the years.
Pretty sure even younger-me would have thought Fall was a travesty, though.
So Anathem is the sticking point for me. I thought it was great, yes the vocab thing is annoying but there is an actual reason for it and all that. Looking it up, after that was some "okay" books and just a sorta steady downwards slant. Mongoliad/Reamde were okay though not a thing I'd ever bother to reread. (I think Reamde gets a little credit as prophetic sci-fi with the whole cryptolocker ransom plot.) After that they were like parts of good books without all the rest of the work done for them.
I really disliked a fair chunk of Reamde. Reamde spoilers:
The international espionage plot was fun and I enjoyed Xula and Chongor (spelling probably incorrect on both) as characters. The ransomeware thing was prophetic and I'll give him credit there. The rest of the book, though, was just full of things that pissed me off.
* I didn't like anything about Dodge. Stephenson seems to want us to really like this guy but nothing about his life seems realistic or relatable and he just constantly comes off as a giant asshole that everyone loves for no obvious reason. I didn't like the rest of his family, either, though that didn't really become an issue until reading Fall.
* C3 and... the geology guy... Pluto? were the sort of stock nerd characters I'd have thought Stephenson was better than writing.
* Everything about the MMO was the sort of arm-chair video game design that I can see making sense to someone who has a vague, passing familiarity with game design and MMOs in general but was just so brutally dumb that it knocked me out of the narrative every time they started talking about it. I could go on for a looong time about how little sense it made.
* The worst part being that the pivotal plot contrivance for the driving narrative about the ransomeware completely invalidated the I-don't-know-how-many-pages dedicated to talking about how important it was that material scarcity in the game world was realistic. Ransomeware obviously only works if you can exchange the game currency for real world currency and the instant that becomes possible as a mechanism of the game world it makes the whole "you have to find and mine the gold out of the ground! the economy is based on the realistic availability of these resources!" thing bullshit since the economy is subject to the whims of people creating and destroying in-game currency at-will and because it's processed by the game's infrastructure it makes no sense that criminals would be using that as a payment mechanism for ransomware (or anything else illegal). If it'd been a matter of criminals collecting the money in-game then selling it to whales in-game via a 3rd party exchange site not related to the game company then fine, that's still pretty iffy from an anonymity standpoint but it at least preserves the whole built up importance of the game world's resource distribution and matches how virtual currency was being bought and sold in the early days of MMOs. But no, Stephenson had to come up with a 3rd-act "clever" way of building that capability into the game itself, blowing the entire concept out of the water.
It probably doesn't help that I'm a software engineer. I imagine if I were a spy or a soldier or something I'd be a lot more pissed off at that part of the book instead.
My biggest problem with his recent work is that it all just feels...lazy, I guess. Like there are a shit-ton of pages there but so much of it feels like, "I want to talk about this now! How can I make my characters talk about this?" rather than any effort being put in to weave narratives around the topics. He's never been good at character work but Seveneves, for example, I couldn't tell you a thing about anyone in it except for the one character previously discussed up-thread. I remember the major ideas being, "What happens to Earth if the moon explodes?", "Orbital mechanics are really, really hard!", and "There's this weird quirk about chains a European physicist noticed but nobody cared much about and I think it's really cool!"
I'm listening to Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll while on my commute. It's made the idea of a branching existence go from "oh isn't that a cute little idea" to "oh this is real oh no." I understand mathematical concepts but I can't really verify their applicability in physics, so when he goes over the math I'm just "yeah, those are words I know." But I'm just going to go out on a limb and say a Caltech Professor has his math right on a theory that's been vetted for the last 100 years and I'm not the guy to question him on that anyway.
What convinced me are the logical inferences he is making. I've tried looking up counterpoints and I listened to something from a philosopher about how the everettian interpretation doesn't acknowledge probability in any way, but the book is pretty convincing in showing that the probability issue isn't an issue. But in the way that it convinces me that the probability issue isn't an issue has me a little fucked up. It seems to be basically invoking the anthropic principle, saying that the pattern that probability creates is a kind of illusion that we don't have to chain our physical theories to. BUT WE'RE THAT PATTERN!
Anyway, this is just something I'm going put on ice until my eventual mid-life crisis.
I'm listening to Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll while on my commute. It's made the idea of a branching existence go from "oh isn't that a cute little idea" to "oh this is real oh no." I understand mathematical concepts but I can't really verify their applicability in physics, so when he goes over the math I'm just "yeah, those are words I know." But I'm just going to go out on a limb and say a Caltech Professor has his math right on a theory that's been vetted for the last 100 years and I'm not the guy to question him on that anyway.
What convinced me are the logical inferences he is making. I've tried looking up counterpoints and I listened to something from a philosopher about how the everettian interpretation doesn't acknowledge probability in any way, but the book is pretty convincing in showing that the probability issue isn't an issue. But in the way that it convinces me that the probability issue isn't an issue has me a little fucked up. It seems to be basically invoking the anthropic principle, saying that the pattern that probability creates is a kind of illusion that we don't have to chain our physical theories to. BUT WE'RE THAT PATTERN!
Anyway, this is just something I'm going put on ice until my eventual mid-life crisis.
Spoilering because it's science, not books, other than being related to this book:
The Everett Interpretation of QM is an interesting beast. It isn't directly testable so it's ripe for being dismissed as "meaningless", "not science", "just an idea", or whatever but the thing about it is that it:
* Matches all observations of quantum mechanical behavior
* Requires no unobserved properties of the universe to exist for it to be accurate
Any alternative interpretation of QM, where "wavefunctions collapse" as in the Copenhagen one or whatever terminology leaves a superposed quantum state not superposed anymore at some point without direct interaction requires some kind of explanation. Evertt doesn't, because states in that interpretation don't change except when acted upon...just like every other part of the physical world.
There's nothing anthropic about about it, though there is a sort of hand-wavey bit buried in there in a place where people don't normally see it since they get hung up on the "many-worlds" thing and go off about parallel universes or whatever.
