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Book 2 does a fantastic job of explaining a bunch of poo poo without feeling like the characters are lecturing you, the reader. Which is often not the case with this kind of setup
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Jan 24, 2023 05:52
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You will need a tolerance for commas, however.
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Jan 24, 2023 06:13
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grassy gnoll posted:You will need a tolerance for commas, however. Lol. Having just finished it, I definitely did not find Edgar's stream-of-consciousness narration anywhere near as annoying as some in this thread. Although I think my favourite part was when he tried weeding, and every way he could think of to kill the weeds was so filled with cosmic horror even Wake was traumatized.
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Jan 24, 2023 06:20
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Ed does tend to wrap themself up in side thoughts and digressions within the same sentence. Zora isn't as bad when we get their perspective in Safely You Deliver, and Grue is downright straightforward. As for Ed and weeding, well... Ed does figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't terrify most people, but is fundamentally similar to what Laurel did to Wake and Halt and the rest of the 12, so that definitely puts Wake off his whole 'benevolent bricklayer' equilibrium for a bit. It's a very good bit.
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Jan 24, 2023 15:42
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habeasdorkus posted:2. You need to build the road as you march or you'll run into things or off of cliffs at high speeds. Reems built their road to prevent the Northern Hills from shifting around, rather than move quickly. Lead out in cuffs posted:8. In the first battle, the most casualties were taken mainly from the solid despair evaporating all over them like a chemical weapon. Otherwise, sorcerers, the swords of berserkers, etc. The Captain single-handedly slices up 220-some dudes with a sword in the first battle. A bunch of the weapons of the main Wapentake/short company are melee weapons, they just have some ranged weapons they use first. (Also, from the Captain's POV, the last battle involved a lot more magic/demons/ichor, whereas Blossoms end of things probably got a lot messier once the enemy were inside arty range.) Spoilers for The March North only: I think the despair didn't necessarily kill them, so much as make it impossible for them to fight back. They lost their latch on the platoon focus, so they were a couple hundred soldiers stuck just fighting a few thousand berserkers (who, being berserkers, were insulated from the despair) instead of being able to use the tricks the Standard offers. The March North does detail how many die at each point, though. Less than half the Wapentake and Experimental Battery make it back to Headwaters, 278 hale or wounded versus 297 dead. Something like 200 of those deaths happen when the Despair pops off. Most of the troopers who went with the Captain into the fortress made it back, but the Experimental Battery and Dove's Third Platoon had ~60 more dead after that fight and took most of their casualties from the spine beasts.
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Jan 24, 2023 16:13
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habeasdorkus posted:Ed does tend to wrap themself up in side thoughts and digressions within the same sentence. Zora isn't as bad when we get their perspective in Safely You Deliver, and Grue is downright straightforward. Lol yep. habeasdorkus posted:Realized in my reread of Safely You Deliver that the Standard also compresses the space being travelled so it's not just being able to move more quickly. Yeah there's an offhand comment near the end of the book. quote:Spoilers for The March North only: Ah yes that makes sense.
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Jan 24, 2023 17:06
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Re: despair, one of my favorite tiny details in the books that you only notice on a re-read. "The light goes out of the world, dust and worse than dust. I’ve been here before. ... Dove’s been here" Those three words mean a fuckton more after book 2.
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Jan 24, 2023 17:14
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How is chapter after chapter about building a house so captivating? This is good.
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Jan 26, 2023 06:28
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I think I still find Edgar the most approachable
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Feb 16, 2023 11:32
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Yeah same. I liked Edgar and the Captain best so far for narrative voice.
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Feb 17, 2023 04:08
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I just finished the second book. At first I bounced off it hard, because I really wanted more of the Captain's bizarre, ultra-terse narration. But by the end it grew on me substantially -- Edgar's relationship with Dove somehow, for all its weirdness, felt more intimate and tender than most relationships I've seen in other of media. What a *weird* series of books this is. Personal highlight: the scene where Edgar has learned shapeshifting and considers giving himself a bigger dick, only for Dove to say that she prefers them *prehensile*. And now I'm ten pages into the third book, and there's a unicorn! Yay!
