Favorite Book

Dove · June 15, 2002, 06:27

Which is your favorite?

Clear Skies · June 15, 2002, 15:45

Haven't read Twilight of the Mind yet due to local librarial incompetence, but I think my favourite has to be Dragon Sun.

Mr. President · June 15, 2002, 21:33

I've only read Dragon Sun and I didn't care much for it. So I guess none of those.

Marid Audran · June 16, 2002, 02:06

My favorite was Twilight of the Mind. Everything just came to a head in that novel, all the tensions, trials, and experiments of the factions accruing to a breaking point. It was "late-game" and we saw all the factions at their economic and ideological zenith, implementing all these different technologies and abilities (including an unforgetable retro-engineering homage). Yet, all the faction leaders are ensconed in an inescapable malaise about everything, as if living for 250 years in suspended eternity since Planetfall just really took it out of them (equate that with the malaise of the player micromanaging everything in his empire late game). Michael Ely managed to rendered Miriam, the most reviled faction leader in the whole game, sympathetic in her own way. In spire of her atrocities, I got to see a broader brush of her mind revealed in the verbal sparring scenes 'twixt her and Zakharov in N-space, more meaningful than all the "Godless and wretched" shtick from the game. The shocking and tragic end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine) on Chiron (no feel-good Transcendence here) instilled the ending of the book a sad poignancy. Before bidding their fond farewells, the Builders of the Chiron (Zak, Dee, Lal, Morgan) make peace with each other underneath the mantle of Planet, standing against the crimes of the Momentum power factions (Yang, Miriam, Santiago).

Dragon Sun was my least favorite in the trilogy, mostly because I thought the Jin Long rebel resistance thing in the Hive wasn't terribly interesting, mostly a distraction, really. The portrait of the Gaians and their escalating conflicts with the other settlements was intriguing, however. Dee had a screw lose for a long time, enough to make one wonder about the reknowned green "Pacifist."

Kassiopeia · June 16, 2002, 05:40

Quote:

Haven't read Twilight of the Mind yet due to local librarial incompetence, but I think my favourite has to be Dragon Sun.

You get even the possibility of having them in your library? I haven't read any of the books yet, due to the fact that I am effectively poor.

Clear Skies · June 16, 2002, 06:33

Well I won Centauri Dawn in a story contest on the AC-Fiction forum, and was able to order a copy of Dragon Sun through my local library, but they can't seem to get a copy of Twilight Of The Mind.
Plus I'm still in full-time education, so it only costs me 50p to order a book and then I can have it for up to 9 weeks!

Hydro · June 16, 2002, 18:19

Journey/Arrival – this and the built-in quotes set the tone for AC, and these are works of art. Well done.

Centauri Dawn was OK, but I really disliked the painful Spartan allegory that in my opinion didn’t really fit in the 22nd century. Some of the characters seemed like puppets walking around on a stage.

Centauri Sun was my favorite. I liked Ely’s description of Yang’s utopian horror, and the rational for war between the competing ideologies.

I HATED Twilight of the Mind. I didn’t buy the premise for a minute, and not being able to suspend disbelief is a fatal error in SF. My detailed (and explicit – don’t read if you haven’t read the book already) thoughts on the subject are posed in Ely’s thread.

Hydro

Frankychan · June 16, 2002, 18:51

I like Dragon Sun....for obvious reasons!

Kass-if you want, I can try ship you my copies.

Marid Audran · June 16, 2002, 20:19

Quote:

Originally posted by Hydro
Journey/Arrival – this and the built-in quotes set the tone for AC, and these are works of art. Well done.

I agree that the prequel, episodic Journey story was the best of the lot. In spite of the impending reactor doom of the Unity it felt we had more downtime, and were privy to the different lifestyles and mindsets of the factions, or proto-factions, in a real and palpable way, mostly in personal snapshots amid their domains (Zak's tech rec room, Dee's hydroponics labs, Morgan's quarters). The problem with the trilogy is that its necessarily rushed in order to encompass the span of a "full-game," so some aspects come off as contrived or thinly layered. I recall how quickly Mia Yang went psycho on the other factions before Jin Long's corpse was even cold; it begged a little more motivation than domestic angst.

My favorite characters had to be the ambivalent hybrids in the factions, people caught between one world and another. Brady from the Spartans is one, the "Builder" in a momentum mindset, always lobbying for more infrastructure. Pierson from the Peacekeepers id another, a little more cut-throat and unrelenting than your typical PK. And there was Simper from the Gaians, who had some Morgan sensibilites and want for compromise but was still a Gaian at heart.

Quote:

Originally posted by Hydro
Centauri Dawn was OK, but I really disliked the painful Spartan allegory that in my opinion didn’t really fit in the 22nd century. Some of the characters seemed like puppets walking around on a stage.

I didn't see it as too far-fetched, considering a great deal of the colonists are still operating within a 21st century ideological basis anyhow, having lost a full forty years in cryogenic stasis. Sparta in particular doesn't surprise me in its brutality, being little more than an urban earth coalition of well-funded, well-organized thugs with little business of being a faction in the first place (mutiny on Unity).

Quote:

Originally posted by Hydro I HATED Twilight of the Mind. I didn’t buy the premise for a minute, and not being able to suspend disbelief is a fatal error in SF. My detailed (and explicit – don’t read if you haven’t read the book already) thoughts on the subject are posed in Ely’s thread.

Oh Hydro, admit it, you're just pissed that your beloved, empathic dryad Dee didn't end up as the enlightened, transcending Planet-bonding angel of Chiron.

Hydro · June 16, 2002, 22:32

MA,

Actually, it was the plot parallels to the ancient Spartan war that annoyed me, not the Spartan ethos (which makes sense – they are the Spartans, after all). I just could have done without the obvious plays to a war from 2500 years ago.

As to Minds, you are probably partially right about Dee. What really ticked me off is how these savvy and genius level people fell for the same tricks over and over, and at the end how they just laid down and died knowing humans were going extinct!! And don’t get me started with the jury-rigged singularity planetbusters. I’m getting upset again just thinking about it…

Hydro