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BarnerCobblewood
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Genre novel for sure = plot and tropes override all other aspects. I see this more as an indication that the author is influenced by, and hopeful of, the demands of visual rather than textual media = movies, tv vs. books. So a market commodity rathe…
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Maybe everything could somehow be keyed to an individual, meaning a genotype or something. No factories then. Or they were simply a market that remained local. Is there a free market in the novel? I don't think we know. But, as @Apocryphal said the…
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I agree with @NeilNjae's point, but OTOH we had the aliens who visited long ago and were kept secret by the desert people, and the use of whose technology was somehow lost. Somewhere I made a flippant comment about mitochondrias and being born to it…
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I think I might like playing with the flux and hybridity possible in a bio-engineered setting like this, but so much would depend on the group. I think it's part of why fiction in these settings seems to be more about single-player stories than the …
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I don't really do much SF gaming, but there are a few things I think I might keep: 1) I thought the bio-engineering of a co-operative was an interesting idea; 2) While the direct mixing of genetic material was a little too rapid for my taste, the hy…
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I think this became more of a problem as the story progressed. The question is what people are, and so who their characters are, I'll paraphrase Jill Lepore in a recent Guardian article: (Quote) and (Quote) Thus, how could our narrator give us ins…
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I thought it was trite, and while it set a tone for the beginning of the stories, by the end it had made me doubt the whole story. She is from a culture, but she seems not to have learned and understood much about it ( @Apocryphal ), and the deaths …
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The aliens didn't do it for me, but at least they were not all a happy family. Nor did the old reaching for the middle-class dream of a United Federation of Planets university, dearly held by people who have never had to work in one, and promoted b…
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I thought that using repetitive or iterative mathematics and algorithms to generate trance was fine. I did wonder why anyone travelling through a utterly hostile and unknown situation would think doing things in a trance would be a good way to go. …
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I didn't actually see anything hand-wavy or magic about it. They've simply mastered a kind of genetic engineering.
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I thought it simply represented a culture's worldview: There's us, there's the people who oppress us (and who everyone has joined with), and there are some primitive people who aren't us, but haven't joined the oppressors. We have to deal with all o…
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Looks like January is quite busy for me. If we keep the rotation, perhaps just move me to the end? Best, BC
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(Quote) Yeah I am about a third of the way through. These ornate passages remind me of religious literature describing other worlds, world-building which long predates what we call speculative fiction. In general I think that most Western secular cu…
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Take your time @clash_bowley
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I'm looking forward to finding out the motivations that drive these stories forward. Part of what I loved about the WO is that the characters are definitely not motivated by the rewards typical of RPGs. If there was a mechanic, I suppose it would ha…
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I'm considering starting the trilogy. Haven't read it before. How does it compare with WO?
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@NeilNjae I don't think we needed the descriptive text, but in its defence I thought it was quite effective at explaining how things (or the social environment) works with and against individual's wishes. The people Jevick meets reveal this both in …
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(Quote) I think it was necessary, but it depends on what theme the book is conveying. I thought the story was about the relation of people with their external soul (jut for those who know of it). The ghost/love story is motivated by this, and we can…
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(Quote) Yeah, cosmopolitan across several cultures / peoples, even Jevick's seemingly provincial source culture. I also liked how the dynamic of interpretation of Jevick's personal experience was hybridised by the location of the possession, and how…
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(Quote) I meant the changing influence regarding the importance of people, things, events, etc., e.g. between authoritative legitimacy according to a book (science), and legitimacy deriving from public statements of individual remembering an event, …
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Yes a love story. Thought it was foreshadowing / correspondence of the casting away of the jut. Other-love as means of imagining self-love, and how grief of separating from self is necessary for living, often goes wrong, and cannot be commanded, and…
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I saw much of this book as an effort to speak of the non-duality of the immanent and transcendent, and the problems which that exposes in language, and which "religious" language attempts to face, and which when secularised causes problems…
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I definitely thought that this book was a response to European colonialism, and enjoyed how it subverted the "active" vs "passive" peoples by ascribing agency and gaze to everyone. Detected an analogy of stages of life that was a…
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Liked them all, meaning I liked they behaved according to some sense of who they thought themselves.
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Liked it. Am reading The Worm Ourobouros right now, and finding it beautiful. I'm tired of short declarative sentences being presented as normative of language. They represent a overweening arrogance of the speaker seeking to deny reception to liste…
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Quite liked the book. Thought the core was the kind of auto-biography that Jonah, or perhaps William James (who said he didn't have a religious bone in his body), might produce to describe his life. Was particularly impressed with the handling of ho…
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AOK!
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Finished a couple of weeks ago.
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@Apocryphal agree completely. The problem with playing against the environment, whether natural, social, political, whatever, is that it's a crying game - the winner is fore-ordained. Play occurs within environments, not against them.
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@NeilNjae I'm not sure Dune is about individuals making choices. While I appreciate many things about Dune, it seems to me that the story, about how blood-lines are beyond any individual's control, is simply another example of an ideology that blood…