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Mar 8, 2023 21:43
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Ruud Hoenkloewen posted:I just finished the second book. At first I bounced off it hard, because I really wanted more of the Captain's bizarre, ultra-terse narration. But by the end it grew on me substantially -- Edgar's relationship with Dove somehow, for all its weirdness, felt more intimate and tender than most relationships I've seen in other of media. What a *weird* series of books this is. If you like intimate and tender (in a different way than most books do it) relationships, you're in for a treat in book 3.
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Mar 8, 2023 21:50
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Ruud Hoenkloewen posted:I just finished the second book. At first I bounced off it hard, because I really wanted more of the Captain's bizarre, ultra-terse narration. But by the end it grew on me substantially -- Edgar's relationship with Dove somehow, for all its weirdness, felt more intimate and tender than most relationships I've seen in other of media. What a *weird* series of books this is. Yeah one of the funniest parts about the series is that the author only slowly lets on that "humans" are no longer actually even remotely the same species, and only interbreed across races via fancy life magic. It's also one of the testaments to the strength of the Commonweal that they're able to be actively inclusive of everyone. Wait until the later books with Graul sex.
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Mar 8, 2023 21:59
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Ruud Hoenkloewen posted:And now I'm ten pages into the third book, and there's a unicorn! Yay!
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Mar 8, 2023 22:40
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At one point Mulch gives Zora the name of Pelorios's ancestor species, which helped me get an idea of what they looked like. Also, very funny naming a unicorn Enormous.
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Mar 9, 2023 00:48
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Slyphic posted:Chapter 11 is when you actually get a description of it, beyond the single word. I'll see if I can dig up the art of it I saw, you post when you get there. In typical Graydon fashion I had to read the paragraph three times to even start building a mental image. Even then it seems pretty wacky, the jaw's attached to their spine? Also, it doesn't seem like it's going to be a big focus, but I'm very much enjoying the details we get on unicorn languages. Watching authors come up with bizarre grammars to show off how a species thinks (hierarchy, respect, conquest) is one of my favourite things.
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Mar 10, 2023 08:58
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Finished the 5th book last night and not exactly sure how to feel about all this. These books were great and simultaneously incredibly frustrating. I both love and hate his writing style. I've read a lot of books in the past that were originally described to me as not handholding and you would have to figure out things without being explicitly told them, but nothing compares to this series. When it works it works extremely well and it is incredibly enjoyable, but there were plenty of passages that no matter how many times I reread or paused and thought about it I just couldn't parse what was actually going on or the meaning. Definitely a series I can only recommend to certain friends. I've thought about how to describe it and the best I could come up with was "grimbright". The world is a really hosed place, but the Commonweal is inspiring in many ways and gave me a lot to chew on in regards to politics and how we organize government. The author certainly has some opinions, but drat if he hasn't mapped out his preferred society down to the smallest details. I can't say I've ever read anything like it, and it was very refreshing to read something so different even if it made me mad often. I do find it funny that he refuses to publish through Amazon/Traditional publishing because of his beliefs but apparently Google is ok? Edit: Is there like a cached version of the old google groups or something? I'd love to go back and read it now that I have finished. Also, does anybody have a link to the first thread? Edit 2: I see now he has an unrelated story called The Human Dress. Is it worth reading? D-Pad fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Mar 11, 2023 |
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Mar 11, 2023 06:31
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His post on the matter seems to imply that Amazon wants a lot more of his personal banking info than Google, rather than it being an ethics issue.
