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Forgall posted:Fyodorov was a real person, so you could've just googled it.
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Feb 11, 2014 20:25
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Less than 4 months away! It can't come soon enough!
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Mar 19, 2014 23:24
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HOW COULD YOU posted:Less than 4 months away! It can't come soon enough! Was it delayed? I could swear it was May before, I was so stoked about Spring for Dresden, FFXHD and Casual Angel, sigh.
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Mar 19, 2014 23:30
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I've been rereading The Quantum Thief in preparation for The Causal Angel and it's night and day reading after having read it and the Fractal Prince already. The world building that Rajaneimi does which is completely incoherent the first time through feels effortless and natural on a second go. You also pick-up on a few things, such as Jean's hallucination as the All Defector kills him in the Dilemma Prison concerns Flower Prince and using stories to steal minds as described in The Fractal Prince.
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Mar 20, 2014 16:49
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Hannu Rajaniemi is also the co-founder of a nanotechnology design start-up. He and I have a few friends in common so I've been trying to connect with him.
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Mar 21, 2014 07:56
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Captain Greed posted:Hannu Rajaniemi is also the co-founder of a nanotechnology design start-up. He and I have a few friends in common so I've been trying to connect with him.
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Mar 21, 2014 11:07
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Forgall posted:Ok, when somebody starts confusing their science fiction with real life they might have a problem. Dude has a degree in quantum physics so... who knows. 
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Mar 21, 2014 11:16
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I remember a friend of mine with a maths PhD set up a company with his friend who had a comp science degree designed to pick up market signals and follow the algorithm he had designed. It just traded with the money they gave it on whatever was designed. So, this could be meaningless... As a postscript to that I told the maths friend the market exhibited a random walk pattern, and that all public information was probably incorporated to the market price. He didn't believe me since I only had a B Ec. 2 years later he refuses to talk about it. Basically what I'm saying is Rajaniemi doing that could be meaningless, and better wait until it has market assets.
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Mar 21, 2014 18:27
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Err I'm not sure why you slid in a statement about semi strong form EMH being a fact. There's an entire body of research and academia devoted to studying this so it's definitely not something that people take for granted.
shrike82 fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Mar 23, 2014 |
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Mar 23, 2014 04:48
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You are correct. I was speaking loosely, in that I do not think the deviations from that model are sufficient to be reliably taken advantage of by such an unsophisticated investor and I found it kind of funny.
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Mar 24, 2014 04:14
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Woo, finally finished TFP. What a ride!Strange Matter posted:2.) What was the significance of the story of the circle and square? Just in case this wasn't answered yet, the story of the circle and square was a body thief story which Abu Nuwas built into the architecture of Sirr such that it would only be visible from the office of his intended victim. This is explained in chapter 25, Tawaddud and The Council.
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May 18, 2014 00:43
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Having just re-read The Fractal Prince, I'm starting to think that Hannu Rajaniemi is very much in touch with the internet. After all, science fiction is based in science fact, and where else would you find a kernel of reality in brainjacking people via fictional story except online? You don't have to look too much farther than Ask/Tell to find (rudimentary) examples of what he describes. If you haven't, read through some of the Ask me about growing up with a girl who thinks she's married to anime guys thread. In there are piles of stories about people who become absolutely convinced they're anime goddess werewolf vampires who are astral pregnant. In a way they've become infected by these awful fictional characters. And you know, if the people in that thread can be taken over by Sepiroth, Sonic or Goku, then I totally buy that in the grim dark future Jean could become the (an?) embodiment of the Trickster God trope.
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May 28, 2014 03:09
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Red Crown posted:And you know, if the people in that thread can be taken over by Sepiroth, Sonic or Goku, then I totally buy that in the grim dark future Jean could become the (an?) embodiment of the Trickster God trope. My first impression when I finished reading TFP was actually that Jean has always been the Flower Prince. He's a master thief who's compelled to deceive and steal from people because he's the archetypal Trickster created by Matjek Chen. The other Aun know this, but no-one else does, Matjek included. Jean was just an identity he wore, but after the Dilemma Prison he's become less of a god and more of a human - hence the identity crisis Jean is having at the start of the book. The Jean we're reading about isn't the Flower Prince anymore, but someone with an identity that goes beyond being an archetype. His character arc has been about gaining empathy and becoming human. Maybe I'm just talkin poo poo though
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May 28, 2014 05:11
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My take was that Jean was never the Aun but the All-Defector was and hijacked Jean in the Dillema Prison. There was a line just after the prison break that suggests something had slipped aboard (I think the ship says it has a stowaway).
