#getting into everything

[gcu-sovereign]

Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis

A not-very-structured liveblog

This book has been sitting on my shelf for YEARS, and I am Finally reading it after also eventually getting around to Infinity Gauntlet, which was coming out while I was a Baby.

It's very hard not to think of Bush-era Cory Doctorow conspiracy in the opening chapters, what with the wikileaks equivalent, civil libertarianism, being located in California, etc. Any whiff of political cuckoldry* is THANKFULLY, BLESSEDLY ABSENT from the narrative so far, as I also know that this series is very much in Conversation with the Bayformers films.

I may end up feeling nostalgic over the first act of this novel because of the tenor of conflict that is likely to evolve in the book. Fighting for transparency is a much more tractable political dispute than whatever the fuck has been happening in the US since late 2015. The last few days of Donald Trump personally appreciating Zohran Mamdani is just much, much stupider than the Dead Hand of Dick Cheney using GWOT powers to be a spooky bitch.

*Doctorow's duology of Little Brother & Homeland is the most dramatic fall from an original to a sequel of any media I have ever encountered. It's truly a novel, literary innovation in cuckoldry.

[gcu-sovereign]

Murderbot Diaries: System Collapse

A more conventional review...

Because I felt like this story took a while to get going. Thus the lack of liveblogging compared to other things I've read in the last year, even objectively worse things like Axiom's End. Picking up where the double feature Network Effect left off is a tall order as hype and stakes go, and I can't say that Martha Wells entirely succeeded.

Right off the bat, the prior book [chronologically speaking] has a Body Count. Dead Murderbot progeny [2.0, rip], dead infected colonists [acceptable Targets], dead Culturnik-like Minds [Perihelion, who was only mostly dead in a way any Culture citizen would approve of as a show of resilience!] The only dead robot or body is really an agricultural unit that got infected with Alien Goop, who Murderbot dispatches early in the book.

A lot of the action in this novel takes place at the polar, separatist colonial settlement, but our usually-media-poisoned narrator absolutely lacks the interest in Stuff to firmly characterize most of the underground base. I was thinking about this a lot in comparison to Assassinorum: Kingmaker a few weeks ago. When there is something Happening in a location, you can forgive a lot of missing detail or richness you get from scene-setting in the color of the hazard stripes, the patina on a pushed door, the smell of old papers and incense. So the Murderbot Underground Railroad book got away with a LOT by being fixated on procedure and technical communication and surveillance. But our protagonist mostly experiences their journey to far-flung destination as a very anxious Walking simulator for someone too easily overstimulated to play Half Life 1 on godmode.

The crowning achievement of the novel is the adventure party putting together a documentary to convince the planet's inhabitants to discard the rival corpo's offer. This is a neat, peaceable way of resolving what would normally be a much louder conflict! For this, I think this book is easily better than the 3rd novella, the one with the companion/sexbot.

Will post some more thoughts after I return this to the library...

[gcu-sovereign]

Finished Artificial Condition, the 2nd novella in the series.

Murderbot REALLY leaned into the 3rd person observation+action and lack of awareness in emotional presentation that Taylor Hebert appreciators would delight in. The pacing in quick enough to...mostly track with Taylor's rescue from a Merchants' rave, but Murderbot is even more whipped onward to some new adventure than fucking Wildbow's serial style.

The Man in the Ear/Remote Operations support figure of ART reminded me of nothing so much as a infantile Culture Mind. The boredom, need for companionship, overwhelming computational power, understated armament. It's all there! I haven't read enough to think whether that's intentional yet. The chekov's gun setups are more obvious and less the consequence of Murderbot's casual disinterest in their social environment, so I think the two synthetic characters will appear sooner rather than later.

The reveal towards the end of the backstory left me a little confused. It's obviously something that will take Murderbot a lot of time to digest, even if revelatory catharsis isn't in the cards eventually. But the process of obtaining that info by using your own power supply? What? On that note, you think murderbot is going to need a firearm for when wrist mounted storm bolters can't be walked through haxored security?

[gcu-sovereign]

Finished Rogue Protocol.

Murderbot's comedic sociopathy and parentheticals are most evocative of Daniel Way's Deadpool run, and the latter element is strongly on display here. Obviously there's less profanity and innuendo, and visually they aren't expressive to a quarter of Wade's extent, but the medium requires and uses less comedic bandwidth.

Our protagonist should probably be more actively acquisitive in their quests, if only to deepen the bag of chekhov's guns available. Like taking pieces of armor and explosives.

There were zero moments of reflection on freeing the ComfortBot from their governor module in the previous installment. The looking back Murderbot does is with respect to the baby GCU, who will doubtless reappear in the 4th book to bring some plot threads home.

[gcu-sovereign]

Thematic remarks on Network Effect, the most structurally obvious Double Novella ever sold.

Murderbot wants to be Skitter so bad it makes them look stupid.

The multithread processing.

Remote sensing and control via minions.

The ability to make earnest friendships.

Moral certitude that isn't so heavily informed by mere proximity.

And ESPECIALLY ability to offload emotions into sensorium.

@as-old-roads this is your invitation to drown in the sight, feel, and buzz of arthropoda.

Gestation - 1.1

Original Chapter Text Editing: Valravn Music: Onetyone and Variety Voices provided by: Maia Harlap/ParallelDimension as Taylor Hebert, Dáith

[gcu-sovereign]

Came across this on fb and immediately jumped to ‘ok, but how coordinated are they?  Only the hunter can actually be mendacious about this in a scary way.  For all the others it’s a matter of ‘how is the sense data and action of the various groups of animals coordinated?’

[gcu-sovereign]

Don't know what caused it [muscular pain from a injury?], but I had a feature length dream about going to an anime convention. Unusually, it didn't feature a meet cute, because this time I was already in a relationship! She was a deadringer for Nichameleon, albeit 2 inches shorter and younger [not a hidden preference thing, just assessing from imaginary recollection]. I spent the middle third of the date on an ambling phone call with this girlfriend, recounting what I had seen and done, asking her what she'd seen so far of the Con. The main part of the 1st third was this weird, indoor, pickup game of soccer I had been roped into. I'd managed to personally offend this weird 4'11" dude who was the goalie for the other team, probably by scoring on him multiple times. Eventually, I met up in person with NotNich, who was in a costume with stilts for some western IP? The color scheme screamed Avatar:TLA&LOK, but it didn't match any character I remember.