I haven't read the book you're talking about but I did go through a PhD program in physics with a focus on condensed matter, which is mostly QM. We (as in humanity) aren't integral to physics in any way in Everett's interpretation. Probability doesn't go away. Any system in the quantum paradigm exists as a probability distribution of states. "Probability" in this case doesn't mean what it means in the macroscopic paradigm; it means the density of states in a given "place" in state-space (a multi-dimensional, conceptual representation of the system at hand where the 'directions' are ways the system could exist and each 'place' or point corresponds to a specific, discrete state of the system). Things we'd call 'likely' (for example, all the air in a room being basically uniformly distributed through the volume) have a lot of states corresponding to them (you can swap the air particles around all kinds of ways and end up with 'basically uniformly distributed') while things we'd consider 'unlikely' have very few states (all the air being compressed into a 1 meter cube in the corner - there are still ways to switch them around in that cube but a lot fewer than the whole room).
Everything in reality is a probability distribution. All those distributions interact and the interaction produces new distributions. We humans, in as much as a 'human' is a meaningful designation for the enormously complicated system it represents when talking about it at the quantum level, are probability distributions comprised of the overlapping, interacting probabilities of all the particles within our personal system.
The somewhat hand-wavey bit comes in when you talk about how that makes it look like wavefunctions collapse. Your system interacts with the system of the thing we're observing (because your system interacts with every other system in the universe, eventually) and because 'you' - your consciousness - occupies a specific point in the state-space of the "You + Experiment" system, "you" see only one of the states of the experiment's system. I'm not sure it's really hand-wavey because it makes sense to me that whatever you want to call consciousness, it logically must be a physical system and all physical systems are representable as probability distributions across potential states and those superpositions become coupled to the superposition of states of the systems around us. It looks hand-wavey because we have no real definition for consciousness. A lot seems to go into making you you. And it seems weird to consider your consciousness at any given moment as even having the possibility to exist in a single, finite, discrete state among a finite-but-enormous-beyond-counting number of potential states. But, assuming it does, it makes perfect sense that any one state of your consciousness would couple to some number of states of an observed system and that each of those Other System States 1 - N, combined with this one specific state of You, call it A, generates a state "Other X + You A" for X = 1, ..., N.
Now, I'd say that's precisely anti-anthropic. It treats your consciousness as indistinguishable from the air in a room or a cloud of electrons in a metal, in so far as it interacts with other systems.
Some potentially dumb questions from a non-physicist:
The the part about probability he seemed to be talking about a single electron, which he described as elementary. Why isn't the probability of all possible states of the electron evenly distributed when it isn't part of a system? In a branching universe all states will come to be realized, but how is the information of the probability of each of those states preserved? Doesn't there need to some kind of mechanism for probability to explain it in elementary untangled particles?
He threw in some stuff about the "thickness" of each branch and I'm willing to go with it, I'm guessing that's the point you are conveying as well. Maybe it has something to do with elementary particles not just being discrete particles but expressions of fields, and that's hard to explain to people like me so he is just hand waving it away.
His points about testability were pretty solid. I recommend the book to those taking this topic seriously because he is not watering it down too much, it seems to be aimed at your average University physicist.
Some potentially dumb questions from a non-physicist:
The the part about probability he seemed to be talking about a single electron, which he described as elementary. Why isn't the probability of all possible states of the electron evenly distributed when it isn't part of a system? In a branching universe all states will come to be realized, but how is the information of the probability of each of those states preserved? Doesn't there need to some kind of mechanism for probability to explain it in elementary untangled particles?
Electrons are fundamental particles but particles, as such, don't exist. An electron is a high spot in an electron field, which describes (basically) the probability of an electron being. Quarks are also fundamental particles which are just excitations of a quark field. A proton is the interaction of some peaks in the quark field but can be considered, for some applications, a discrete 'thing'. You can talk about the shape of the quark field overall, representing those interacting peaks, but it's not meaningful to talk about the probability distribution of one of those quarks because none of them exist alone. The existence of other ones modifies the overall shape of the system and the only possible states are several-quarks-interacting ones.
I had started to type up something about a universe containing nothing except a single electron but it's surprisingly tricky. I guess it would be at least approximately everywhere at once with equal probability, though. In our universe no electron is ever truly free. Even the deepest reaches of intergalactic space, which are about as empty as you can get, are still awash in fields. And the existence of other field excitations in the universe gives us some meaning for 'distance' and the speed of light some meaning for 'time' such that a single electron can't exist everywhere at once in basically any size volume with equal likelihood.
I'll have to check out the book, though. I've gotten pretty rusty at explaining my love for quantum mechanics, apparently.
PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
+5
Options
knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
See, I enjoyed the first half of REAMDE because it was way out of my wheelhouse.
The second half? Motherfucker set it in my backyard, changed all the geography, and made heroes out of the sort of people who in reality are a bunch of racist patriarchal anti-government nutjobs.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Some potentially dumb questions from a non-physicist:
The the part about probability he seemed to be talking about a single electron, which he described as elementary. Why isn't the probability of all possible states of the electron evenly distributed when it isn't part of a system? In a branching universe all states will come to be realized, but how is the information of the probability of each of those states preserved? Doesn't there need to some kind of mechanism for probability to explain it in elementary untangled particles?
Electrons are fundamental particles but particles, as such, don't exist. An electron is a high spot in an electron field, which describes (basically) the probability of an electron being. Quarks are also fundamental particles which are just excitations of a quark field. A proton is the interaction of some peaks in the quark field but can be considered, for some applications, a discrete 'thing'. You can talk about the shape of the quark field overall, representing those interacting peaks, but it's not meaningful to talk about the probability distribution of one of those quarks because none of them exist alone. The existence of other ones modifies the overall shape of the system and the only possible states are several-quarks-interacting ones.