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Mar 11, 2023 06:52
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D-Pad posted:I both love and hate his writing style. I've read a lot of books in the past that were originally described to me as not handholding and you would have to figure out things without being explicitly told them, but nothing compares to this series. When it works it works extremely well and it is incredibly enjoyable, but there were plenty of passages that no matter how many times I reread or paused and thought about it I just couldn't parse what was actually going on or the meaning. I read a thread recounting the first book (https://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/egalitarianism-battle-sheep-and-bad-bad-odds-lets-read-the-commonweal-series.10575/, might've been posted here already) that describes the books as making 'a heroic, but ultimately unsuccessful attempt at pretending to be written in English', which I adore. For all the utterly obscure passages, it never really feels like the prose is slipping out of his control. The confusing parts are mostly meant to be confusing, be it because Edgar's losing track of the situation or the Captain just doesn't bother explaining concepts of basic geography to the reader. Even when things do get completely impenetrable, I honestly find it even more fascinating, in an outsider-art kind of way. Clearly it meant something to Saunders, you can feel that there's something there to understand but you just can't quite grab onto it. Like remembering the shape of a dream when you wake up, but none of the details. I've wondered a few times if Saunders carefully lays out each turn of phrase like a mathematician, or if he just goes into a fugue state when writing and this is his natural diction. I don't know which option is more terrifying.
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Mar 11, 2023 09:16
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Every narrator has a distinct voice - diction, register, the whole lot, and there are no slips in that.
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Mar 11, 2023 09:28
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Yeah, I strongly suspect that he plans them meticulously, since he plans everything else meticulously and I love him for it. That said, you can read his blog and see what his "natural" writing voice is, and there's definitely some Captain in it. The voice of The March North probably wasn't as challenging to write as you might think.D-Pad posted:Edit: Is there like a cached version of the old google groups or something? I'd love to go back and read it now that I have finished. Also, does anybody have a link to the first thread? To the best of my knowledge it was obliterated beyond hope of retrieval, and even if there was a way to view it, posting it here would probably violate our pact with the author. It's a shame, because it was a fascinating resource and I regret not making more extensive notes than I did for my thought experiment of, "What would I need to do to run an RPG faithfully in this setting, or hack an existing one?" (The answer is: a lot. A lot.) Oh! One thing I hope he'd be fine with coming up in discussion are his book recommendations, since it has nothing to do with the Commonweal directly. I copied them down to read later, so I could post them here if we feel that's acceptable. How do we feel as a thread / mods about that?
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Mar 11, 2023 11:16
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D-Pad posted:Edit 2: I see now he has an unrelated story called The Human Dress. Is it worth reading? Parts of it are good (vikings! zombies! dinosaurs!) but at its worst the prose is way more confusing than anything in the Commonweal series and it goes on just a little bit too long at the end. I'm thinking in particular of most everything after the scene with Tyl's parents ghosts I've read it twice, the second after seeing some discussion on the mailing list about a critical detail of the setting and being bothered enough as to how I could have missed it the first time that I wanted to see how it changed things. I don't think this counts as a mailing list leak, as a sufficiently-attentive reader could and maybe should have figured it out but there are no humans in the story. Also while looking for a non-list source of that I found this 2015 post on rec.arts.sf.written: quote:There's The Blessed Novel, aka :Ravens in a Morning Sky:; short, dense (kindly disposed readers used the word "neutronium") in part because I was trying to use saga conventions. (70 kwords; first full draft was just fifty, much "make this clearer" from early readers. No plans to epub.)
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Mar 11, 2023 13:20
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Ruud Hoenkloewen posted:'a heroic, but ultimately unsuccessful attempt at pretending to be written in English' That's the phrase I keep failing to remember when trying to sell people on these books!
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Mar 11, 2023 23:25
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Hello, bought the first book on google, downloaded the EPUB and now want to get it onto my Kindle. I have tried both of the "send to" functions and they both fail. Am I hosed? - it worked as a mobi ... the format they dont want to support - the epub works fine on my iPhone … Sonderval fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Mar 13, 2023 |
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Mar 13, 2023 07:09
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only mobi (and azw3 or whatever the name is?) works on kindle get calibre and convert the epub to mobi
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Mar 13, 2023 09:20
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Doktor Avalanche posted:only mobi (and azw3 or whatever the name is?) works on kindle This is the answer. Don't worry Sonderval, Calibre is free and the conversion process is trivially easy. Here's a guide! Calibre's great to have around for ebook management in general, too.
