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NeilNjae
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That's a question I was considering asking: is the idea of "found family" and community a significant element of the narrative? People in the book are often doing things for others, not themselves. The Crows and Dr Grey are exceptions, and…
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Questions posted for The Curious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands. I had a lot of thoughts!
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How are people doing with Cautious Traveller ? I'm planning to post some questions in the next few days.
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(Quote) I'm not using "qualia" in any controversial way. My point is that we have no way (at present) to connect a subjective experience of something to an organic state in a brain, and certainly can't relate any of that to a collection of…
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(Quote) LLMs don't "think" like humans. Yes, LLMs generate text by creating one word at a time. But which word to generate is determined by the context of that word. That includes all the words that have come before, the prompt, and what …
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(Quote) I don't. The whole thing is an ill-defined mess. Philosophers of mind use introspection to build castles in the air about what mental phenomena are. But things like qualia don't exist in any observable, physical form. They can't be the subje…
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(Quote) A "language model" is something that is a representation of language. You can use it to understand or generate language. The "large language models" underlying things like ChatGPT use neural networks as an underlying tech…
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(Quote) That's pretty much synonymous with "life": bacteria will move from areas of "discomfort" to "comfort". If "sentience" has a useful meaning, it needs to be something more specific than that. Most AI re…
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I'm sorry, but this was another book I just couldn't finish. I found it very dull and formulaic, with all the characters acting at the surface level and not the slightest hint of any three-dimensionality. It was so bad, it was almost as bad as the f…
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Yes, thank you. I appreciate the notion that there are multiple, conflicting versions of "the truth" co-existing. That reflects the notion of the various Chosen Once in the book.
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> @Apocryphal said: > Every so often this book flips into the first person present. I haven’t wrapped my head around this yet. > “The Perfect and Kind is not looking at Fetter. He’s looking at me. He can’t see me - it’s not possible - but…
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(Quote) Thanks for this. As I said elsewhere, I'm ignorant of the schools of thought in this part of the world. That meant I missed a lot, and I appreciate having these references made explicit. Feel free to espouse more!
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> @BarnerCobblewood said: > This inability to communicate (aphasia) becoming a social problem would make a great theme for a highly relevant SF novel. I think _Blindsight_ does this. I'm that book, a team of disparate experts investigate …
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There's some interesting world-building there, even if it's mostly ignored in the book. There's the portal fantasy of the Bright Doors, and perhaps the associated devils that come through them. Religion is a big thing, with so many sects and so man…
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I think the characters were mainly in the mould of "people doing their best in the midst of a vast, uncaring, social system." Most of them were following their expected roles, even Fetter. Fetter tried to move out of his mother's influenc…
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I'm with Richard. I found the doors and the devils pretty irrelevant to the story. They had no effect on the story. Are they part of the wider Buddhist mythology and therefore a standard part of fantasy stories, much like elves and dwarves are in Eu…
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I don't think the story format was anything unusual. It was a fairly chronological retelling of a sequence of events in Fetter's life. The biggest surprise was the change from third-person to first-person narration at the end. I liked that it overtu…
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I didn't pick up that it was close to Buddhism, but it's obvious now you mention it. I think the standard view of Buddhism in British pop culture is all about monks and meditation, and we get to hear almost nothing about what Buddhism is like as an …
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I also liked it. It had a real sense of South Asia that was refreshingly alien to my jaded Eurocentric experience. But that's probably for another question. The book didn't prompt deeper thoughts in me, or change my world-view: the concerns of the …
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How about The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks for June? It's from last year, it's had good reviews, and is on my TBR pile already.
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Yes, the idea of a stable of NPCs that illustrate different lives. That's good for a game. The notion of "us Vs them" for the gap between nobles and commoners was the central point of the novel. But generally, I thought the action was too …
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The main thing I got from the setting was the attitude of the people. They were living in what seemed to me to be an oppressive society, but most people accepted it as inevitable. There was very little attempt at resistance or agitation to change th…
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At least this book wasn't full of rape, unlike the other Vance books we've read here. Yes, it was sombre, and that was something that continued into the conclusion. Even the overthrow of the nobles didn't lead to much change in the tone. It did end…
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I agree with the other comments. The legend connection became important in the end, but it was almost as if Vance tacked it on to the main story of following Ghyl's life. I'm not sure if it's covered in other questions, but there was very little set…
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I also finished it a while ago. I actually managed to finish a club pick!
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The first time meeting the characters was fun, but I didn't notice any particular change in them from cycle to cycle.
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No.
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I didn't finish the book, but I'll comment on what I did read. I didn't mind that the story was repetitive. As Clash says, Groundhog Day is a fun film. What I didn't like was that there there was very little different between each repetition. Some …
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I'm finding it very dull. The first half of the book is little more than the cover blurb. It seems like Reynolds wrote some derivative mix of Inception and Solaris, but by missing out the good bits of both.
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I've battled my way to just over half way through Eversion and ... does it get any better? I can find very little to redeem this book. It's unlikely to be the first Reynolds book I finish.