I had started to type up something about a universe containing nothing except a single electron but it's surprisingly tricky. I guess it would be at least approximately everywhere at once with equal probability, though. In our universe no electron is ever truly free. Even the deepest reaches of intergalactic space, which are about as empty as you can get, are still awash in fields. And the existence of other field excitations in the universe gives us some meaning for 'distance' and the speed of light some meaning for 'time' such that a single electron can't exist everywhere at once in basically any size volume with equal likelihood.
I'll have to check out the book, though. I've gotten pretty rusty at explaining my love for quantum mechanics, apparently.
Not that rusty, I think you just did the trick.
I think us layman just aren't used to thinking of fields because physics is just not described that way in public by popular scientists. Or maybe it is, I dunno. I certainly haven't fully internalized it yet.
Stephenson novels have always felt like they were written by a guy who just read a wikipedia page he found really interesting and now he's gonna stop the story to tell you all about it.
I had a hard time with suspension of disbelief in Seveneves, that the situation as set up by the end of the second part was actually in any way survivable. It just reached indy getting nuked in a fridge levels to me.
Especially since none of the hard parts were really explained or shown. It was basically
A series of disasters eliminates all of humanity but a handful of women trapped in a space station held together by duct tape and bubblegum —-> ???? (Some handwavey bullshit involving genetics and robots) —-> Future Space People
So it is Sci-Fi so I'm more willing to let some of the silly science bullshit go but the human elements kill it for me.
The crazy cannibal revolutionary murderess lady being around and having a fuck ton of children? Yeah, no. She gets fucking spaced. There is no way they can ever trust her, they only have six people! Do they devote 17% of their labor resources to constantly watching this murderer? She doesn't repent or even acknowledge that maybe she was wrong to lead a no-nothing revolution and murder like some double digit percentage of the human population.
yeah, but young people on facebook are fucking awful though. Seriously. They suck so much. It's an incredibly important point to drive home. They really do all pretty much deserve to die for not being Gault-esq libertarian bootstrapping geniuses and letting themselves be swayed by the views of the leftist social media elites. They don't even know morse code.
I never got super hard into reading his stuff. I think I started with Snow Crash, then read Anathem, and finally Seveneves (also Good Omens, but that was only half his), and I always felt like his books had some interesting points/theories/things to explore, but I don't know how much I really enjoyed his books by the time they were done.
That's the wrong Neil. That's Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. :P
They moistly come out at night, moistly.
+13
Options
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I never got super hard into reading his stuff. I think I started with Snow Crash, then read Anathem, and finally Seveneves (also Good Omens, but that was only half his), and I always felt like his books had some interesting points/theories/things to explore, but I don't know how much I really enjoyed his books by the time they were done.
That's the wrong Neil. That's Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. :P
For some reason I thought that was Neil and Neal.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Remembered that a new The Expanse novel came out last year, finally getting around to reading. I get that people make dumb decisions all the time, and I feel like this decision is likely in character, but the stupidity of the decision is still very aggravating.
Which one? There were a couple of poor choices made in that book. I'm guessing you mean (Expanse spoilers for whatever the title of the last book was):
Duarte deciding it's a great plan to play a game of brinksmanship/puppy-scolding with entities of unknown nature and intelligence about whom your only solid knowledge is that they:
1) can break the laws of known physics apparently at-will
2) already wiped out a species who were incomprehensibly more advanced than your own
It did seem in keeping with his attitude as Space Dictator Supreme but was pretty fucking stupid any way you look at it.
Unrelatedly: I just finished Fluency by Jennifer Wells. It was not great. The premise was strong (an early NASA discovered an alien ship lying dormant in the outer system and the whole space program was basically a cover for developing the tech necessary to go visit it) but then it devolves into people acting stupidly at length. I picked up the sequel hoping that maybe things would improve but so far no dice. May give up on it and go read This is How You Lose a Time War instead.
People keep recommending The Three-Body Problem to me. It won a Hugo but then so did All the Birds in the Sky and I think that was one of the worst books I've read in recent memory. The amazon reviews lead me to suspect I won't like it but I'm still maybe willing to give it a go. Anybody read it to comment on whether the writing really is of middling quality and/or the central conceit is infuriatingly silly?
Hmmm
Three Body Problem is a pretty unique book. The writing is functional; the sci fi ideas range from interesting and cool to real dumb but fun--they span 'hard' scifi and more implausible stuff, but I don't care about the plausibility as long as it isn't tonally jarring and still supports the story. The book overall is intriguing and stays with you.
I thought it had a pretty good portrayal of physicists in it, and some striking imagery.
That said, I thought All The Birds In The Sky was enjoyable and stuck with me strongly despite being kinda medium-written/not amazing writing. So probably we have very different criteria and my recommendation is no good here!
also look up the 'particle in a box' scenario if you are having trouble thinking about an electron alone. It's a classic intro physics or chemistry problem and the math is accessible and nice.
The last book I finished is The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a poem in prose about a guy and his kid traveling in an immediately post-apocalyptic devastated US. It has a lot of extremely tender dad feelings (emotionally manipulative but so well written you accept it), a lot of visual snapshots and impressions of their struggle, rising and breaking tension about survival and danger and starvation. I don’t like these themes at all—not into survival stuff (also a problem with the NK Jemisin stone books), not into innocent kid full of goodness or whatever—but it is really beautifully written and gripping so I liked it (and it made me cry on metro). The other McCarthy books I read were Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men; I like No Country for Old Men best because it’s a fun violent action story. The Road second best because it’s interesting stylistically and moving. Blood Meridian is hard to understand so it’s at the bottom ;_;
I’ve read some people kind of cruelly mocking McCarthy’s style on twitter and it irritates me. It’s amazingly good writing and so unique. So specific and brief glimpses, and driving terse sentence structure with extremely rich vocabulary. Lots of colors and visuals. Recommended if you’re interested in writing for writing’s sake.
