SciFi and Fantasy eBook Club discussion
October Discussions
>
House of Suns - The Palatial
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
[deleted user]
(new)
Oct 03, 2010 12:51PM
At the beginning of each book is another view into Abigail Gentian's childhood and her holodeck like toy - the Palatial. It, or more precisely the Fantasy story within it, seems to be integral to the plot somehow. I'm not sure how it is important (yet), but what are your thoughts on it? Or, is it something else in this 31st century Golden Hour society that's important?
reply
|
flag
Possible spoiler alert...My guess at 50% into the book is that the "boy" who joins her intermittently in the Palatial will end up being the driving force behind the House of Suns, or whoever is trying to destroy the Gentians.
The house itself is really strange. Around 40% you find out why the house is always growing and changing but there's still a lot more going on we haven't found out yet. Seems like a very lonely place to grow up although the palatial is pretty cool. I'm with Charles, I don't trust the creepy little boy.
OK: here's one plot complaint I couldn't get by last night (spoiler alert!)Why is it that, 6 million years after this episode in the Palatial, when the Gentians want to interrogate their prisoners, they resort to what is essentially physical torture (even if it is gussied up in fancy technology)? Did, among all their strands of knowledge, forget about sodium pentathol (and presumably much better drugs that would have been developed)? And more to the point, why couldn't the same technology used to scan their own memories and used by the Palatial be used on the prisoners (perhaps along with drugs to make them more complacent), instead of the silly "slicing" they did? To me this smacked of the author thinking of a cool technology idea that he then decided he had to incorporate into the story, even if it made no sense to do so.
(Spoiler alert)Good point. I thought the interrogation was a little odd too. I just finished the part where they were interrogating the second prisoner and tried to bring him into real time and he died. And I was thinking, did they really do everything possible to get information out of him? They didn't even really torture him, just asked him questions in a stern manner.
