Whitaker's comments (member since Sep 24, 2008)

Whitaker's comments from the SciFi and Fantasy Book Club group.

Richard wrote: "For example, I think that would be true among the novels this was roughly reminiscent of, to me: Frank Herbert's Dune, or either of Vernor Vinge's space operas (A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky)."

That's true, I guess. It definitely reminded me of A Deepness in the Sky which I read for this book club too, and which I thought did the whole alien intelligence thing much better.

Yes, my impressions were similar. It felt very uneven. The overarching theme seemed to be great power and its use and abuse. The Dwellers use their's benignly, while Sal (self-centered), Luseferous (cruel) and the Mercatoria (greedy?) do not. But as an examination of power, he couldn't seem to decide whether to do Marx-brothers farce or straight tragedy and ended up with neither.

Edit: Was reading through the reviews on this on GR. One reviewer called this Banks's examination of how an anarchic society would work. I guess that's another way of looking at the novel: anarchic (Dwellers), commercial/oliogarchic (the Mercartoria), and dictatorship (Luserferous). Still not thrilled though.

Well, it's the first thing that strikes you. The Dwellers, for example. The "kudos" thing is somewhat alien, but essentially tracks societies based on honour. When we meet them, Y'sul's behaviour is so much like Sal's that's it's hard to see them as being different species, much less one human and one an intelligence on a gas planet. It's like he's taken human society and mapped it on an alien body.

I'm a 100 pages in, and I'm enjoying it so far. That said, at about 20+ pages, I realised that I'd read it before. Don't remember much of it, so it's practically like a first time read. Not sure if that's a good or bad sign. LOL!

Peregrine wrote: "His health tied to the health of the land. The wound that would not heal, caused by the use of sedos power in the battle with the Skasloi."

Ahhh, that's interesting. I didn't pick up that bit about the wound that would not heal. I guess it must have been in one of the songs or something cause I mostly skimmed those.

This is a bit of an answer to the "How Different" topic as well. I'm close to 5/6th of the way through and I'm enjoying it. But I didn't feel much enjoyment until well after the halfway mark.

It really felt so very very trodden: you had the ranger type, the monk type, the princess type, the naive knight type. Humphf.

That wasn't helped by the style which was to end each chapter on a cliff-hanger. Too much redolent of The Da Vinci Code for me. And the language skirted laughable several times. I almost gave up at page 103 when Lesbeth arrives and "leapt ferociously into William's arms". Say what? A jungle cat attack?

Then I got past the halfway mark, and the mythology got far more interesting with the fanes and stuff. That's the stuff that's keeping me interested so I hope there's more of that later: I'm currently intrigued enough to want to read the rest of the series. We shall see.

Peregrine wrote: "For those who like to deconstruct fantasy mythology. The Briar King: Green Man? Fisher King? Seems a mixture of both to me, and there's pleasure and richness in the noticing."

Interesting. I get the Green Man, but why Fisher King?

Jennifer wrote: "I found that this book was a slow start for me, but about halfway through I started to see the connections between the various stories and got hooked."

It was like that for me too. :-D

Robin, would it by any chance be available in any other ebook format? I use Mobipocket and eReader.

Yeah, that seems to be her style. It feels of sort "meander-y" (Yes, yes, I made up that word. Don't hit me, don't hit me. :-P). I've not decided how I feel about that yet.

Thomas wrote: "The implication would be that the focus on eugenics starved the Tines of interest in what we would call standard technological development. However, the events of the book seem to gainsay this."

Hmmmm...I thought this was addressed by the explanation that the Tines were singularly unable to collaborate. Individuals could come up with bright ideas and the society was clearly developing some sort of nascent science with the development of telescopes. But greater technical endeavours, teams of Tines working collaboratively on experiments was not possible for them.

I'm very glad I was introduced to it. I'd never read Vinge before so this was all new to me. I actually enjoyed it so much I want to go read the prequel and the upcoming (hopefully) sequel!

I nominate: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman.

But surely the wrong--if there is any--is in the fact that when asked, Ravna was quite happy to supply "high tech" weapons to Steel's group specifically to help them destroy their enemy? The very specificity of the goal makes it quite a bit different from a more generalised technology upgrade.

Say you have two primitive tribes in New Guinea at war. Weapons of choice are spears and arrows. Tribe A sits on land that you want. You go to Tribe A and say, "If you let me have your land, I'll give you these grenades and machine guns so that you can wipe out Tribe B." Is that ethical?