Book thread, I am getting excited about the Dune movie because it's Denis Villeneuve doing more sci fi, but I've never read the book. Keeping in mind that I really need the writing to be dripping in style to hold my attention (my favourite authors are William Gibson, Cormac McCarthy, and Raymond Chandler), is Dune worth reading or should I just wait for the movie?
It's not especially stylish prose (everything thinks a lot in italics), but it's not badly written. And the premise, story and setting are all pretty fascinating stuff.
Dune is an undeniable giant of the sci-fi genre. If you are into sci-fi, it's probably worth reading on that account. Just to get the memes and references alone.
In terms of quality, it's a book that brimming with interesting ideas. Many of which have been shamelessly copied over the years but not in a way that diminishes the original in any way, at least imo.
In terms of actual writing and story and the like, at least imo, I've always thought it's pretty poor honestly. You can sort of divide it into 3 sections and the first section is honestly kinda dire imo in terms of writing. The middle section is by far the best and the writing quality and storytelling pick up a decent amount. The final section is a bit of a step down and the ending feels very abrupt.
IMO overall worth reading as a sci-fi classic if you are into the genre, lots of good ideas and an interesting story in the abstract, but it's shaky at best in terms of prose and storytelling.
The rest of the series, which is kind of incomplete depending on where you wanna stop, is a whole other kettle of fish too.
I did not even make it to the "good part" of Seveneves. I found the orbital mechanics obsession tiresome.
You chose wisely
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
+2
Options
VanguardBut now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
edited January 2020
I finished Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer
It took a moment to find my footing but once I did I blasted off to the end (read 160 pages yesterday).
This is the kind of weird fiction I am here for: extremely strong concept exploded by weird postmodern textual eccentricities.
Vandermeer’s writing always feels more poetic than the usual weird sci-fi and Dead Astronauts is maybe the book that leans in the most (and not just because there are actual poems sprinkled into the text). The use of repetition (with and without variation) is key to unlocking the book, especially in the later sections when you might be reading the same cluster of lines for 5 or so pages.
I want to reread this again now that I know what I’m looking for but the book still does the Vandermeer thing where whatever normal looks like (even if it is decidedly NOT NORMAL) is established, subverted, and then things get prodigiously weird without that foreknowledge going into it.
Vanguard on
+1
Options
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
Finished Quantum Garden yesterday. It was a rather interesting novel. It kept me fairly well captivated.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Grudgeblessed is the mind too small for doubtRegistered Userregular
Hello again book thread, it's been so long, and I've read so much. I will have to do multiple small posts, I think.
Some general agreements on a few recent posts:
Joe Abercrombie is great, love all of his books - they are one of the few fantasy series (aside from Tolkien) that I've actually reread. His new series has potential, looking forward to the second one (should be out soon, right?)
The Expanse series keep delivering - I agree with one of the main themes (of all the books) being people making bad decisions and things going rapidly and inexorably down the shitter. But there is a black sense of humor there as well, so everything is not all grimdark (hmm, very much like Joe Abercrombie, I sense a theme).
The Broken Earth trilogy was good - I understand that it won all the prizes because it's very uniqe, however... I enjoyed the first one very much, it had a great sense of mystery and you could tell there were untold stories behind the characters. But as the mysteries were revealed and the world was (at least partly) explained in the second and third books it kinda lost a little of what made the first one so great. I dunno, kinda like the Matrix... I probably would have been happier only reading/watching the first one.
Started reading The Three Body Problem, but it never really captured me. Never made it past the first few revolution flashbacks. Put it down in favor for other things, but since people keep recommending it maybe I'll give it another try at some point.
A long way to a small angry planet - delightful. Feelgood sci-fi novel where teams and relationships are more important than guns, spaceships and brooding, lone heroes. Will definitely pick up the sequel at some point.
And current reading - picked up The Traitor Baru Cormorant, on recommendation from the thread. Yay, another fantasy series featuring banking! (read Daniel Abraham's Dagger and Coin series a while ago, and enjoyed that one a lot). Traitor is good so far, nice take on colonialism and empire politics - however I have one niggling annoyance; the names! They make no sense - there is a random mix of your standard fantasy names together with very Earth-culture sounding ones - Chinese, French, Nordic, Eastern European, and sometimes it's very jarring. I get it - there are influences from many peoples mixed in the Masquerade and it's conquered provinces, but it feels very haphazard and not at all consistent. People who should have Nordic names (because they come from the north) instead have Chinese ones, and so on. Is this all intentional, or am I missing something? Is there a hidden reason that is explained at some point? Anyway, it's just a small thing - the book is good but this is kind of annoying.
And current reading - picked up The Traitor Baru Cormorant, on recommendation from the thread. Yay, another fantasy series featuring banking! (read Daniel Abraham's Dagger and Coin series a while ago, and enjoyed that one a lot). Traitor is good so far, nice take on colonialism and empire politics - however I have one niggling annoyance; the names! They make no sense - there is a random mix of your standard fantasy names together with very Earth-culture sounding ones - Chinese, French, Nordic, Eastern European, and sometimes it's very jarring. I get it - there are influences from many peoples mixed in the Masquerade and it's conquered provinces, but it feels very haphazard and not at all consistent. People who should have Nordic names (because they come from the north) instead have Chinese ones, and so on. Is this all intentional, or am I missing something? Is there a hidden reason that is explained at some point? Anyway, it's just a small thing - the book is good but this is kind of annoying.
I believe it's intentional as a means of preventing you developing expectations based on the perceived cultural parallel. Neither The Empire of Masks nor the M'bo nor any of either nation's constituent states has (as far as I can tell) anything like a close analog in the real world in terms of culture, history, or language. By basically picking names out of a hat Dickinson is (I think, anyway) purposefully trying to keep you from mentally saying, "Okay, so this island is basically Fantasy China" or whatever. His world is weird and even things that look familiar at first glance tend to be rooted in some fairly alien cultural of philosophical tradition.