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May 28, 2014 07:14
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EdBlackadder posted:My take was that Jean was never the Aun but the All-Defector was and hijacked Jean in the Dillema Prison. There was a line just after the prison break that suggests something had slipped aboard (I think the ship says it has a stowaway). I hadn't considered that. That would be pretty cool, but it seemed that All-Defector was a product of the Archon prisons, and Jean wouldn't have had a chance to pick him up until he went there, and he was certainly fulfilling the role of a trickster god prior to his imprisonment.
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May 28, 2014 11:52
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EdBlackadder posted:My take was that Jean was never the Aun but the All-Defector was and hijacked Jean in the Dillema Prison. There was a line just after the prison break that suggests something had slipped aboard (I think the ship says it has a stowaway). Yeah, but we see the All-Defector again while the Flower Prince is in a different location.
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May 28, 2014 13:08
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EdBlackadder posted:My take was that Jean was never the Aun but the All-Defector was and hijacked Jean in the Dillema Prison. There was a line just after the prison break that suggests something had slipped aboard (I think the ship says it has a stowaway). The All-Defector doesn't fit the archetype though, I think. In the last chapter, Josephine remarks that she expected All-Defector to consume her like he did lil' Matjek. Jean fits the trickster archetype better, he doesn't consume and destroy, nor does he even really betray - he just manipulates and steals. Also, I get the impression that Jean existed at the same time adult and still human Chen did, at this point he would have been a real live person. Maybe The Flower Prince gogol that Chen sent off into the ether found a like-minded host in him at some point, but I think Jean was a person who existed.
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May 28, 2014 21:15
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quote:The old thing inside me wants to say yes. To be with the Prince of Stories again. But something pulls me back. Perhonen. A promise. I keep my promises. Whatever the serpent things are, I am something else. I remember reading a book in a cell. I remember a door opening. That’s when I was born, out of the crystal stopper. A creature made from La Bouchon de cristal, a boy from the desert and an old god. Jean as we know him in the books is an amalgamation of a human and an Aun. The Flower Prince "hijacks" him as he's reading La Bouchon de cristal in the opening scene of TQT.
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May 28, 2014 21:27
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Yeah I really need to reread these before the third is out. All interesting ideas, guess we'll find out soon enough (that's not soon enough). Jean was definitely a human in the flashbacks with the Pellegrini, though. He was also a post-human connected with but distinct from the Sobornost. He could have joined with the Flower Prince at some point during this transition, the memory of which may have been what he kept in the Obliette. And possibly, with the Aun living through patterns and memories, much of what was the Flower Prince might have been lost with the end of the Quantum Thief, leaving our Jean as something slightly different and less destructive.
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May 28, 2014 21:30
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coffeetable posted:Jean as we know him in the books is an amalgamation of a human and an Aun. The Flower Prince "hijacks" him as he's reading La Bouchon de cristal in the opening scene of TQT. I completely forgot about this so I went back and re-read it. I'm pretty sure that he was taken by The Flower Prince through that book when he was still human, in one of his dying flashbacks he remembers reading that novel in a prison made of stone where he was put by soldiers. That is just too cool.
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May 28, 2014 23:05
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inklesspen posted:Just in case this wasn't answered yet, the story of the circle and square was a body thief story which Abu Nuwas built into the architecture of Sirr such that it would only be visible from the office of his intended victim. This is explained in chapter 25, Tawaddud and The Council.
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May 29, 2014 19:07
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Tor.com has an excerpt from The Causal Angel. Getting excited for this one.
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Jun 18, 2014 02:07
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Leospeare posted:Tor.com has an excerpt from The Causal Angel. Getting excited for this one. Ooh, that is excellent. I'm incredibly amused that the zoku ship is named the Bob Howard.
