Burton K Wheeler
Moderator
I think you should just repeat whatever Moscow says, since you don't fully appreciate the freedom of speech
Not only that, but his brain is incapable of feeling anything but lust for men.
My opinion of Stirling's ISOT and Emberverse Series
- Thread starter Brian Boru
- Start date
Not only that, but his brain is incapable of feeling anything but lust for men.
I think I got whiplash from all the tangents.
Noticed an upcoming movie called "The Road", that kind of addresses the post-apocalyptic, civilization falling apart idea.
They haz cannibals. Seems like everyone should be packing away MREs, because if the world ends, apparently people are on the menu in short order.
Both series were entertaining, but like any fiction with a major literary conceit, if you pull on the threads, the story can be unravelled pretty easily....
Noticed an upcoming movie called "The Road", that kind of addresses the post-apocalyptic, civilization falling apart idea.
They haz cannibals. Seems like everyone should be packing away MREs, because if the world ends, apparently people are on the menu in short order.
Both series were entertaining, but like any fiction with a major literary conceit, if you pull on the threads, the story can be unravelled pretty easily....
Burton K Wheeler
Moderator
Have you read the novel? It's by Cormac McCarthy, and it's at least as good as Blood Meridian.
I think you should just repeat whatever Moscow says, since you don't fully appreciate the freedom of speech
I'm in a bind here. Moscow, being Moscow, never says anything about fictional lesbians.
Babylonians weren't Muslims. Do you think that all dark skinned people are Muslim, and vice versa?
And I love your unwillingness to accept that he did say that - he's a presence on internet message boards, and has made no attempt to disguise his identity. People who know him through conventions and the like can no doubt confirm his identity is one and the same.
My criticism is that Stirling has a way over simplistic view of what constitutes academic knowledge.
For example: "He has a degree in history - he's the perfect guy to set up a medieval kingdom (and get a bunch of gangsters to collude in it)."
or
<<Lord Bear: Oh, Lord Protector, I noticed (insert some really obvious, almost asinine point).
Arminger and wife stare at him, interestedly, as his dumb, obvious point has revealed just how smart he is.
Lord Bear curses himself for not having been more careful in concealing his great intelligence.>>
If any of you remember the precise moment I'm talking about, it's when Mike Havel goes scouting into Portland in the first book before deciding to take his band through to Oregon a different route. The conversation is really bad.
I don't either, and that's not what I was saying. I was saying that if he's going to write as much about sex as he is, he might as well at least be more inclusive about the sexual interests of his heroes rather than depicting certain kinks as always being the province of those who are villainous.
Personally I'd prefer it if he cut down on the sex, truth be told. All I'm saying is that, if you have to write about it, write about it fairly.
That's not how it works.
The First Amendment protects speech in public. It does not protect speech in private institutions, such as a forum. If a moderator or an administrator decides to censor you on a forum, there is nothing you can do about it, because it is a privately owned establishment, and they are allowed to set the rules in it.
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Hmm well I believe thats more in the Peshwar Lancers but I've read int he Emberverse series where the 'Eaters' don't always practice cannibalism. The whole useage of cannibalism is more or less used to show insanity, most of the Eaters you see are out of their minds one way or another.
Though in the second book of The Sunrise Lands series you see a small mention by a Iowa Guard who mentions to Rudi (ina mocking way) that the people over the Missisippi in Illinois have given up eating flesh.
Though then we have in the Third book of the Sunrise lands a village group of people who seemed to be descendent from a group of teenagers who survived the Change via Hunting-Gathering but had no knowledge whatsoever of how to Farm.
It seems to me that the Neo-Savages o the Eastcoast might have some farming knowledge but nothing grand scale and mostly do hunt and gather (but Human is ont he list of being OK to eat).
For that matter, how many people who live in Suburbs or Urban areas know how to farm?
Valdemar II
Banned
You don't need to have the skill to farm to farm, you just need the knowledge it's possible and the plants, which they both have, while they will be crappy farmers, they can farm. Much of it will fail, but even with limit knowledge, they will improve over time, and even on crappy level ensure a safe supply of food.
Fail means Death in the Emberverse. Stirling doesn't give any notion that no one did try this. Probably the pockets around Eugene and parts of California and those Neosavages in the east.
Mostly people who survived fled to farms where people who knew what they were doing so they farmed most 'Sucessfully' and helped them farm so everyone could survive. Other examples would be those who fled to the Ranches.