Edit: Though I do wish he'd pick somewhat easier to pronounce names out of his hat. I still have no idea how to pronounce 'Xate'. Apparently the audiobook narrator went with "Ex-ate", which never even occurred to me as an option. I'd assumed it was somewhere between 'Jate', 'Shate', and 'Zate', but then something in one of the books (I forget what) made me think maybe it was supposed to be more like 'Kate'.
Read Clockwork Boys / The Wonder Engine, a short fantasy duology by T. Kingfisher, on the recommendation of Lois McMaster Bujold. It's less steampunk than the title implies. I was looking for a competent, pulpy epic fantasy with a real ending, and boy did this hit the spot. Perfect tight third person point of view, strong dialogue, crisp, distinctive characterization, solid plotting, and quick pacing. Yeah, it kind of reads like somebody's DnD campaign gussied up and transposed into an original setting (thankfully without elves, dwarves, and the like), and yeah, it's not a high literary achievement, but it's not looking to be. It's just competent, in every area. Every element functions as it should given what the author is trying to do. Best of all, after some 600 pages, the story is just satisfyingly over. No waiting three decades for sixteen doorstopping tomes.
My only real complaint is that I'm not sure why it was published as a duology instead of a single volume. Feels a bit money-grabby. Maybe it's targeted partially at the YA fantasy market, but you can't tell from the content; it reads like a typical midlist adult epic fantasy novel, and the characters are thirty-somethings. Who knows.
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
I'm certainly looking forward to the follow up. I read it over the holidays, as one of the Kindle recommendations, and I was surprised by how much is was not what I expected, and how much I enjoyed it
Its two lovecraftian novellas in one volume. One is about refugees of a southern Pincohet style dictatorship, the other a southern gothic based about folk music.
Really good shit.
+5
Options
Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
Somebody here recommended The Migration. I'm going to say it was Bogart.
I'm only a few chapters in but it's excellent so far. It's like a lost John Wyndham novel
I have now finished this and can safely say it's excellent. It becomes less Wyndham and more its own thing as it continues.
It captures the mundane life during terrible times in such a believable way.
There's a few language quirks that the editor should have picked up (the author is Canadian but it's set in the UK) and you can tell the author is an Oxbridge academic as she can't quite imagine that Oxford is not just a university. Although apparently she now lives in Cambridge, so she's been punished enough.
It looks like her other fiction are collections of short stories which float my boat less. I'll be keeping an eye out for more though.
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
How angry are these dragons? Slightly? Exceedingly? Proper?
While there are dragons and they do seem pretty angry, the book is a several hundred page set up for the metaphor in the final line.
General description with very mild spoilers:
The book is set in a medieval matriarchal African fantasy world. The Omehi are a people with a strict caste system who've been fighting against Savage raiders for the last two hundred years.
The magic in the book is achieved by channeling it from the underworld while avoiding the demons there. Technically anyone could do this, but only few women can remain unseen while there. They mostly use their magic to send the souls of fighters to the underworld where time moves slower and generally leaves them stunned for a few moments, having generally just experienced their soul being ripped apart by demons.
The main character becomes driven to train and join the military to get revenge on certain nobles. Even though he's dedicated, he's a common and only gets a year of training compared to three for nobles, nevermind the natural differences from centuries of breeding.
So he decides to learn how to send his soul to the underworld. He uses the slowed time and demons to improve his abilities. He also, inevitably, loses to the demons and experiences dying horrifically, again and again and again.
No fight in the book is a certainty. He wins some, loses some, comes to a draw, or things go sideways. I was constantly wondering what would happen which I loved.
Quid on
0
Options
Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
I remember listening to the Three Body Problem as I played Wind Waker for the first time
boy howdy was that an experience
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
I finished Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it was lovely. It is a book taking place in a sort of generic fantasy Pale of Settlement (that is, Eastern Europe places where ashkenazi Jews lived in like Middle Ages to early 1900s, and I guess part of the reason the setting works so well for me is that I definitely have a generic old timey Pale of Settlement in my mind, like ah yes my ancestors came from uhhh somewhere in this general region and were there for idk probably some hundreds of years in small towns or whatever—there’s a fuzziness to it all that makes the genericized old timey Lithuania of this book feel very familiar and homey). Anyway, the book is a first person narrative by an expanding number of perspective characters; the main one is Miryem, whose dad is the town’s moneylender but is utter garbage at it so she starts collecting the debts, and that’s where the story starts. She’s probably in her late teens, as are the two other young women perspective characters, a peasant woman looking to escape her abusive family and a noblewoman who is getting married off soon, and that and the first person, somewhat simplistic style makes it read a bit YA, but I don’t know if it’s YA, really.
The writing is direct but the characterization is full and nuanced; as new characters get introduced, everyone becomes humanized, including people like the noblewoman’s dad who in another book would be a cardboard cutout villain. There’s very strong themes of compassion, solidarity, family (natural and found). There is a lot about antisemitism; I didn’t expect that, but how interesting to read a fantasy book where this is explicitly dealt with, both in the real world as it affects Miryem and her family in their town and in the city, but also echoed metaphorically as Miryem finds herself among strange faeries who disdain her and want her only for the services she can provide.
Ah and of course there is magic, and instead of trying to go full Russian folklore, there are instead what feel like rather English fae, albeit very winter inflected, all promises and bargains and contracts and cruel beauty. (I probably should know if they are part of Russian folklore, but I don’t. My instinct is no). The transactional magic is very good and interesting, and the book is broader than I thought it would be; what I thought might be the main event, the titular rumplestiltskin sort of thing, happens in the first 100 pages or so, and then we go much further and it is just really interesting! I really didn’t at all know what it was driving at or how much magic there would be or what sort of scope I was dealing with, and that was exciting and compelling.
