74. (January 2019) Dark Orbit by Carolyn Ives Gilman — The Tabletop Roleplayers' Book Club

5. Dark Orbit - The Escher

Apocryphal — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 00:02:10 +0000

The good ship Escher was described early on as being designed by a 'demented architect', with nothing being where it should, and up and down being hard to discern. Fitting for a ship named after Escher, no? What did you think of the ship? How would you compare the Escher to the surface of the planet Iris, or to the town of Torobe in particular?

2. Dark Orbit - To Observe is to Change

Apocryphal — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 23:42:25 +0000

There are several themes at work in this book - two in particular stood out for me. The strongest is the idea that to understand something is to destroy it, a concept that comes from particle physics, but that Thora Lassiter also relates it to her expertise in learning systems: "To perceive, describe, explain: these are the essence of discovery. "I don't know" does not constitute learning. And yet, what happens when we encounter something so genuinely outside our previous experience that we have no mental categories for it, and the only truthful statement is "I don't know"? Why, we liken it to something we do know, however bad the analogy. We apply rules to it that lie within our experience. We resist incomprehension as reflexively as we recoil from pain."

Does this ring true for you? How was it applied to the story? Can you relate it to your own experiences?

4. Dark Orbit - Moth, Sara, and Thora

Apocryphal — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 23:53:51 +0000

How do the three main characters in this book relate to one another? Are they similar or different people? Did any one in particular stand out for you? Did their relationships work for you?

3. Dark Orbit - Strengths and Weaknesses

Apocryphal — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 23:50:11 +0000

Another theme introduced early is the concept of the nkida - a strength that is also a weakness. How did that theme manifest itself in the story? Have you heard this concept given a name before? What separates a nkida from something that's just a strength?

How are this theme and the theme about the destructive qualities of observation tied together in this novel? Or are they?

7. Dark Orbit - Unexplored themes

NeilNjae — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 15:46:42 +0000

The book suggested a couple of themes that it might have explored, but didn't.

One was the traveller/settler split. The people on the ship had the Waster/Plant split, with all the ship crew being the travelling Wasters. Torobe had the same split, with wenders and villagers (and all adult men expected to be wenders). I was expecting there to be some clash between the two attitudes to life and community: the crew being both from a different culture and the flitting Wasters, with the Torobes being the settled villagers.

The other theme was the nature of identity and teleportation (and probably less interesting). There was lots of teleportation in the book, and it was unclear exactly how it worked. I'm mainly thinking about the mass: the laser beam could transfer the information to make a person, but I expect that the mass to make the body at the receiver to come from the receiver. In that case, what happened to the body/mass that was left behind? I was expecting an occasion where someone in a teleport was trapped in a fold of dark matter and hence we ended up with two copies of the same person. A bit hackneyed, but there if the author wanted to go there.

Did you pick up on the suggestion of these themes? Do you think the book would have been stronger or weaker if it had explored them? What themes did you find in the book that you weren't too engaged with?

6. Dark Orbit - Dark Matter

Apocryphal — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 00:17:35 +0000

We learn very early on that Iris is laden with dark matter, and that it's residents have developed some very unusual abilities - presumably as a result of their close connection. Is there any science behind this mysterious power of Dark Matter? Did this work for you, conceptually?

1. Dark Orbit - General Impressions

Apocryphal — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 23:25:16 +0000

What did you think of Dark Orbit? Was this your first book by Carolyn Ives Gilman? Would you read another? What did you like most, or least?

8. Dark Orbit - Approaches to Knowledge

RichardAbbott — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 18:16:40 +0000

On board the Escher, and apparently in society at large, there are several different approaches to knowledge which seem to me to be much broader than simply being different disciplines like maths, physics, biology etc. So we have Corroborative Sciences, Descriptive Sciences, Sensualism, and probably others I can't offhand remember.
Did this division of types of human thought, and approaches to problem solving, resonate with you? Or not?