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Jun 18, 2014 05:03
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Leospeare posted:Tor.com has an excerpt from The Causal Angel. Getting excited for this one. You're my hero. Reading this for the second time on my train ride today. On a slightly unrelated note, how are Rajaniemi's short stories? I'm definitely interested in his other works.
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Jun 21, 2014 12:45
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So I am 60 pages into The Causal Angel and I realize I have forgotten how The Fractal Prince ended. Anyone got a summary of the final events?
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Jul 4, 2014 09:40
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Cardiac posted:So I am 60 pages into The Causal Angel and I realize I have forgotten how The Fractal Prince ended. Is it out or did you get an advance copy?
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Jul 4, 2014 14:42
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Date on Amazon says July 15, at least in the US.
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Jul 4, 2014 15:43
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andrew smash posted:Is it out or did you get an advance copy? It is out in Sweden, at least through my regular scifi-store. I got The Rhesus Chart by Stross earlier as well. So anyone got a summary for the ending of the Fractal Prince, cause I am fuzzy on the details?
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Jul 4, 2014 20:34
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Cardiac posted:It is out in Sweden, at least through my regular scifi-store. I would also be interested in this summary because even though I reread The Fractal Prince recently I found the ending really confusing.
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Jul 5, 2014 11:12
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Neurosis posted:I would also be interested in this summary because even though I reread The Fractal Prince recently I found the ending really confusing. Yes please - the whole JLF series, in fact. I'm finding it hard to differentiate between stuff I don't understand, and stuff I'm not supposed to understand yet.
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Jul 5, 2014 14:26
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Okay, let me see if I can make this simple without collapsing any unknowns. Part of the fun of this series is that there are few infodumps; you need to puzzle some stuff out from context. Needless to say, spoilery as all hell. The Quantum Thief: To begin with, we need to establish that Jean le Flambeau has been forked millions of times. The books follow one particular instantiation of Jean, along with his memories of things he used to do, but there are others. (Many of them are in the Dilemma Prison run by the Sobornost, which works along the lines of the iterated prisoner dilemma.) In the Dilemma Prison, Jean encounters the All-Defector, an entity which is capable of appearing as you, fooling you into thinking it will cooperate when in fact it always defects and gets away with it. The All-Defector is reading a book called "Le Bouchon de cristal", which Jean describes as one of his favorites. At the same time, Jean encounters Mieli, an Oortian who is working for a posthuman "goddess" called a pellegrini, who is a sister of the entity which runs the prison. Mieli, the pellegrini, and Mieli's ship Perhonen break Jean out of the Prison, but they are pursued by the jailors, the Archons. A nanomissile containing an Archon hits Perhonen and starts to transform it into another Prison. Jean convinces Mieli to give him root access to his posthuman body and uses its powers to "swallow" the missile, trapping the Archon in a sim of Perhonen's hull. In the aftermath, Jean realizes some of his memories have been sealed away for safety and will need to be recovered before he can do the work for which Mieli sprung him. They head to Mars. The society on Mars, the Oubliette, is based on absolute privacy and service to the state. Every citizen has reserves of Time, seconds of time spent as a human in society, which must be earned by spending time as a gogol (called a Quiet) serving society. Time also operates as the Oubilette's currency. The word gogol appears earlier in the book, but here we actually get it defined, it's a dead soul, an uploaded mind constrained to perform certain tasks in certain ways, enslaved to others in a way no living human ever could be. The society of the Oubliette is plagued by gogol pirates, agents of the Sobornost who illegally steal minds for their Great Common Task. Against the pirates work the tzaddikim, a group of vigilantes who use gevulot (Hebrew for "borders") to protect their identity. Gevulot is the Martian system of privacy; all memories can be protected by trees of public-key encryption, and you can share them with other people. The Martian equivalent of texting is to send someone a "co-memory" of the message, so that it integrates into their memory and they recall it. We meet