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NeilNjae
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- NeilNjae
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(Quote) I think that's a fair summary. The books are like confections. Those are great things to have on occasion, but a diet of nothing but confection is not a good idea. I think the books are great. They're not profound literature, but I think it …
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(Quote) Good point. I think the difference is that those devices aren't people, so it's more like "using force" rather than "violence", in that hacking a bot doesn't hurt a person. As for the violence against people, Murderbot d…
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I think this could be an interesting solo or one-on-one game, where the PC is a Murderbot-alike. I don't think the setting has a great deal distinct to offer for the more traditional group-based games.
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I think it's fairly clear that Murderbot has affection for people, especially its clients. Murderbot is quite emotional, even if it's not to familiar with those emotions let alone how to display them. The rest of the characters are mostly fairly sh…
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Personally, I'm mystified why Wells had this aspect of the setting. I can only suppose that the lack of criminal law and central authority allows more scope for her to tell the stories of a murderbot.
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I think the level of security in the book fulfils the same role as Doctor Who's sonic screwdriver: it allows the protagonist to get to where the fun action is, rather than us either having pages of description of bypassing systems or the protagonist…
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(Quote) that raises the very thorny issue of whether intelligence and sentience and sapience are different words for the same thing, or quite different kinds of things With my "day job" hat on, the only people who care about the differenc…
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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…
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> @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…
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Murderbot questions are up. Have at them!
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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…
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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…
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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…
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(Quote) That's my understanding.
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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
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> @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.
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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…
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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…
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Paint-by-numbers caricatures. Even Singh was a bit of token representation.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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 …
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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> @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.
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Oh, damn. I got all confused. I've read Arabella of Mars instead. Whoops!