I cry easily at books, but this book also made me cry on metro, and I just found it so good to read and interesting with such good values and a lot of depth to it. And when do you get to read a genre book with Jews in it! (Other than the Golem and the Djinni, which was all right, and of course there’s the one guy in Hyperion but he’s so poorly and cringe-inducingly written I don’t really count it.)
credeiki on
Steam, LoL: credeiki
+6
Options
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I need to start making small book reports for every book I finish so that I can remember what happened in the book. I keep leaving too long between sequels and then trying to find a decent synopsis of the last book is like pulling teeth.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Posts
I may be misremembering the ordering of his bibliography and I'm not sure where I'd put the cut-over (Anathem is just the most recent one I can recall really enjoying) but New Stephenson really doesn't feel like Old Stephenson in some fundamental way.
Though I haven't re-read any of his old novels in a while. Maybe my tastes have just changed over the years.
Pretty sure even younger-me would have thought Fall was a travesty, though.
So Anathem is the sticking point for me. I thought it was great, yes the vocab thing is annoying but there is an actual reason for it and all that. Looking it up, after that was some "okay" books and just a sorta steady downwards slant. Mongoliad/Reamde were okay though not a thing I'd ever bother to reread. (I think Reamde gets a little credit as prophetic sci-fi with the whole cryptolocker ransom plot.) After that they were like parts of good books without all the rest of the work done for them.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
I really disliked a fair chunk of Reamde. Reamde spoilers:
* I didn't like anything about Dodge. Stephenson seems to want us to really like this guy but nothing about his life seems realistic or relatable and he just constantly comes off as a giant asshole that everyone loves for no obvious reason. I didn't like the rest of his family, either, though that didn't really become an issue until reading Fall.
* C3 and... the geology guy... Pluto? were the sort of stock nerd characters I'd have thought Stephenson was better than writing.
* Everything about the MMO was the sort of arm-chair video game design that I can see making sense to someone who has a vague, passing familiarity with game design and MMOs in general but was just so brutally dumb that it knocked me out of the narrative every time they started talking about it. I could go on for a looong time about how little sense it made.
* The worst part being that the pivotal plot contrivance for the driving narrative about the ransomeware completely invalidated the I-don't-know-how-many-pages dedicated to talking about how important it was that material scarcity in the game world was realistic. Ransomeware obviously only works if you can exchange the game currency for real world currency and the instant that becomes possible as a mechanism of the game world it makes the whole "you have to find and mine the gold out of the ground! the economy is based on the realistic availability of these resources!" thing bullshit since the economy is subject to the whims of people creating and destroying in-game currency at-will and because it's processed by the game's infrastructure it makes no sense that criminals would be using that as a payment mechanism for ransomware (or anything else illegal). If it'd been a matter of criminals collecting the money in-game then selling it to whales in-game via a 3rd party exchange site not related to the game company then fine, that's still pretty iffy from an anonymity standpoint but it at least preserves the whole built up importance of the game world's resource distribution and matches how virtual currency was being bought and sold in the early days of MMOs. But no, Stephenson had to come up with a 3rd-act "clever" way of building that capability into the game itself, blowing the entire concept out of the water.
It probably doesn't help that I'm a software engineer. I imagine if I were a spy or a soldier or something I'd be a lot more pissed off at that part of the book instead.
My biggest problem with his recent work is that it all just feels...lazy, I guess. Like there are a shit-ton of pages there but so much of it feels like, "I want to talk about this now! How can I make my characters talk about this?" rather than any effort being put in to weave narratives around the topics. He's never been good at character work but Seveneves, for example, I couldn't tell you a thing about anyone in it except for the one character previously discussed up-thread. I remember the major ideas being, "What happens to Earth if the moon explodes?", "Orbital mechanics are really, really hard!", and "There's this weird quirk about chains a European physicist noticed but nobody cared much about and I think it's really cool!"
What convinced me are the logical inferences he is making. I've tried looking up counterpoints and I listened to something from a philosopher about how the everettian interpretation doesn't acknowledge probability in any way, but the book is pretty convincing in showing that the probability issue isn't an issue. But in the way that it convinces me that the probability issue isn't an issue has me a little fucked up. It seems to be basically invoking the anthropic principle, saying that the pattern that probability creates is a kind of illusion that we don't have to chain our physical theories to. BUT WE'RE THAT PATTERN!
Anyway, this is just something I'm going put on ice until my eventual mid-life crisis.
Spoilering because it's science, not books, other than being related to this book:
* Matches all observations of quantum mechanical behavior
* Requires no unobserved properties of the universe to exist for it to be accurate
Any alternative interpretation of QM, where "wavefunctions collapse" as in the Copenhagen one or whatever terminology leaves a superposed quantum state not superposed anymore at some point without direct interaction requires some kind of explanation. Evertt doesn't, because states in that interpretation don't change except when acted upon...just like every other part of the physical world.
There's nothing anthropic about about it, though there is a sort of hand-wavey bit buried in there in a place where people don't normally see it since they get hung up on the "many-worlds" thing and go off about parallel universes or whatever.
I haven't read the book you're talking about but I did go through a PhD program in physics with a focus on condensed matter, which is mostly QM. We (as in humanity) aren't integral to physics in any way in Everett's interpretation. Probability doesn't go away. Any system in the quantum paradigm exists as a probability distribution of states. "Probability" in this case doesn't mean what it means in the macroscopic paradigm; it means the density of states in a given "place" in state-space (a multi-dimensional, conceptual representation of the system at hand where the 'directions' are ways the system could exist and each 'place' or point corresponds to a specific, discrete state of the system). Things we'd call 'likely' (for example, all the air in a room being basically uniformly distributed through the volume) have a lot of states corresponding to them (you can swap the air particles around all kinds of ways and end up with 'basically uniformly distributed') while things we'd consider 'unlikely' have very few states (all the air being compressed into a 1 meter cube in the corner - there are still ways to switch them around in that cube but a lot fewer than the whole room).
Everything in reality is a probability distribution. All those distributions interact and the interaction produces new distributions. We humans, in as much as a 'human' is a meaningful designation for the enormously complicated system it represents when talking about it at the quantum level, are probability distributions comprised of the overlapping, interacting probabilities of all the particles within our personal system.
