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NeilNjae
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Alternatively, what with the film coming out soon, perhaps Dune? We've been talking about it for a while. Maybe split the discussion over two months, especially as the film covers just half the novel.
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I've been intrigued by Vita Nostra, a Ukranain novel that seems to defy easy explanation. I have the feeling that, like Piranesi, it's a novel that works best if you know little about it. (I have no idea if it's as good as Piranesi.) I read the sam…
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(Quote) I could well believe that everything Ordier saw was a hallucination. But if that was what Priest wanted us to think, he did a bad job communicating that. The same goes for time distortions or any other explanation of the story: us readers ha…
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(Quote) It's fun. It's a bit of a mess, but it has Tom Hanks enjoying being a villain at one point, and Hugo Weaving has a great time chewing the scenery as a spooky apparition. It's been criticised for a bout of yellowface, where the actors are ma…
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I was disappointed by the ending. It seemed to be utterly self-centred, with Ordier concluding that the entire situation was engineered purely for his benefit and his reaction: the folly, his purchase of it, the ritual, the comings and goings, every…
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I enjoyed the film, so I'm interested see what the book's like.
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(Quote) I've not been to Qatar, but I've done work trips to Bahrain and Kuwait. My impression is that most of the Persian Gulf was pretty desolate before oil came along. Yes, there were bits of trade, and some servicing of shipping going up and down…
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(Quote) I noticed the Qataar / Qatar similarity as well. Qatar has always been occupied by different states (it was a British dependency until 1971), and I don't think was especially rich before the discovery of oil. But by 1978, the trope of oil-r…
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The "race" angle is one I wanted to bring up. The description of the Qataari reinforces that this is a very European setting and the Archipelago is the Mediterranean. Jenessa is described as "dark in hair and complexion" and havi…
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Neither did I! Even if it's not totally accurate (it is some random YouTube) it's good fodder for the imagination.
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I just stumbled across this video about word-games in Egyptian heiroglyphs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_oFUrgC9rA There are lots of examples of scribes being playful with words and writing, with signs being substituted all over the place depen…
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I'll echo other comments that you should choose a book that interest you. One reason I like this book club is that we read a selection of books. I wouldn't have chosen them myself, but I enjoyed most of them.
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(Quote) Yes, something of a novelty for Priest! (Quote) That's the reference I was searching for! Thanks for pointing it out.
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There are various other elements of "watching." Jenessa likes being watched when she's in Ordier's house. Jeness and Parren are anthropologists, who watch others to study them. The Qataari seem to organise their society around watching the…
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(Quote) I think that's something we don't have enough of in games. Mahit had Three Seagrass. Phileas Fogg had Passepartout, D'Argtanan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis had Planchet, Grimaud, Mousqueton, and Bazin. Knights in armour had squires. It's a dy…
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@clash_bowley , can you give some examples of what would go into a game? And I'm interested in what would make a good idea for something at the "Designer" level. What sort of things would inform your design decisions? Is there something a…
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(Quote) On the other hand, this is the only story I can remember from my first reading of this anthology many years ago. It may be constructed, but I found it successful. (Quote) I see what you mean about the parallels. Yes, they're there but I als…
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(Quote) Any good bits you want to tell us about?
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(Quote) It's not something I've got a good answer to in the novel. Martine took some effort to invent the parallel story of the Ebrekti. It's mentioned it throughout the novel, both as comments by the characters and snippets from Eleven Lathe's memo…
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(Quote) Care to say more about that? Was Lsel right to take the path it did, of selling the imago tech to keep Teixcalaan at bay? Would it be better to fight, or to expunge itself of all elements of Teixcalaanli cultural influence?
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We never really say One Lightning, but Thirty Larkspur was acting for entirely relatable reasons, of ambition. I thought Nine Adze was interesting, especially when it wasn't clear how much she was just using Mahit for her own objectives.
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This reads like a folk horror story, in the vein of The Wicker Man and similar stories. There's also a strong line of the "Brits discovering Greek islands" feel from the 1970s setting. Person goes to unknown island, lots of things happen w…
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Something else that occurred to me about politics in the books. There are factions, but the book doesn't concern itself with them. Instead, it's concerned with the people who head those factions. Most obviously there's the Western Arm faction, repre…
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(Quote) It's interesting how Priest has taken what's a fairly standard male fantasy, the sexually assertive woman who is direct about wanting sex, and turns it into something repellent.
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(Quote) Good insight. Is this something about technocrats vs demagogues? Relating the ideas to the novel, how would we categorise the various people we see? Eight Antidote, and to a lesser extent Six Direction, are technocrats (even if they used ta…
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(Quote) I agree that Martine didn't have many quotable phrases, I thought some of her paragraphs were good. I thought the description of Mahit's first real view of open sky (on the way to see Fifteen Engine) and the subsequent explosion were both vi…
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(Quote) Indeed. Byzantine politics may have been lots of poetry and double-meanings, but there was plenty of exile, blindings, and executions. (Blinding someone was a way of permanently eliminating them from holding power, without going quite so far…
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I liked Martine's choice to tell us about the poetry, not show it. Part is her talent in writing it, but I think it was motivated by the inability of us readers to interpret fully the poetry. I wonder if she was influenced by any difficulty in under…
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@RichardAbbott , we get to see a bit more of Lsel in the sequel, but a lot of the action is set in the Teixcalaan Fleet. I thought Nine Azelea's death was a bit peripheral to the story, and the escalation to firearms not handled well in the book. I…
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Interesting that you both thought of Teixcalaan as mainly Aztec. I read them as fundamentally Byzantine, but with bits of Aztec surface flavour (names, flower motifs). But that doesn't address the question of why we have Byzantines in space. I thin…