a detective, Isidore Beautrelet, who works with one of the tzaddikim named the Gentleman. He suspects the tzaddikim are fighting not only the gogol pirates, but also a group called the cryptarchs. Isidore is also linked to a group of posthumans called the zoku. The zoku are the descendants/evolutions of MMORPG guilds who used quantum entanglement and mind uploading to raid more efficiently. Meili and Jean are drawn into the tzaddikim's fight while Jean navigates memory palaces embedded in the structure of the Oubliette itself. Much is revealed about the backstory of Isidore and the Gentleman. Eventually it comes out that the cryptarchs are entities who control the entire key space of gevulot. When a citizen goes into Quiet and comes back, his memory is restored from the exomemory backups, whose security is owned by the cryptarchs. They can manufacture memories at will for anyone who is in Quiet, and have done so, crafting a past where there was a King of Mars and a Revolution resulting in the current society. Rather than a the most private society in the solar system, the Oubliette is a panopticon. The truth is, the Oubliette was a prison, and the true cryptarch, the King of Mars, is implied to be a long-ago fork of Jean le Flambeur who was imprisoned there with a compulsion never to leave Mars planted in his consciousness. Jean can't bring himself to fully unleash the memory palace, because that would require condemning all his former friends to an eternal Quiet. But Jean le Roi, the King of Mars, can and does. Isidore and Mieli go to Jean's rescue; le Roi gives Isidore the cryptarch keys and sends him out of the memory palace; meanwhile, le Flambeur unleashes the Archon contained within him, which promptly turns the memory palace sim into another Dilemma Prison. Mieli pulls le Flambeur out of it, his recovered memories intact. Isidore contemplates how to truly set Mars free while Mieli, Jean, and Perhonen head off on the next step of their service to the pellegrini. Finally, we see the solar system from the Sobornost point of view. The Engineer-of-Souls (human name Sasha) is a Sobornost Founder, essentially a posthuman god, who spends his entire time splitting and recombining gogols (including forks of himself) in search of "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful". Here we get our first view of the nature of the Sobornost Great Common Task. He receives a visit from two other Founders, Matjek Chen and Joséphine Pellegrini, who inform him the Dilemma Prison has been breached. They detected it because Mieli made a mistake; instead of recovering two minds, she recovered three: herself, Jean, and the All-Defector. Joséphine persuades the Engineer that she is in danger, and as a favor to her he creates a Hunter gogol to recover a gogol whose name she whispers to it. Wow, that took a while to write up. I'll get back to The Fractal Prince in a bit. e: removed spoiler tags inklesspen fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Jul 9, 2014 |
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Jul 5, 2014 16:17
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Thank you for that. That makes way more sense now.
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Jul 5, 2014 23:04
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That was a good post.
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Jul 6, 2014 00:35
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It occurred to me after writing that post that "cryptarchs" can mean both "the hidden lords" and "the lords of cryptography". Of course, le Roi is both.
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Jul 6, 2014 00:41
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An excellent post. Looking forward to the Fractal Prince write-up, since while I got most of Quantum Thief, Fractal Prince was slightly harder for me. I should just re-read it a few times; some parts were crystal and others were...less so.
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Jul 6, 2014 02:34
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And now for The Fractal Prince. This one is a whole lot longer. Partly that's due to the narrative structure of the book, partly that's due to not knowing what's going to be important and what isn't, but there's also a lot more going on in this book. Once again, massive spoiler block. The first thing about The Fractal Prince is that its structure is a bit more complex than The Quantum Thief's. TQT had four kinds of chapters: "The Thief And", "The Detective And", five interludes about Jean's past on Mars, and two interludes about other characters. TFP keeps trading off viewpoint characters; usually it's The Thief or Tawaddud, a few times it's Mieli, and once it's The Prince, (whoever that is). But it also has chapters called "The story of...", and this is important. Most of the book, and perhaps the entirety of the previous book, is a story The Thief is telling to a child named Matjek (a name you may remember from the previous post). The telling of stories is about to become very important. The book proper opens with Jean aboard Perhonen with his