I've only read ISOT and as many have said, finished the series simply as a chore in order to say that I’d done it. I never really empathised with any of the characters, particularly Alston, who was a Mary-Sue of the highest order. I mean every coast guard training ship has a woman captain. Who is a black. Who is a lesbian. Who is a fantastic leader. Who is master tactician. Who is trained in Japanese martial arts. A coast guard captain, who basically never loses. To make matters worse, there is another, equally gifted officer on board, whose main plan, it has to be said is to conquer the world. And don’t forget the ex-stasi agent who isn’t mentioned until most of the way through the second book. Basically, the characters were simply a collection of traits forming a series of clichés rather than rounder human beings (the chief of police as a reluctant leader after a disaster in America?? Shock horror!) I also don’t really feel that any scene sparked my imagination. The battles while well described, just weren’t interesting. Finally, after Walker and his group leave, the Eagle People are completely good. The two sides are either completely good or completely evil (or in the case of Odikweos duped). This again makes it harder to empathise or identify with the characters as the whole world is basically filled with Clark Kents or Lex Luthors. The story would be a lot better if some of the characters had at least the occasional internal conflict. And as a final, minor note, considering that the second book opens with an extract from a history book, there is very little tension throughout-they get to write the history books so they probably make it.
As for the emberverse, I know its ASB, but I just can’t suspend that much disbelief that all those technologies could stop working without massive repercussions on the natural world (although if I’m missing a plot point, please correct me).
As for the emberverse, I know its ASB, but I just can’t suspend that much disbelief that all those technologies could stop working without massive repercussions on the natural world (although if I’m missing a plot point, please correct me).
Oh there were. Fires wiping out Forests, Dams breaking and destroying who knows what (Apparently the Aswan dam wiped out everything in Egypt except the Pyramids), oil tankers bursting open and polluting this and that.
How many people in the suburbs have a backyard garden? From my experiences living in Montreal, Toronto, Kingston and Ottawa, I would say a good 1/3 have some kind of knowledge, if not full blown gardening, than at least the basics of it. Have no idea how it's like in the US but I would not be surprised that if you grabbed 100 people at random from any suburb, at least 10 would at least know the basics of gardening. And I bet that another 10 had parents or grandparents who owned a farm that they grew up on.
Would a lot of those farms fail? Sure - but some will not. To have an entire population lose even the basics of farming is simply unbelievable.
I kind of meant with nature. Obviously, gun powder and electronics aren't natural (although voltage is just the potential difference in energy between 2 points so surely this will impact electrical storms and maybe even neurone activity). I was thinking about steam power, which somehow has apparently stopped working. This alters one of the basic principles of physics, ie, for a fixed volume of gas, pressure exerted is proportional to temperature of the gas. Altering this would have unimaginable impacts on the world.
Tom Kalbfus
Banned
The burden of proof is always on the accusor. If you say someone is racist I say prove it!. The keyboard after all can't tell who is typing on it, it may very well be Stirling's computer, but no instrument of piece of software in existance can tell who's typing on who's computer. The furthest it can go is to trace a particular message to a particular computer through addressing, then you have to break into Stirling's house and dust his keyboard for fingerprints.
You see, you are accusing someone of something bad, and I'm not going to go around spreading gossip and potentially ruin an innocent person's reputation. Also people do get emotional from time to time, they may say things in the heat of the moment that they might otherwise not say, words can be taken out of context too, and finally there's the old saying: Judge not the mote in your neigbors eye, lest you fail to see the beam in your own. If you go judging people, then others will judge you by your own standards, and beware, you may come up short. I don't know in what context you say Stirling said he wanted to kill all the World's Muslims, I tend to think that's an idle threat in anycase as he would have to kill over a billion of them, and I don't think he can.
Sure but still you do have all the other factors that could get you killed before or after you lay down the hoe and trowels. Though gardening is hardly the level of a griculture to create large scale society.
Burton K Wheeler
Moderator
Would it be okay if I said I wanted to kill you? It would be an idle threat, since I have no idea where I'd find you and no means to actually do so.
Tom Kalbfus
Banned
I don't know very many part-time crooks or swindlers who are otherwise very decent men and women when they aren't out their robbing and murdering somebody.
You want a series with a bunch or morally questionable characters? How about the HBO series Rome? Rome has a full cast of morally questionable characters. You have one friendly ex-Roman Centurian who was retired from the Legion and works part time as an assassin, his friend, the family man retires from the legion to start a business selling slaves. Brutus, fine Republican that he is, is willing to murder his friend to save the Republic, Julius Caesar finds that bribery and vote-buying is just part of the normal course of doing business in the Late Roman Republic. You have a Jew from Palestine with nothing to do, so he hires himself out as the house torturer for the family of Octavian. Octavian murders Julius Caesar's son to make sure he doesn't grow up and challenge him for rulership of Rome.
Rome is like a mirror of the Sopranos, a series about a mafia family that alternates between family life and rubbing someone out. When you have a conflict between two groups of equally dirty men and women, you really don't invest much in the outcome, you basically pick a side and its more or less like rooting for your team in a football game.