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Mar 13, 2023 10:10
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Kestral posted:Oh! One thing I hope he'd be fine with coming up in discussion are his book recommendations, since it has nothing to do with the Commonweal directly. I copied them down to read later, so I could post them here if we feel that's acceptable. How do we feel as a thread / mods about that? I wanna see the recommendations
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Mar 13, 2023 17:39
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Kestral posted:Ye]) I don't see how that would be a problem. If it is graydon can tell us / me.
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Mar 13, 2023 17:43
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So be it! Some recommended reading by Mr. Saunders, in reference to The Commonweal: quote:Pamela Dean, everything but particularly and especially The Dubious Hills. Of these, I've only read The Black Company and Beowulf, albeit not the Rebsamen translation; the only McKillip I've read is the Riddle-Master series, and while I'm sure there's a connection to / influence on Saunders' work somewhere in it, I can't see it. For folks who've read these, I'd be quite curious to know how you see them relating to The Commonweal! Also, let's take a moment to appreciate the idea of "honour as a technology." The Graydon-est thing.
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Mar 14, 2023 03:16
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I read about a quarter of Pamela Dean's Dubious Hills this year. The Graydon influence is very obvious. It's a pastoral examination of the nature of knowledge and perception and I was just not at all in the mood for that. It felt like it was going to take a fairly heavy cognitive load to follow the story but wasn't engaging me while pelting me with oblique hints at the actual nature of the world. It's been placed in my 2nd try pile for the time being. I've got a copy of her book The Secret Country which is supposed to be more approachable in my soon-ish to-be-read pile.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:26
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I really like The Dubious Hills and I'd think that most Saunders fans would too. It's been a long-rear end time since I read The Secret Country and the sequels, I should probably fix that. Early Cherryh is all about people in strange situations being confused by what's going on and it doesn't surprise me at all that they'd have been an influence. (now I'm thinking about the azi and the various created-to-obey-the-sorcerer races in the Commonweal....)
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Mar 14, 2023 17:35
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Kestral posted:So be it! Some recommended reading by Mr. Saunders, in reference to The Commonweal: You want mid and late period McKillip for weird magic and weirder prose. Ombria in the Shadows, Od Magic and The Bards of The Bone Plain might be the best places to start.
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Mar 17, 2023 04:52
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So, in book 2, there's a bit where Creek people mention that they have some sort of two axis chart for romances and I have to wonder if this is a Homestuck reference (which would make Dove and so on the trolls, I guess?) or if Graydon accidentally reinvented Homestuck's quadrant system
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Mar 21, 2023 02:57
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There’s more details later, and there are intimations that there are actually even more axes of gender for the Creeks.
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Mar 21, 2023 02:59
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Greydon as a Homestuck fan would be about the most against type thing I could imagine.
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Mar 21, 2023 03:30
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being a vriska in the commonweal is punishable by immediate summary execution
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Mar 21, 2023 04:47
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eke out posted:being a vriska in the commonweal is punishable by immediate summary execution It really is a utopia in the making, isn't it?
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Mar 21, 2023 10:10
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so what massive fanfiction AU does graydon secretly write?
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Mar 21, 2023 10:16
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Just finished the third book in a daze. The latter half feels denser than #2, but that might just be my mind failing to keep up. Some highlights: The chapter narrated by Pelorios. Felt like something by Joyce, achingly beautiful and teetering wildly on the edge of incomprehensibility. I thought the romance was very sweet. The shape of peace talks! Ed and Dove and Constant taking so long to get judged that even Halt is worried, because they engaged the shape of peace in philosophical discussion. Of course they did. What a strange series this is. Now to see what book #4 is like. From what I've heard it's even more dense, which is exciting 
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Mar 26, 2023 20:45
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So what's the deal with the whole forum thing of there being multiple Graydons? Like I'm not gonna doxx him here, but the guy isn't hard to find, and what I can gather about him tracks pretty well with the politics and overall content of the Commonweal books.
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Mar 31, 2023 20:42
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