The somewhat hand-wavey bit comes in when you talk about how that makes it look like wavefunctions collapse. Your system interacts with the system of the thing we're observing (because your system interacts with every other system in the universe, eventually) and because 'you' - your consciousness - occupies a specific point in the state-space of the "You + Experiment" system, "you" see only one of the states of the experiment's system. I'm not sure it's really hand-wavey because it makes sense to me that whatever you want to call consciousness, it logically must be a physical system and all physical systems are representable as probability distributions across potential states and those superpositions become coupled to the superposition of states of the systems around us. It looks hand-wavey because we have no real definition for consciousness. A lot seems to go into making you you. And it seems weird to consider your consciousness at any given moment as even having the possibility to exist in a single, finite, discrete state among a finite-but-enormous-beyond-counting number of potential states. But, assuming it does, it makes perfect sense that any one state of your consciousness would couple to some number of states of an observed system and that each of those Other System States 1 - N, combined with this one specific state of You, call it A, generates a state "Other X + You A" for X = 1, ..., N.
Now, I'd say that's precisely anti-anthropic. It treats your consciousness as indistinguishable from the air in a room or a cloud of electrons in a metal, in so far as it interacts with other systems.
The the part about probability he seemed to be talking about a single electron, which he described as elementary. Why isn't the probability of all possible states of the electron evenly distributed when it isn't part of a system? In a branching universe all states will come to be realized, but how is the information of the probability of each of those states preserved? Doesn't there need to some kind of mechanism for probability to explain it in elementary untangled particles?
He threw in some stuff about the "thickness" of each branch and I'm willing to go with it, I'm guessing that's the point you are conveying as well. Maybe it has something to do with elementary particles not just being discrete particles but expressions of fields, and that's hard to explain to people like me so he is just hand waving it away.
His points about testability were pretty solid. I recommend the book to those taking this topic seriously because he is not watering it down too much, it seems to be aimed at your average University physicist.
Electrons are fundamental particles but particles, as such, don't exist. An electron is a high spot in an electron field, which describes (basically) the probability of an electron being. Quarks are also fundamental particles which are just excitations of a quark field. A proton is the interaction of some peaks in the quark field but can be considered, for some applications, a discrete 'thing'. You can talk about the shape of the quark field overall, representing those interacting peaks, but it's not meaningful to talk about the probability distribution of one of those quarks because none of them exist alone. The existence of other ones modifies the overall shape of the system and the only possible states are several-quarks-interacting ones.
I had started to type up something about a universe containing nothing except a single electron but it's surprisingly tricky. I guess it would be at least approximately everywhere at once with equal probability, though. In our universe no electron is ever truly free. Even the deepest reaches of intergalactic space, which are about as empty as you can get, are still awash in fields. And the existence of other field excitations in the universe gives us some meaning for 'distance' and the speed of light some meaning for 'time' such that a single electron can't exist everywhere at once in basically any size volume with equal likelihood.
I'll have to check out the book, though. I've gotten pretty rusty at explaining my love for quantum mechanics, apparently.
The second half? Motherfucker set it in my backyard, changed all the geography, and made heroes out of the sort of people who in reality are a bunch of racist patriarchal anti-government nutjobs.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I think us layman just aren't used to thinking of fields because physics is just not described that way in public by popular scientists. Or maybe it is, I dunno. I certainly haven't fully internalized it yet.
yeah, but young people on facebook are fucking awful though. Seriously. They suck so much. It's an incredibly important point to drive home. They really do all pretty much deserve to die for not being Gault-esq libertarian bootstrapping geniuses and letting themselves be swayed by the views of the leftist social media elites. They don't even know morse code.
That's the wrong Neil. That's Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. :P
For some reason I thought that was Neil and Neal.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Hmmm
Three Body Problem is a pretty unique book. The writing is functional; the sci fi ideas range from interesting and cool to real dumb but fun--they span 'hard' scifi and more implausible stuff, but I don't care about the plausibility as long as it isn't tonally jarring and still supports the story. The book overall is intriguing and stays with you.
I thought it had a pretty good portrayal of physicists in it, and some striking imagery.
That said, I thought All The Birds In The Sky was enjoyable and stuck with me strongly despite being kinda medium-written/not amazing writing. So probably we have very different criteria and my recommendation is no good here!
also look up the 'particle in a box' scenario if you are having trouble thinking about an electron alone. It's a classic intro physics or chemistry problem and the math is accessible and nice.
I’ve read some people kind of cruelly mocking McCarthy’s style on twitter and it irritates me. It’s amazingly good writing and so unique. So specific and brief glimpses, and driving terse sentence structure with extremely rich vocabulary. Lots of colors and visuals. Recommended if you’re interested in writing for writing’s sake.
Do... Re... Mi... So... Fa.... Do... Re.... Do...
Forget it...
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
In terms of quality, it's a book that brimming with interesting ideas. Many of which have been shamelessly copied over the years but not in a way that diminishes the original in any way, at least imo.
In terms of actual writing and story and the like, at least imo, I've always thought it's pretty poor honestly. You can sort of divide it into 3 sections and the first section is honestly kinda dire imo in terms of writing. The middle section is by far the best and the writing quality and storytelling pick up a decent amount. The final section is a bit of a step down and the ending feels very abrupt.
IMO overall worth reading as a sci-fi classic if you are into the genre, lots of good ideas and an interesting story in the abstract, but it's shaky at best in terms of prose and storytelling.
The rest of the series, which is kind of incomplete depending on where you wanna stop, is a whole other kettle of fish too.
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
The last third of the book felt trite.
You chose wisely
It took a moment to find my footing but once I did I blasted off to the end (read 160 pages yesterday).
This is the kind of weird fiction I am here for: extremely strong concept exploded by weird postmodern textual eccentricities.