loot from the memory palace on Mars. It's a Schrodinger Box, a prison which uses quantum mechanics to isolate an uploaded mind from the outside universe. Jean is trying to unlock the Box without causing its quantum states to collapse and destroy the mind inside it. Inside the box is a captured Sobornost Founder gogol; even though a gogol is a constrained, limited fork, a captive Founder is an incredible (and incredibly dangerous) treasure. Tawaddud Gomelez lives in a city called Sirr on Earth. She performs an interesting sort of sex work; in her world, there are creatures known as jinn. We don't find out very much about their nature for a long while, but it's safe to say they are disembodied people who crave the experience of having a body. Tawaddud uses a device called a beemee ("be me") to let a jinn share her sensations while she eats, reads physical books, and then masturbates. We also learn at this time that it is forbidden to tell any story in Sirr which is not true. The story she reads gives us some information about Sirr. There are mutalibun ("treasure hunters"), ghuls (people who have been possessed), muhtasib (the term means something like "inspector of the marketplace", but we will learn it means a different thing here). We learn that the treasure which the mutalibun hunt is "heavens", containing uploaded minds they can sell to the Sobornost. We learn that there are Secret Names which can control utility fog and ward off "wildcode". We learn the jinn she is entertaining used to be a man. In short, it's a weird mixture of postsingularity stuff and Arabian Nights. Before she can finish the entertainment, Tawaddud is interrupted by her sister Dunyazad. Politics is afoot in Sirr; a member of the Council has died. Tawaddud's father requests her help shoring up his political position. She agrees to help by going on a date with a man named Abu Nuwas. Back aboard Perhonen, Jean confronts the pellegrini gogol and learns the story of how he was caught and imprisoned in the first place. He infiltrated a Founder virtual reality and impersonated every one of the Founders except Matjek Chen, in the hopes of tricking the Chen gogol (or "the chen"; when a Founder name is used in lowercase, it always means a gogol) into revealing his Founder Code, his root access to the firmament (the control software underlying all other Sobornost virs and software). Unfortunately, the chen saw through his trick and has turned the trap on Jean. They banter a bit while Jean tries to make his escape, and fails. This is the first time we learn about the Kaminari jewel, but right now, all we learn is that it is the key to the Planck Locks, whatever those are, but in turn it has to be unlocked. As Jean's integrating the memory of his failure, the Hunter arrives. It uses a laser to destructively scan and upload any matter it can, searching for the person Pellegrini named at the end of TQF. To buy time, Mieli unlocks Jean's body, who turns it into mirrors, reflecting the Hunter's scanning beam back at it, confusing it just long enough for Perhonen to drive it off. Back to Tawaddud, on her date. She's down in what are essentially the black-market bazaars of Sirr, treating hauntings and wildcode infections. It seems wildcode is a sort of nanotechnology which has run out of control. Later, they bring her a ghul. The ghul is a person who thinks she is someone other than she is, and she got this way by reading a story. The story is recursive; inside the story, a young man meets with the Aun who demand that he tell them a story, and so he does, the same story as the one he is in. The Aun are four powerful entities, known as The Chimney Princess, the Kraken of Light, the Green Soldier, and the Flower Prince. A "body thief" named Ahmad has used the story to possess the woman; Tawaddud uses a Secret Name to force him to leave her. Abu Nuwas knows Tawaddud makes love to jinn, knows what she does in the bazaar, and is not repulsed by her; she in turn finds herself attracted to him. To escape from more Hunters, Jean and Perhonen find a Zoku router, a networking node that links the various zoku Realms together. Mieli is an Oortian, but she also has zoku heritage. She can temporarily join a zoku, giving her information and resources to ask their help in return. With the zoku's help, they unlock the Box and access the Realm stored within, but something goes wrong. Back to Tawaddud again. She meets with an envoy of the Sobernost named Sumanguru. Properly, "a sumanguru"; a gogol of one of the Founders. Even a Foundor gogol is vulnerable to wildcode, but the people of Sirr know Seals that can keep the wildcode away. After some discussion, Tawaddud convinces the sumanguru to let her guide him. The Sobornost gogol (also a sumanguru) inside the Box has escaped before Jean was ready for it. The sumanguru begins to take control of Perhonen, while simultaneously toying with Jean inside the Box's Realm. But this was always part of Jean's plan. He used the same trick that failed to work on the chen earlier; this time it works. When the sumanguru entered Perhonen, it fed its Codes to a simulation of the firmament. Jean takes the Codes, puts the sumanguru back in the Box, and weaponizes the router against the Hunters. Perhonen is very upset that Jean used her like that, but in the end she is persuaded that he deserves a chance to complete his mission. Perhonen agrees to help Jean lie to Mieli. Back to Tawaddud and the sumanguru. They're investigating the death of the Councilwoman. Her body has been transformed by wildcode. They suspect foul play, because only the Councilwoman should be able to unleash wildcode in her office, and it is incomprehensible that she would commit suicide. They suspect a body thief. The sumanguru interrogates the Councilwoman's jinn familiar; since it is linked with her personality, the sumanguru believes it can explain what happened. Tawaddud considers his method of interrogation to be torture; instead, she entwines with the familiar, joining its self-story with her own. She tells it how she went to live among the jinn and the body thieves and how she became the lover of a jinn known as Zaybak or The Axolotl. Within the story, Zaybak tells her a story about how he met one of the Aun and learned the secret of embedding yourself within a story: of becoming a body thief. Zaybak drives her away and she goes back to Sirr. At the end of her story, she has linked with the familiar and learns that the Axolotl stole the Councilwoman's body. The body thief story was strangely simple: "the circle and the square", no exciting events or compelling characters at all. As Tawaddud tries to explain this to the sumanguru without giving away that she was the Axolotl's lover, they are attacked by Fast Ones, tiny humanoids which operate much faster than humans. At this point, we get the first "the story of" chapter, explaining how Matjek Chen came to possess the Kaminari Jewel. We learn about the Dragons, AIs that do not have the motivations of humans, the reason the Founders use gogols nowadays. We also learn that the Founders' vision of the Great Common Task requires changing physics itself so that God can no longer play dice. The Zoku are opposed to this; thus they are at war. Tawaddud defends herself with Secret Names, which we now learn are command phrases given by the Aun to control the foglets that are omnipresent on Earth. The Fast Ones steal the Councilwoman's familiar. She and the sumanguru give chase on a flying carpet (foglets controlled by minor jinn), but they are led into a trap. They survive, but the familiar is lost. Jean explains his plan to Mieli. He is going to track down an upload of Chen made when he was seven years old, lost somewhere in the deserts outside Sirr. Jean plans to impersonate the sumanguru gogol using its Founder Codes, find the child version of Chen, and deduce Founder Chen's Codes from the child's memories. Jean leaves for Earth in the form of the sumanguru, with the pellegrini tagging along. Her sister convinces Tawaddud to assassinate the sumanguru. Tawaddud nearly goes through with it before the sumanguru helps her to realize her sister had a hand in everything that's happened to them up till now. Jean dives into a Sobornost vir replicating the pre-Singularity history of Earth. They take gogols of anyone who lived at that time, along with all recorded history, and tweak simulations over and over again until the simulated people act exactly the same way they did in known history. It's implied that this is part of the Sobornost war on death; a simulated person which thinks and behaves in exactly the same way that person did can, for their purposes, be considered to be that person. While Jean is exploring the vir in search of the lost Chen upload, he meets a little girl who looks like she's been up a chimney. The girl asks him to tell her a true story; in exchange, she'll help him find what he's looking for. So Jean tells a story (starting from the first words of TQF), the girl leads him to Chen's parents' memory of his upload being made. The hsien-ku asks the sumanguru she believes Jean to be to address an issue in Sirr. If you didn't figure it out before now, here it is; the sumanguru with Tawaddud is Jean le Flambeur. While Jean is doing all this, we now find out why Mieli made the deal with the pellegrini in the first place; her lover Sydän (Finnish for "heart") joined the Sobornost's Great Common Task and Mieli wants her back. Jean-sumanguru and Tawaddud return to the Palace of Stories, where the jinn and body thieves live. Tawaddud communicates with the Axolotl and learns that it is possible to become a story "like the Aun" and live inside the wildcode, and that Abu Nuwas is responsible for what happened to the Councilwoman. Unfortunately, while she is communing, Abu Nuwas has tracked them down. Abu Nuwas explains his motivations and plan in the best Bond villain style, but Tawaddud outwits him and uses another Secret Name to overpower his goons. Jean and Tawaddud escape. Jean obtains the Secret Name that can make you into a body thief and sends it to the pellegrini to test. Whole factions are converging on seven-year-old Chen's heaven ("The Jannah of the Cannon") in the desert. To buy more time, Mieli convinces the pellegrini to use the Sobornost technology orbiting Earth manufacture a posthuman army consisting of gogols of her, knowing most of them will die. Tawaddud is put on trial for the murders of the Councilwoman and the Sobornost envoy. She manages to convince the council what really happened; the story of the circle and the square was a body thief story that Abu Nuwas built into the augmented reality view of Sirr in such a way that it was only visible from the Councilwoman's office. Tawaddud convinces her father (one of the Councilmen) to make another deal with the Aun. Mieli and her other selves fight their way to the Jannah, but before they can recover the Chen upload, they're interrupted by three entities Perhonen and the pellegrini can't see: a man in green, a cephalopod made of light, and a girl who looks like she's been up a chimney. The girl says she should ask Mieli for a story, except she already knows it. The entities vanish and Mieli descends into the Jannah and meets seven-year-old Matjek Chen, who's playing with three of his four imaginary friends. His imaginary friends which have the same names as the Aun. She takes Chen back to Perhonen. Meanwhile, Chen the Founder is coming to Earth. In the time before he arrives, Jean and Mieli debate the ethics of using the body thief Name to take over the seven-year-old Chen so that when Founder Chen integrates him, thinking this will let him unlock the Kaminari Jewel, Jean will be able to steal Chen's Founder Codes. Mieli refuses to let him, despite the pellegrini's instructions, and summons the Hunter to take its prey. Before it arrives, Perhonen launches Mieli into the vacuum of space. We return to The Thief telling a story to the child Matjek, who is actually the Founder Chen after integrating his seven-year-old self, trying to convice the Kaminari Jewel he's innocent enough to be worthy of its power. (This despite the fact that he's about to unleash the Dragons on Earth, to crush the Sirr for daring to resist the Sobornost.) The thief and Joséphine convice Matjek to explain what caused him launch the Great Common Task. It's pretty short and not terribly compelling; as a child he saw death and decided to end it. However, much to Matjek's surprise, the thief isn't Jean. The name Joséphine had whispered to the Hunter was that of the All-Defector. Tawaddud and her father meet with the Aun. The Aun claim to have been stories living in humanity's minds, all throughout history, since the fire and the wheel, until Matjek set them free into the wildcode. They ask the Aun for a boon, to save them from the Sobornost, but the Aun are not strong enough. Tawaddud thinks it's all over, but then the fourth member of the Aun returns, the Flower Prince. Meanwhile, Jean and Perhonen fall into Earth's atmosphere. Perhonen burns up. Before she goes, she makes Jean promise to look after Mieli. The Aun save Jean, because part of him is part of them. Jean has been entwined with the Flower Prince since the Prison. Jean helps the Aun to turn the entire population of Sirr into body thief stories, so they can slip away from the Sobornost and come back again. Then we find out why Chen's upload heaven is called the Jannah of the Cannon; it is equipped with a thermonuclear bomb to propel it away from Earth in the event of an emergency. Jean and seven-year-old Matjek and all the Sirr stories head for the outer system. Epilogue: The All-Defector hands the Kaminari Jewel to Joséphine, but inside is merely Jean's calling card. The pellegrini inside Mieli threatens her, but she discovers a zoku jewel Perhonen sent with her and summons a fleet to take her to safety. Things I don't know the answer to:
e: removed spoiler tags inklesspen fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Jul 9, 2014 |
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Jul 6, 2014 06:19
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inklesspen posted:Things I don't know the answer to: Great post, I remembered most of it but not all of the details and especially what the Dragons were.
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Jul 6, 2014 06:57
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Thanks, inklesspen, that was really helpful. I'm looking forward to TCA but I think I'm even more excited to reread the entire series in one go sometime in the future, with a lot more understanding of what's going on.
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Jul 6, 2014 08:32
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One thing that I remain confused about : Did the All-Defector consume the Prime Chen? That was the impression that I was under reading that chapter, but presumably that's not what happened, since Prime Pellegrini wouldn't have a way to control it if it was, right?
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Jul 6, 2014 11:16
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inklesspen posted:Sydän (Finnish for "heart") Also Mieli = mind. Heart and Mind. And Perhonen = butterfly in case anyone was wondering.
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Jul 6, 2014 13:03
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