NeilNjae

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NeilNjae
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  • Without having a chance to think about the issues raised in this thread, the in-fiction justification for SecUnits having intelligence was that the intelligence is needed to innovate, especially in anticipation of (and response to) threats from huma…
  • > @kcaryths said: > > On a second reading I only thought more of the first book. I read the entire series and got a little tired of them by the end, but that's pretty standard of most series I think. Yes, I can see that happening. Eve…
  • Murderbot questions are up. Have at them!
  • Here's an interview with her, covering the first book. It contains major spoilers for that book and some smaller ones for later in the series. https://www.newscientist.com/video/2436358-martha-wells-i-didnt-know-how-non-neurotypical-i-was-until-mur…
  • I read it a while ago and enjoyed it. However, it was a while ago and I can't remember all the details. I remember it being a multi-layered book, with quite a lot happening to different aspects of the characters. There's also, IIRC, quite a bit of c…
  • A general comment: I'm sorry, but I just bounced off this book almost immediately. I tried a couple of times, but always found myself skim-reading after only a couple of pages. Adams loves the sound of his own voice, and I just couldn't wade through…
  • (Quote) That's my understanding.
  • How about The Murderbot Diaries? They're novellas, so we might be able to fit in the first two (115 pages, 149 pages). Or perhaps we just want a light month
  • > @Apocryphal said: > Do we think we can dispense with the whole faux-napoleonic thing for a while now? We’ve had three this year (two with wooden air ships and one with dragons substituting for ships)? I'll second that.
  • A shining example of what not to do! It's a shame that Renegade Jennys and Boilerplate Jacks never got out of ashcan stage, as that was a refreshing take on steampunk. RJBJ was all about steampunk from the point of view of the people at the bottom o…
  • Ah, the Martians. Couldn't be more Noble Savages if they'd tried. And with the added benefit of being explicitly non-human, so none of that awkward detail of treating them like people! This part of the book was the most transparent apologia for impe…
  • Paint-by-numbers caricatures. Even Singh was a bit of token representation.
  • Let's do steampunk! Let's take some 18th century sailing stories, nerd-trope them with a couple of bits of planetary romance, and not think too hard about what any of this would mean. It's all about the surface bling, and almost nothing to do with c…
  • She was there as a sop to some modern sensibilities while embedded in a book that took pains to glorify imperialism and colonialism. Of course colonialism is good if you're one of the few that owns the colonies. Just don't look at all the rest of pl…
  • I've played a couple of games with the "ship brain" as a distinct character type. One was Mindjammer , where AIs in vehicles are commonplace and a common PC option. The other is Blue Planet where cetacean PCs are possible; they're not exac…
  • I don't think I've much to say here. It was a fixup novel from a bunch of short stories. They kind of hung together, but it clearly wasn't a single narrative. It worked well enough as a fixup.
  • On the one part, this was a story told nearer the start of the women's liberation movement, and so the story addresses those themes. That movement has moved on, so any similar story would address the issues in a different way. One other thing that …
  • I don't think Helva's story covers the whole of her life. In the first story she is a naïve young woman, smitten by her first love. In the end she is a mature, self-confident woman choosing her own path and her own partner. It's a tale of women's li…
  • There wasn't a lot of emphasis on technology in the book, but there weren't egregious errors either: it wasn't like Star Wars or Dune with a lot of mysticism and the like. So definitely SF, even if it wasn't hard. This book is about people and their…
  • The first McCaffery book I've read. As is the consensus here, I'm not eager to read another one. It's OK, but very much of its time. I think I'd have enjoyed it more in my youth, when I was reading more Heinlein and Asimov; this would have been a go…
  • I think the prejudice is very much of its time, perhaps a counter to the then-prevailing view that physically disabled people are also mentally retarded and therefore can't have any agency ("Does he take sugar?"). Helva comes across as a c…
  • > @clash_bowley said: > (Quote) > You got two days to read The Ship Who Sang, Njae! Can you do it? ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH? :D No.
  • Oh, damn. I got all confused. I've read Arabella of Mars instead. Whoops!
  • The other interpretation of having Dracula as the title is that he's the element that brings the heroes together and gives them direction. Dracula is the unifier of the book; without him, none of these people would have met. As for @BarnerCobblewoo…
  • Going back to the question of "who's the protagonist?", which characters really changed in the course of the book? I think Jonathan had the greatest transformation, from eager young lawyer to victim to mature veteran. Mina also changes a l…
  • I thought Dracula was scary. A lot of that was down to the lack of reliable information about what Dracula could do. We saw he could dominate people, sneak into all sorts of places, change into beasts, and so on. But we didn't know that much at firs…
  • Sorry for the delay in replying. This is an insightful comment. It reminds me of the analysis of "whodunnit" and other crime fiction, where the detective is the representative of good society. A crime is committed, the social order is tra…
  • I would argue that the partial narration is the literary equivalent to the "don't show the monster" technique in films like Alien. We don't have an omniscient narrator, so we never get a definitive statement of Dracula, what he does, or wh…
  • And, as was pointed out to me, the role of women as temptresses. The "brides of Dracula" in the castle give us a picture of what Lucy and Mina would become without intervention. Dracula may corrupt women, but how much of that is down to D…
  • Dracula questions are finally up. Sorry for the delay. Let's hope they're up to @Apocryphal 's standards!