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One thing that interests me about Daniel Abraham as a writer is that he's both smart and consciously commercial - his first fantasy series was more high-falutin' and literary but when it did badly he made a choice to try to write to market. So whenever I'm irritated by a decision in these books I always wonder if Abraham's irritated too but just playing it the way he thinks will sell. A big difference between the books and show is that the core crew, Holden's group, have almost no backstory or personality that I can recall until book 5. I'm curious if that's actually true on reread or I'm just not paying attention.
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Mar 19, 2020 18:16
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FPyat posted:A bit of a missed opportunity to emphasize the living conditions inside small, enclosed ecosystems, where food wastage would be one thing that people would surely want to minimize. I think that's why it's a recycler.
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Mar 22, 2020 00:18
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Fred Johnson is such an unassuming name. I don't know if I like the choice or not. It's kind of cool to give The Butcher of Anderson Station a 'just a guy' feeling, but it's also a little bit "GM didn't have a list of names written down and had to adlib."
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Mar 26, 2020 03:36
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quote:“Anyone can kill a planet from orbit,” Holden replied. “You don’t even need bombs. Just push anvils out the airlock. That thing out there could kill … poo poo. Anything.” I always hate it when SF books say this! It's not exactly wrong, but if you push an anvil out the airlock, it's just going to keep orbiting next to you. You still need to de-orbit your impactor, which will take some retro thrust or big backwards kick.
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Mar 28, 2020 15:48
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True but I think anyone who is saying 'from orbit' is probably not including 'orbits with an underground periapse' 
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Mar 28, 2020 17:48
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I imagine they were thinking more about the Maltese variety, given the noir influence. There's something about the space food writing that just drives me up a wall. Don't get me wrong, cone noodles sound great, and they're even a bit of a nod to Blade Runner and Deckard's introduction. But I think I'm getting retroactive irritation from the future books full of kibble.
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Apr 8, 2020 17:54
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The loss of the protomolecule as a tangible biological horror is one of the things I regret most about the later books. I think they consciously chose to ditch that aspect because no one liked 'vomit zombies', but rooting the protomolecule in the intrinsically horrific repurposing of human biology is an effective way to characterize its danger.
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Apr 10, 2020 18:20
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Book Eros is a lot better than show Eros. The show is too tidy, the book is a real cyst of hell.
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Apr 13, 2020 20:51
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Matt Stover's action always gets me. e: CJ Cherryh too
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Apr 18, 2020 01:56
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There are ways it makes sense. Planes don’t carry a lot of ammunition, generally just enough for a couple seconds of firing. This is because you only need a few rounds to score a kill and most of your time will be spent lining up a shot. Bobbie’s armor may be designed with the assumption you’re just going to aimbot people with one or two shots. Plus ammunition is heavy and takes up space.
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Dec 23, 2021 15:18
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I mean an autocannon is much, much, much, much bigger than a 2mm (or 6mm) gatling gun.
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Dec 23, 2021 18:14
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This was a really interesting post and brought up a lot of stuff I hadn't thought about about the overall structure of the series. I like reading your analysis more than the recaps—the recaps aren't by any means bad, but I liked the heavier mix of commentary at the end of AG. I don't know if we'll ever make it to Book 9 but boy oh boy I'm excited to read some thoughts on that. I may be alone in thinking that Book 7 was actually pretty strong as a kickoff for a new arc—curious about that too.
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Apr 9, 2022 01:03
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I am VERY curious how you're going to feel about the Great Slug War. I think I had in my head that this book was going to be our first real, Rama-like adventure into protobuilder mystery world, with lots of spooky things and Mysterious Anomalies for Elvi to puzzle out. And around when the slug thing happened I realized "boy, this is what this series is about, isn't it? You go to your first alien planet and it's all mud and slugs."
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Jun 30, 2022 04:15
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I love bullet For all the poo poo I give this series I do think the writing around the bullet and its perception-altering effects (which we see a lot more of later) is quite cool.
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Jul 28, 2022 14:42
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I think this book might be the one most improved by the TV show so far. Burn Gorman in particular just kills it as Murtry, who I found actively unpleasant to read about in the book. Amos also gets to shine as a character (and actor!) Come to think of it - does the book at all explore the angle of Murtry being some kind of evil Holden figure? The executin’ a guy scene is a bit Millerish, and Holden has of course been accused of turning into a Miller lite. But I don’t remember if the book explores this at all - Murtry’s total dedication to the letter of his job isn’t very Holden at all.
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Jul 29, 2022 13:34
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He’s just the kind of guy who gets off on power and knows how to use the rules to put himself in positions where he can use that power to hurt. It’s a very real personality type but not one that can unfold much in a book, yknow? It’s not like he’s some kind of Wild West lawman with personal magnetism and folksy charm, a proper Little Bill from Unforgiven type. He’s a killer cop. He’s a killer cop for a company. He’s a hateful dude.
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Jul 29, 2022 15:23
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It just cracks me up how it took until Nemesis Games for them to decide 'man we should give the crew some personality'.
