Frank Davis > Recent Status Updates

I've fallen asleep twice listening to this one, so far.

TO HIMSELF EVERYONE IS IMMORTAL; HE MAY KNOW THAT HE IS GOING TO DIE, BUT HE CAN NEVER KNOW THAT HE IS DEAD.
—SAMUEL BUTLER

Now what's going on here? This time I did read the blurb before pressing play and I was definitely enticed by the last line, claiming that the TARDIS has been hijacked by the Doctor himself! Very exciting.

Almost at chapter 29, I've now passed where I had left off when I first started this. I'm enjoying the way the story is developing. The return of some characters that seemed to have already served their purpose has been great. Again though, that is definitely more than enough for one day. I've been listening to this while working and eager to continue at the start of my shift but oh so ready to quit at the other end!

I'm into chapter 14 now and that's enough of that for one day. I'm enjoying it and definitely glad that I restarted from the start instead of trying to pick up where I'd left off at chapter 24.

About to restart this.

"What a terrible way to never die" - Eight

This dragon story sure is draggin'.

"He knew something, he didn't know he knew."

This is pretty bizarre. The second narrator also sounds like a computerised voice. I wonder if that's intended 🤔

Gee whiz. I'm listening to the blackstone audio version and this first narrator sounds more like a computerised voice than my beloved text-to-speech engine.

About a minute into this and it's already making me smile so big!

"He'd known many beautiful women, and quite a few charming whores."

I'm finding the story interesting but the language with which it is told has been less than palatable.

"...empire claimed by acclamation was a brutal process that cared not at all for the places and peoples who had to succumb to make that acclamation plausible."

"This decision to discard reason, I see now, is not the last but the first reasonable act; and this insanity we are taught to fear consists in nothing but responding naturally and instinctively rather than with the culturally acquired, mannered thing called reason;"

Roughly a quarter of the way into this one and it's not going at all how I expected. Very much more of a character study, this story is only now beginning to feel like scifi.

“Do you trust me?” she asked.
He considered carefully before answering. “I trust you to act in the way I think you will.”

"Each morning I would wake up alone, and all the weight of my life would press me back. I had no interest in my duties any more, and had to drag myself through the day as if time had grown thick and slow, resisting my passage."

"Tall and thin, with the classically handsome features of a politician." - p.267

"Classically handsome features" never seem to have taken any part in Australian politics and from my limited observations of global politics, it doesn't seem to be a widespread phenomenon.

The world is weird but the characters are sensational and the plot is engaging.

"I really don’t care about my own life. But I do care about Spearpoint, and if my continued survival benefits it, then I have a moral obligation to keep myself alive."

"Do you see him paying me many visits, enquiring about my welfare, asking if there’s something I’d rather be doing than shovelling coal into a boiler for the rest of my time on Earth?"

This is not a very interesting quote but I feel like it's the first indication that this crazy universe is set on the Earth.

‘It was an angel, just not like the ones we see flying overhead. The angels have been trying to find a way to survive beyond the Celestial Levels for years. That thing - the ghoul - was one of their deep-penetration agents, surgically and genetically adapted to function down here.’

“They always call Cohen he, even when he’s in a woman’s body. It’s like the names of hurricanes. It doesn’t mean anything."

[Cohen is an AI]

"And the identity of that enemy was another article of quasi-religious faith, uncontested by any loyal Syndicate construct: the United Nations."

"...when humans are building a machine, everything but the one thing they want it to do tends to fall by the wayside."

"You don’t trust people because they’re a sure bet or even a good risk. You trust them because the risk that you’ll lose them is worse than the risk that they’ll hurt you. That took me a few centuries to learn, Catherine, but I did learn it."

"And anyway, it’s how I’m written. Naturally nosy. Neither of us can fight our code, can we?”

An interestingly familiar sentiment, adapted for the AIs of the future.

“Right. Well, the story about the glory holes is that the priests take people down there and … feed them to something.”

I think that adopting the term "glory hole" was a questionable decision on the author's part.