Let's play around with that scenario. Does it make a difference if you don't offer but instead Tribe A asks? Does it make a difference if instead of grenades and machine guns you offer longbow technology (a lot more efficient than the existing bows and arrows used by Tribe A but a lot less deadly than grenades and machine guns)? To extend the analogy closer to the story in the novel, what if the land contains material needed to save the lives of one million people, and this deal is the only way to get at that material?

Interestingly, Vinge never shows us whether Ravna offers or whether Steel (via Amdijefri) asks. We see Ravna mentioning the possibility of rendering aid. We see Steel mentioning the possibility of asking for aid. But Vinge never shows us the meeting where the deal is made. This makes Ravna's actions a little more ethically ambiguous. To save itself, the Blight is willing to destroy civilisations. Ravna and Pham seem equally willing to destroy Woodcarver's group to get at something that could save them. Are they simply like the Blight but on a smaller scale? Or does the fact that they are trying to save others in addition to themselves absolve their actions?

All that double-crossing with Vendacious and the Flenser Fragment -- so very space opera no? And I liked the irony of Flenser finding that by defeating Tyrathect, it was in fact her who won by becoming the basis of his soul. So very Matrix.

Phew! That's called taking an idea and running with it! :-)

I must say that I just thought of the Blight as evil and didn't give it much further thought. Hmm... I see your point. I'm a bit queasy about it. It's so much easier to just see "evil" as evil. But I can see where you are coming from.

Wes wrote: "With increasingly complex lifeforms it becomes increasingly difficult to apply that scale that is based on Human nature and Human morals."

Surely Vinge is not claiming to set some universal standard of "evil" when he uses that term. While written in the third person, the novel clearly sees events from the view of the narrator of the segment. So, we see Jefri seeing Steel as good at the beginning; Joannah--at the beginning--seeing the Tines as evil. These are not intended to be objective qualifications but clearly subjective ones. We also get to see Steel's POV and he doesn't think of himself as evil. So, from the POV of anyone outside the Blight (i.e., the heros of the novel), it is evil.

Ultimately Vinge is writing an entertainment. My own take was that, in the context of the story, the Blight is the McGuffin--the object used to set up conflict. As an "ancient evil", the Blight is surely intended to evoke for the reader the Devil. Wouldn't it be less powerful, less resonant if Ravna thought, "Gee, this Power wants to kill me, or take over my mind. I guess from its point of view, it's entitled to think that way and to try to achieve its objective. I don't like it, but hey, that's only my point of view. It's only doing what it has to do. It's not really bad. I'm just not transcendent enough to understand it."

Well, how I thought of it was like linkages between neurons where the number of members (or neurons) is less important than the number of links. Each additional member increases the links like so:
2 Tines: 1 link
3 Tines: 3 links
4 Tines: 6 links
5 Tines: 10 links
6 Tines: 15 links
7 Tines: 21 links

Having a line strung out reduces links to one-on-one. Some of Flenser's experiments play with this notion of links as well, such the one where one Tine is placed in the center of pack and acts as the sole hub for the whole pack.

What I found really interesting was the communication between the individual members of a pack through sound waves. So, barriers to sound or distance cause problems. As do reflective surfaces. Even more fascinating is the notion that different patterns cause different parts of a personality to surface more strongly.

Put this all together and you can imagine that the larger the pack, the harder it is to remain physically cohesive in a way that maintains the same number/cohesion of links that form the core personality. Added to that would be the greater variations from interference/blockage from external objects and packs.

Wes, I'm thrilled to know that Vinge plans a sequel. Thanks for the info!

Yes, I very much like the way Vinge describes the pack-mind. Writing about alien modes of thinking is one of the hardest things about SF. We'll never truly be able to do it--we have enough problems crossing human culture gaps--but Vinge does a really good job at describing a totally different species. And I particularly like that he doesn't lay it out for us, but lets us discover it on our own. The consequences of the pack-mind-meld, the loss of a member, the way a personality changes depending on the composition of the pack--that's fascinatingly done. It's close enough to the way we think of a group having its own characteristics that we can identify, but so startlingly different that we truly feel on an alien world. Much better I would say than most aliens which are simply men with one or two characteristics amped up (cough--Spock--cough).

It's turning out to be more interesting than I thought it would be. I've got up to Chapter 9 so if you haven't reached there yet, you may want to consider the rest of this post **SPOILERS**.



My first take was that it was going to be some kind of hi-tech rescue a la the grand old masters, Asmimov and Clarke. Then, with Tine's world, I thought, oh ok, it's your standard medieval fantasy type trope a la Anne McCaffery. Then we got into the nature of the pack-mind, and further on into the Beyond with some truly alien aliens, and it's starting to turn far more interesting, more like Iain Banks and his Culture series.

I'm starting to really look forward to what will happen next.