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Jul 31, 2022 21:35
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Holden out for a hero
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Aug 1, 2022 15:10
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quote:The crone spent the entire flight high on little white pills, staring at the ceiling all day and tossing and sweating through fever dreams all night. Amos introduced himself to her. She offered him some pills. He declined. This ended their association. This is genuinely very funny. I read all your posts! I'm impressed you've made it this far in the series when so many projects like this drown early on. I'm excited to see your take on beamNG.planet
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Aug 31, 2022 18:15
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The ship names are ugly, but maybe they're ugly in the way real ship names are ugly? But no, real ship names are all like "Valiant Venturer II" and "Galaxy Leader" and "Gay Viking". But maybe that's the result of Anglophone dominance, and things have changed in the Expanse. I don't know. I like it when they just name ships for ordinary sounding people, especially military ships. That's very plausible. (But - is there any difference between Earth and Mars military ship names? That seems like a missed opportunity.) I can't believe the real protagonist of the series (red kibble) doesn't show up until this book!
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Sep 11, 2022 13:44
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Now begins the greatest mystery of the series...how to pronounce Winston Dwart
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Sep 13, 2022 21:01
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I don't really think the Expanse is 'hard' SF at all, it doesn't really care about the actual details of the technology or materials or ships or guns. It's hard SF as an aesthetic. Which is fine, maybe even better for what it's doing. Especially when one of the things it's doing is 'get one book out a year and don't stop like GRRM stopped'
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Oct 12, 2022 03:49
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I think the Nemesis Games ending scene is one of the best things in the whole series. We coulda used a lot more like it, but instead they just sort of…repeat it a bunch? It’s about the most we ever get from the Goths in terms of face to ‘face’ contact. It’s funny that this dipshit admiral Sauveterre bemoans how half of humanity is by definition below average intelligence when that transparently doesn’t have to be true. Below median, sure, but if I have 500 1 dollar bills and 1 500 dollar bills half of my population isn’t below average value, nearly 100% is. I guess this is clever foreshadowing that Laconia dumb.
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Nov 16, 2022 02:09
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The description of this is very funny quote:Amos Burton, quite possibly the most unique character in sci-fi, ever. With a complex and thoughtfully created back story (something you'd never see in modern Star Trek/Wars for example) Amos has played a massive role in attracting new fans to the show over the seasons and rightfully so. The most unique character in science fiction! He's a gangster with a heart of gold! Except his heart of gold is, I don't know, other people who tell him what to do. gently caress you science fiction
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Nov 16, 2022 16:41
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Vlogging Heidegger In Ganymede
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Jan 2, 2023 15:40
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It makes sense that Marco would want to take out the Rocinante but what doesn't make sense is nobody thinking about it. Surely if you (Jimmy Holden) are carrying VIPs to an important meeting, you file a flight plan, and someone in the military says "You know the Free Navy will see your departure and will want to take a shot at you, let's give you some escorts". This is like Churchill getting in a plane to meet up with Stalin and Roosevelt by flying over, I don't know, Nazi occupied Norway: an attack might not be guaranteed, but it would be really easy! And then Marco says "of course the Rocinante will have escorts, so we'll have to draw them off by attacking them in force from behind, and when they drop back to screen the Rocinante I'll come in from the other side and 1v1 the Rocinante and totally own them" and there, you've got your set piece. It's a very weird bit of Expansian physics that ships moving through space always have fairly low relative velocities. By this I mean, like, they meet up to fight and they're able to exchange fire for hours. In reality, if you were to burn as hard as possible to intercept someone also burning hard, and you're coming in from anywhere other than behind them, odds are very good you'd blast pass each other at rear end-tearing speeds that would make a low Earth orbit satellite look like a slowpoke. (For an easy demonstration, imagine launching a satellite into orbit around Earth going east to west, then another going west to east, then ordering them to fight each other.) This could make for a really cool fight! It's like a medieval joust: you just go at each other blasting away with everything and then you flash past in a blink and maybe someone's dead, maybe you're both dead. It would also involve the kind of super high G divert maneuvers that would absolutely kill people. But no, Expanse ships always just kinda craaawl together while exchanging torpedoes, like they're very big Soviet and American warships playing Harpoon. There's a bit at the start of this chapter I'm never sure whether I like or detest, about Marco's ships being like wolves and everyone's so loving hyped to kill ol' Jimmy. The thing that doesn't work about it is it makes them sound like a bunch of Brazilian Counter-Strike players rushing B talking about how hard they're gonna gently caress the other team's moms. They're popping off so hard about how macho and cool they feel that it's obvious they're going to eat poo poo. The Free Navy in general is associated with this kind of bro machismo that I buy coming from Marco but, I don't know, feels weird and almoooooost a little racist as an all-pervading trait. I say racist because...they feel a little Hispanic/South American coded a lot of the time? Maybe I am the racist one. Maybe I'm reading too much into Belter slang. But they seem way more coded as Mexicans, than as say, Chinese people, or Persians like Keon Alexander who plays Marco. And with that comes all this hot-blooded machismo stuff and I dunno, it's weird. Is this like a sort of historical determinist "the underclass will always be poorly educated and therefore into sex and killing and honor and posturing?" Is it just something they thought would be interesting to read? I'd much rather read about an actual Mexican revolutionary than Marco, so if they're going to take inspiration from Hispanic culture I wish they'd actually dig into the history. Instead we get, uh, Alexander the Great comparisons? Anyway I'm just gonna post, maybe this is all stupid, I dunno.
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Jan 8, 2023 05:29
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Is that — I guess this question is a spoiler — the last we see of Anna?
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Apr 2, 2023 15:06
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Duarte (I guess this constitute spoilers???) should've been the most interesting character in this series, instead of the narrative equivalent of "guy who gets hit by a bus in the middle of his speech". The God-Emperor speeches with Holden as his Duncan Idaho could've been so fantastic.. Missed opportunities.
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May 2, 2023 14:07
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Eh I wholly believe that if there were a giant super traumatic event you could achieve some major political changes, including “this organization will handle interstellar trade so we don’t have another space genocide war.” Giving the disenfranchised space people a stake in the stability of civilization seems like an okay idea.
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May 18, 2023 22:16
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I’ll actually stand up for Expanderinos a little here. AIUI the idea that nukes are less destructive in space is kind of a misconception. There’s no atmosphere to tamp the x-rays emitted by the blast into a fireball, which means no shockwave and reduced mechanical effect. But that same lack of atmosphere means the x-rays just…keep going. And they’re very destructive on their own, especially to human bodies. Nukes go from weapons that burn and crush a relatively small area to weapons that poison or just instantly kill people at surprising range. E: neutrons from the blast also keep going, whereas in an atmosphere they’d be stopped pretty fast, and neutron radiation is very bad for you General Battuta fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Jun 1, 2023 |
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Jun 1, 2023 14:35
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Wait a minute, what’s the Proteus? I entirely do not remember the Proteus.
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Jul 1, 2023 13:33
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I wonder what the Coreys think the "right" thing for Singh to do is, tactically. You figure they've got to have some kind of opinion on counterinsurgency!
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Jul 11, 2023 16:55
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I think Naomi in the shipping containers might be, for me, the nadir of the series. It's such a...nothingburger of a plot about something that should be so exciting and important. It's the ultimate in the Coreyist tendency to take the dramatic or extreme and make it banal as possible (well, until the final sentence of Jim's plot in book 9). Naomi running an interstellar resistance movement and orchestrating the climactic battle should be so good but it's all boxes, kibble, feeling lovely, passively described administration and distant narration.
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Oct 23, 2023 16:26
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Naomi as they write her does not seem like a character who has any fun. She's doing the same stuff Avasarala used to do but Avasarala was obscene and ferocious even when badly wounded. Naomi is like...many people I've known who are excellent at their jobs but should've retired a long time ago because they are deep into burnout. She's not an acute portrait of that kind of person, she just sort of rolls into that slot because she's fatalistic and tired. Characters don't need to have or be fun, but they do need to be compelling, and Naomi doesn't (for me) compel in this book. She's not ferocious, brutal, yearning, passionate, driven to become the good version of Marco Inaros, willing to die to be with Jim again, willing to kill Jim to save him from whatever Duarte's doing to him, or even viscerally terrified of the Laconians hauling her in front of a firing squad. She's just kinda running an interstellar resistance because if she doesn't do it nobody else will.
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Oct 23, 2023 16:38
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I got myself in a posting snit over the Expanse game because I thought people were saying 'wait to buy this first game until the entire series is completed' and as a book author I am driven to rage by 'wait to buy the first book until the while trilogy/whatever is done'. It turns out they'd already finished a bunch of episodes and were releasing them one a time, and people were saying 'wait to see if the episodes already in the pipe get good or not before buying the first one'. So whether you waited to buy the first one made no difference to whether the later ones would be funded or completed. I felt a fool. e: what an inane page snipe sorry. Truly the Coreyism of posts
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Dec 4, 2023 15:40
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I like Duarte's game theory approach a lot, actually. It's so loving stupid and thus exactly in line with what I'd expect from the kind of person who talks a lot about game theory without ever really digging into it. One of the more successful strategies in the iterated prisoner's dilemma is 'grim trigger', which is basically what Elsa does — the first time your opponent defects on you, go ape poo poo and never forgive them. You'd think Duarte would consider that the other dimensional aliens might take such an approach
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Dec 4, 2023 20:56
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I think it's arguable that (spoilers for future events) taking Duarte out of the picture for much of the last three books was maybe the single worst decision in the whole series, it puts the last really interesting character off the page permanently. By the time he shows up again he's not even really the same guy.
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Dec 6, 2023 16:27
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Kchama posted:Isn't he like, the main antagonist? He has to return some videotapes
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Dec 7, 2023 05:55
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That Amos beat is genuinely very good yeah. It’s the right way to remind readers that you may all love the “amiable psychopath” but violence is actually a risky and ultimately fairly stupid way to live. It’s the right conclusion for the character.
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Jan 13, 2024 20:58
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I always got the sense Amos didn’t pull the trigger because he didn’t want to kill Teresa. Is that ridiculous? Did I just make it up?
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Jan 14, 2024 18:06
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