Vandermeer’s writing always feels more poetic than the usual weird sci-fi and Dead Astronauts is maybe the book that leans in the most (and not just because there are actual poems sprinkled into the text). The use of repetition (with and without variation) is key to unlocking the book, especially in the later sections when you might be reading the same cluster of lines for 5 or so pages.
I want to reread this again now that I know what I’m looking for but the book still does the Vandermeer thing where whatever normal looks like (even if it is decidedly NOT NORMAL) is established, subverted, and then things get prodigiously weird without that foreknowledge going into it.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Some general agreements on a few recent posts:
And current reading - picked up The Traitor Baru Cormorant, on recommendation from the thread. Yay, another fantasy series featuring banking! (read Daniel Abraham's Dagger and Coin series a while ago, and enjoyed that one a lot). Traitor is good so far, nice take on colonialism and empire politics - however I have one niggling annoyance; the names! They make no sense - there is a random mix of your standard fantasy names together with very Earth-culture sounding ones - Chinese, French, Nordic, Eastern European, and sometimes it's very jarring. I get it - there are influences from many peoples mixed in the Masquerade and it's conquered provinces, but it feels very haphazard and not at all consistent. People who should have Nordic names (because they come from the north) instead have Chinese ones, and so on. Is this all intentional, or am I missing something? Is there a hidden reason that is explained at some point? Anyway, it's just a small thing - the book is good but this is kind of annoying.
I believe it's intentional as a means of preventing you developing expectations based on the perceived cultural parallel. Neither The Empire of Masks nor the M'bo nor any of either nation's constituent states has (as far as I can tell) anything like a close analog in the real world in terms of culture, history, or language. By basically picking names out of a hat Dickinson is (I think, anyway) purposefully trying to keep you from mentally saying, "Okay, so this island is basically Fantasy China" or whatever. His world is weird and even things that look familiar at first glance tend to be rooted in some fairly alien cultural of philosophical tradition.
Edit: Though I do wish he'd pick somewhat easier to pronounce names out of his hat. I still have no idea how to pronounce 'Xate'. Apparently the audiobook narrator went with "Ex-ate", which never even occurred to me as an option. I'd assumed it was somewhere between 'Jate', 'Shate', and 'Zate', but then something in one of the books (I forget what) made me think maybe it was supposed to be more like 'Kate'.
My only real complaint is that I'm not sure why it was published as a duology instead of a single volume. Feels a bit money-grabby. Maybe it's targeted partially at the YA fantasy market, but you can't tell from the content; it reads like a typical midlist adult epic fantasy novel, and the characters are thirty-somethings. Who knows.
I'm certainly looking forward to the follow up. I read it over the holidays, as one of the Kindle recommendations, and I was surprised by how much is was not what I expected, and how much I enjoyed it
Its two lovecraftian novellas in one volume. One is about refugees of a southern Pincohet style dictatorship, the other a southern gothic based about folk music.
Really good shit.
I have now finished this and can safely say it's excellent. It becomes less Wyndham and more its own thing as it continues.
It captures the mundane life during terrible times in such a believable way.
There's a few language quirks that the editor should have picked up (the author is Canadian but it's set in the UK) and you can tell the author is an Oxbridge academic as she can't quite imagine that Oxford is not just a university. Although apparently she now lives in Cambridge, so she's been punished enough.
It looks like her other fiction are collections of short stories which float my boat less. I'll be keeping an eye out for more though.
Everyone should read The Rage of Dragons
How angry are these dragons? Slightly? Exceedingly? Proper?
Depends, is the author planning on publishing the sequel before I die?
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
The first book works self contained IMO. It's clearly set up for another with some loose ends but if it stopped here if be entirely satisfied.
While there are dragons and they do seem pretty angry, the book is a several hundred page set up for the metaphor in the final line.
General description with very mild spoilers:
The magic in the book is achieved by channeling it from the underworld while avoiding the demons there. Technically anyone could do this, but only few women can remain unseen while there. They mostly use their magic to send the souls of fighters to the underworld where time moves slower and generally leaves them stunned for a few moments, having generally just experienced their soul being ripped apart by demons.
The main character becomes driven to train and join the military to get revenge on certain nobles. Even though he's dedicated, he's a common and only gets a year of training compared to three for nobles, nevermind the natural differences from centuries of breeding.
So he decides to learn how to send his soul to the underworld. He uses the slowed time and demons to improve his abilities. He also, inevitably, loses to the demons and experiences dying horrifically, again and again and again.
No fight in the book is a certainty. He wins some, loses some, comes to a draw, or things go sideways. I was constantly wondering what would happen which I loved.
boy howdy was that an experience
The writing is direct but the characterization is full and nuanced; as new characters get introduced, everyone becomes humanized, including people like the noblewoman’s dad who in another book would be a cardboard cutout villain. There’s very strong themes of compassion, solidarity, family (natural and found). There is a lot about antisemitism; I didn’t expect that, but how interesting to read a fantasy book where this is explicitly dealt with, both in the real world as it affects Miryem and her family in their town and in the city, but also echoed metaphorically as Miryem finds herself among strange faeries who disdain her and want her only for the services she can provide.
Ah and of course there is magic, and instead of trying to go full Russian folklore, there are instead what feel like rather English fae, albeit very winter inflected, all promises and bargains and contracts and cruel beauty. (I probably should know if they are part of Russian folklore, but I don’t. My instinct is no). The transactional magic is very good and interesting, and the book is broader than I thought it would be; what I thought might be the main event, the titular rumplestiltskin sort of thing, happens in the first 100 pages or so, and then we go much further and it is just really interesting! I really didn’t at all know what it was driving at or how much magic there would be or what sort of scope I was dealing with, and that was exciting and compelling.
I cry easily at books, but this book also made me cry on metro, and I just found it so good to read and interesting with such good values and a lot of depth to it. And when do you get to read a genre book with Jews in it! (Other than the Golem and the Djinni, which was all right, and of course there’s the one guy in Hyperion but he’s so poorly and cringe-inducingly written I don’t really count it.)
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain