|
I was worried that the show was going to lose a lot of the unsettling weirdness about sleeving, but (Ep 4) Ortega sleeving her crotchety gran in a neo-nazi for Die de Muertos is loving genius.
|
# ¿ Feb 4, 2018 12:58 |
|
|
# ¿ Mar 29, 2024 00:42 |
|
The change that most irritates me is a really minor one in ep 2: he buys all his guns from a blackmarket dealer In the book he goes to a swanky walnut walled establishment, where a very dapper synth sells him perfectly legal hyper-cyanide tipped knives, and a mag-flechette with a spare battery and "a charger compatible with all standard household outlets" It gave a really nice civilised veneer to the dystopia, and made it a lot more than a generic gritty cyberpunk.
|
# ¿ Feb 4, 2018 20:01 |
|
^^^^^^ As if that would make any difference to anything! We still have horrifying political dynasties now, because you can just pass all your money and influence to your inbred chinless offspring. Boris Galerkin posted:Sorry I’ve never read the books nor the Wikipedia page so I have no idea about half of these terms/names and was just going by what I picked up from the show only. Not saying you’re wrong or anything, but this is what I pieced together from the show: The reason you're struggling is because the show half-assed it, chopping around all the forces and idealogies in the book into a stupid mush that doesn't make any sense. Show: Kovacs joins the Protectorate's CTAC (can't remember what it stands for) who are somewhere between a marine strike team and a repressive totalitarian, getting downloaded into bodies all over the galaxy to Quell leads a bunch of anti-immortality rebels, training them as Envoys - people who can download into any body any planet and quickly start assembling terror cells and resistance movements. Despite this, her only goal with the Envoys is a single suicide mission to take out the system core that magically controls all stack transfers for some loving reason. Book: Envoys are the elite body swapping forces of the Protectorate, given elite training to let them adapt rapidly to foreign environments and changing social and tactical landscapes (c.f The Forever War for the Vietnam-scale mess you get into if you don't do this). They're conditioned to be near-sociopaths, and are legally forbidden from every holding public office. They drop into planets to crush dissent, topple governments, all sorts of dirty work. Quell leads a failed socialist/anarchist revolt, which Kovacs and his commanding officer (Virginia Ver-something) join up to after a catastrophic Envoy mission leads to their whole team getting wiped out by a viral strike. Quell is explicitly pro-Sleeving, because it ensures that the revolution can never die - the same old class conflicts will keep grinding the galaxy down, but eventually people will get resleeved and the revolution can begin again. It's part of a general trend in the show of taking all the anti-capitalist cyberpunk themes of the Books and turning it into a very on the nose conflict about whether or not its a good thing to make some people immortal. Every time the book comes up with some social or cultural explanation for a problem in the future the show just reworks it to be a fictional result of Sleeving, which completely robs the story of any meaningful subtext. Instead its all lazy "world-building" about how fictional property X of fictional technology Y leads to fictional problem Z. It's boring, its cowardly, and its not good sci-fi. Book Meths don't go crazy because they're so immortal, they're evil upper-classholes who have so much power and wealth that they're completely above the law and start growing bored with the mundane pursuits the rest of us can afford. Being resleeved a bunch doesn't cause you to go crazy because you've passed some mythical 10 sleeve limit, you're just gonna suffer the mental strain of being constantly torn away from everything you know and everyone you love. Sleeving sickness isn't a problem, the problem is being dropped into a foreign world with no cultural touchstones for you to understand, with no connections to your fellow man. Strom Cuzewon fucked around with this message at 14:17 on Feb 5, 2018 |
# ¿ Feb 5, 2018 14:14 |
|
Gyges posted:I had read a review or two about the show that complained that the show took it's technology and came to the conclusion that immortality was bad. Having watched it, to me it seems that the show was pretty clear that the issue was rich assholes becoming too powerful and that power leading to corruption. Even good people are corrupted, because the limitless power is just too much. The show even goes out of it's way to give a voice to several people who are in favor of death, and to varying degrees shows how that's not the answer to the problem. Book spoilers: Not sure she's the one who specifies Tak. I think Bancroft finds him of his own accord. I might be wrong. Importantly, Tak is less of a big deal in the books. The Envoy's are the elite strike forces of the protectorate, and rogue Envoys that can be hired by the super-rich are a dime a dozen.
