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commented on Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Terra Ignota, #1)

Ada Palmer: Too Like the Lightning (2017, Head of Zeus)

that whole bit about the legally untranslatable latin dialogue, except one of the people present also speaks unreasonably obscure latin nobody else is used to, so the narrator reasons it's fine to at least give translations in 'normal' (in-world modern) latin, and then his anonymous editor suddenly inserts a paragraph saying "oh yeah i translated the latin but i suck at it & did so in secret from the others, so not sure how accurate it is" is still so absurdly over-the-top funny to me (all three versions are in the text, so one can compare)

even better since the editor clearly attempted to translate the obscure version of everything, not the narrator's "reasonable" gloss, so there's lots of overly-literal translations of idioms and such

also the latin speakers exchange a couple sentences beetween them in english without putting in much effort, so the grammar leaks and everyone else is …

commented on Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Terra Ignota, #1)

Ada Palmer: Too Like the Lightning (2017, Head of Zeus)

annoyingly, this book is still in the category of "almost everything i could possibly say about it has at least essay-length", and i don't have the time or motivation to write essays 🙈

a fun side observation tho: it moves slowly, not in the sense that i'm on page 155 and it's barely evening of the second day described, but in that reappearing characters usually reappear exactly where they were left before the narration switched focus on someplace else, and there are absolutely no "they did $things in the meantime"-passages anywhere — everything is part of the main trunk of the narration grinding along at dizzying (but slow) speeds, without ever taking a moment for breath (while Mycroft repeatedly hits you on the head with the entire canon of 'western' philosophy, and being unnecessarily horny about it all)

started reading Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Terra Ignota, #1)

Ada Palmer: Too Like the Lightning (2017, Head of Zeus)

Haven't read much so far, but god have i missed Mycroft's voice, he's so absurdly, obnoxiously, incomprehensibly derangend in absolutely every word he writes; i keep having fun imagining what one of his actual readers would think, since he's explicitly writing this for publication soon after the events he's describing

(i'm kinda anxious about how much i like i'll like these books this time overall though — been years since i read this, and i might disagree with Ada more now than I did before, but we'll see)

commented on A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Arkady Martine: A Memory Called Empire (Hardcover, 2019, Tor Books)

Ambassador Mahit Dzmare arrives in the center of the multi-system Teixcalaanli Empire only to discover …

I'm at the end! This book really has no right to be anywhere near this good.

There's a sequel which I didn't find as good last time, but maybe I should read it again? But perhaps take a break from this and read something else first.

Arkady Martine: A Memory Called Empire (Hardcover, 2019, Tor Books)

Ambassador Mahit Dzmare arrives in the center of the multi-system Teixcalaanli Empire only to discover …

A mind is a sort of star-chart in reverse: an assembly of memory, conditioned response, and past action held together in a network of electricity and endocrine signalling, rendered down to a single moving point of consciousness.

A Memory Called Empire by  (Page 352)

Not sure if this a very quotable sentence, but i like it so much? it does such a neat job of tying the story together, or at least relating its two main themes as almost-reflections of each other (relatedly, A Memory Called Empire is such an enormously cool title for this book, and i'm still a little disappointed that its sequel just has a Tacitus quote)

also it's just funny how it says "a single moving point of consciousness" at the precise moment in the book when Mahit is at the absolute furthest from being a 'single' person or mind.

Xueting Christine Ni: Sinopticon (2021, Black Library, The)

The Last Save (Gu Shi)

No rating

This is a fun one, in a way, but I'm not sure I'd call it good? There's a fun idea (a videogame-like "save and reload" function for real life, introduced by an all-powerful company) and what I think is a fun if somewhat obvious message (sth like "aim at making the right choices, but don't obsess about past wrong choices, and have the confidence to do so")

Or at least, I can only really read it as a metaphor; I had real trouble suspending disbelief enough to accept that this world would work as the story requires it to — it feels like a morality tale ruminating on what makes a (single) person good, and less like a sf story exploring how the ostensible premise (i.e. the save-and-reload technology) would shape the society within which it exists.

Content warning thoughts on teixcalaanli succession laws