|
# ¿ Feb 8, 2018 00:12 |
|
Neddy Seagoon posted:So minor thing for episode 6; They kinda missing the point on Kadmin using the quote "That's loving enough". How it goes in the book is a brutal gun battle in the Oakley VR cafe, with Kadmin rocking up in a cheap synth body with some hired goons. They shoot the hell out of him, have him dead to rights, and that's when he says "That's loving enough". Which is enough for Kovacs to drag Ortega into cover a few seconds before Kadmin self-destructs just like the interrogated woman on Adoracion. That said, past that bit I think it's a good adaptation of the fight in the Panama Rose. Also the general change of Laurens Bancroft being such a violent manipulative piece of poo poo is just dull and utterly sinks how the story is (presumably) going to go by the end seeing how tightly they're generally riding the original book. The whole "Meths are an elite breed " thing is still stupid too. Also there's no reason for him to know the significance of that phrase - in the show, only Quell and Tak know what happened on Adoracion. In the book it's not such a secret. It's like they half adapted the whole idea of Kadmin being strangely well read for a psychotic hitman, then missed one of their own edits. See also: the attempted hack of Bancrofts datastream, which is never resolved in either Tak's real or fictitious explanation.
|
# ¿ Feb 9, 2018 16:20 |
|
MrMojok posted:Also she died a couple hundred years prior to the events of Altered Carbon. Although in the third book it turns out she has survived, digitally. Super late game spoiler here. As in "climax of book three" - should probably flag it as such. That said, the above spoiler really should be "the start of book three, and the impetus behind the whole book" instead of the bloody ending.
|
# ¿ Feb 9, 2018 19:10 |
|
Neddy Seagoon posted:That multi-sleeve psychosis thing is mostly the series' bad writing. It is a thing in the books, but you gotta really gently caress yourself up with repeated re-sleevings in a short span of time. Dimi the Twin gets like that because he regularly resleeves for jobs across the world, nevermind double-sleeving himself. The brother angle is just bad too, because the book has a far more pragmatic reason for him double-sleeving himself that tells you far more about the character; it's so he has backup he can trust. The sad thing is that i would have happily watched a story about two hosed up kids tearing across the galaxy after centuries apart I think there's a compelling story there. But bolting it on to a murder mystery and making her the most evil woman alive didn't work very well.
|
# ¿ Feb 10, 2018 11:59 |
|
I would say that Netflix has proved that 10 episodes is precisely the worst length for a series. But then Defenders was only 8.
|
# ¿ Feb 11, 2018 16:52 |
|
General Battuta posted:It's actually the opposite - the internal chronicle of you is far less disrupted by a fork operation than outside observers (who can see, for example, that you've been on ice for 250 years and then woke up in a new body). To the subjective first-person qualia, the, 'I', there's no change, at least until you get some sensory evidence you're in a new place. SOMA handles this really well. SOMA's greatest strength is making the main character an idiot. It could easily have been a bunch of dry philosophical wanking, but instead it sharpened their focus onto the subjective vs objective bit. SOMA owns.
|
# ¿ Feb 11, 2018 17:51 |
|
Collateral posted:I just had a really bad premonition with regards to Quell. How terrible, how cliche, could they really make it? In the diary? Somehow.
|
# ¿ Feb 12, 2018 20:53 |
|
I feel the core of the disagreement is how much we should privilege biological continuity. You can say that "you" exist only when you have a continuity of consciousness - but then sleeping, getting knocked out, and losing your train of thought count as "death". The new you when you wake up has just a strong a claim as the copy I made from your brain scan. Obviously once both exist at the same time they become different people (because out of petty vengeance I'm making the copies of you all fight to the death) So maybe we should say that the original is whichever exists in the same substrate - I'm the original because I'm the same flesh and blood as I was when I went to sleep. But this isn't a complete answer - my atoms are not quite the same as they were a week ago, and very different from what they were 10 years ago. So we can't really take biological continuity as the most important thing. And if we do, we have to say why being in the same meat-chassis is so very important - and it's hard to make that argument without getting all mystical and hand-wavey. Neddy Seagoon posted:Nooope, that's all the series doing and its "Look, we are like Caligula's orgies, morals are for poors" bullshit. I really liked that bit, especially the reveal that the rebellious teenage daughter was in her 60s. I didn't take it in an especially sexual way (although its hard to interpret "I'm using my mum's body to gently caress strangers" in a completely non-sexual way), but more like she was stealing her mum's ferraria to go for a joy-ride. It was just a repressed, spoilt child acting out. It would have been extremely weird to have Miriam be permanently mid-20s like in the book, but this is a good middle-ground. Strom Cuzewon fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Feb 14, 2018 |
# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 17:43 |
|
There Bias Two posted:Another question maybe the book readers have an answer to: I assume you're refering to Blindsight in this. If not - you should totally read Blindsight. Part of the setting has people uploading their minds into a virtual heaven (with their bodies in storage/life-support) and it's seen as the ultimate in giving up, in accepting that you have nothing more to contribute to the world. It also has characters express surprise at someone who only takes their sex in the first-person, instead of doing it all in VR. 95% of the planet are physically virgins.
|
# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 18:13 |
|
Zaphod42 posted:Nah this still exists even without souls, don't let him saying "maybe there are souls" distract you. You still have the death problem with zero souls. I don't believe in souls. Nah, just that each of those copies are you. Not a copy, exactly the same as you. At least at the moment of creation. After that they start to diverge and become their own dudes.
|
# ¿ Feb 15, 2018 17:11 |
|
Zaphod42 posted:They can be exactly you without being the you instance of you. Yeah, they're a separate instance. But GB's point is that there is no difference between the separate instances. You can have subjective experience, nothing GB is saying invalidates that. In fact, accepting that all copies can have subjective experiences is kind of a prerequisite to what he's saying - otherwise it's abundantly clear which is the original and which is the copy.
|
# ¿ Feb 15, 2018 17:50 |
|
Zoracle Zed posted:it's a waste of time to complain about not being able to adapt books 2 and 3 properly, they're gonna keep all the same characters and actors and invent another murder mystery for Kovacs to solve I would be perfectly fine if they never moved past the first three chapters of book 2, and we got 10 whole episodes of Catch-22-in space!
|
# ¿ Feb 20, 2018 19:54 |
|
DropsySufferer posted:Are the books worth reading? The show was ok... the premise is amazing but too much time was wasted on the cop drama stuff. Do the books focus more on the big picture and the setting itself? I've been selling it to my friends thusly: The books are some very clever, very angry sci-fi, hidden beneath a slick cyberpunk murder thriller. The show manages to just be a slick cyberpunk murder thriller. If any of the implications of Stack tech or their social consequences interested you in the slightest then you'll absolutely dig the hell out of the book.
|
# ¿ Jul 31, 2018 10:39 |
|
Bust Rodd posted:You or other persons have said the sex is “kind of rape-y” multiple times and I’d really like some clarification as to what that means. Is he loving bodies without stacks? Is it a digital torture scene like the one from the first book? Is Kovacs the one doing the rape stuff? Broken Angels has a traumatised rape victim who Kovacs rescues from soldiers, and because he needs her functional quickly he puts her through military pack bonding treatment that's explicitly a hairs-breadth away from sexual assault itself. It's another piece of the settings subtle body-horror - you're nothing more than biological resources, and the people in power will happily open up your body and soul, rummage around inside, and put you back together in a way that suits them - and it's portrayed as a really hosed up thing to do, but it's still kinda skeezy. Why does so much scifi/fantasy try and be clever with sexual assault? The sex with Ortega was great - it captured all the weird uncomfortable stuff of stacks and sleeves, without crossing into creepy.
|
# ¿ Jul 31, 2018 18:03 |
|
Neddy Seagoon posted:Even I gloss over that one, but iirc that was more just mutual blowing off steam. None of it was about bonding, it was just all about keeping her mind from regressing into itself because he needed her functional for the job and she was not capable of much when she was pulled out of the prison in a malnourished and badly abused sleeve. She does mention that she can feel whatever he's done to her psychologically at the edge of her mind a bit, or something like that, basically hypnotizing her into being mentally-sound whether she likes it or not. I'd actually like to file the VR sex under "the good kind of weird" - drug aided VR sex is dangerously plausible, as is the way their avatars are somewhat pornified versions of their normal sleeves. And the archaeologist literally sculpting her tits and rear end in front of Kovacs is hilarious. Edit: to clarify - Envoy psyche-reassembly is rapey, but not a sex scene. VR sex is sex, but not rapey. Strom Cuzewon fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Jul 31, 2018 |
# ¿ Jul 31, 2018 18:34 |
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Presumably he owns the building and maintenance costs are low because it's all AI run. Also maybe he's making money somehow on the side. This is the tiniest change in the show that annoyed me. In the show he's just an AI running a hotel. In the book, Ortega remarks how a bunch of hotel-AIs upgraded themselves to full sentience and bought themselves from senior management. It's a trivial little detail, but it makes me smile whenever I think of it.
|
# ¿ Aug 13, 2018 13:51 |
|
|
# ¿ Mar 29, 2024 00:42 |
|
Neddy Seagoon posted:I have much, much, higher hopes for the anime being good than the second season. I love the disconnect between The masses of drugs probably help too.
|
# ¿ Nov 9, 2018 16:39 |