TSiaSOS Spork, Part 2 Chapter 5: Extremis
Nov. 29th, 2020 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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antishurtugal_reborn
Disclaimer: I stopped paying attention to this book somewhere around the end of Part 1. I haven’t had the time or inclination to read any further because there’s just so little to hold the interest. I’ve barely even glanced at other people’s sporkings. I do feel bad about that because people have put a lot of effort into sporking a book that reads like it was written with much less effort, but a combination of lack of time and lack of interest has been a significant obstacle.
As much as we poke at them, at least the Inheritance Cycle made me feel something. Even rage and bewildered disgust is better than this.. emptiness.
(yes, this is going to be gif and image heavy, to distract from the tedium of the story)
Part 2, Chapter 5: Extremis.
I don’t need to translate “extremis”. Suffice to say even without having read the chapter yet, I can say with confidence that nothing extreme occurs. Except perhaps extreme boredom.
Falconi explains the plan to the ship’s crew, which sadly does not involve him holding Kira at gunpoint and explaining how he owns all the cops in Gotham.
The plan seems to rest on the hope that “there should only be a few jellies on that ship”, and “no way all of them have survived”. Which is exactly like the dialogue of an underdressed teenager in a slasher flick moments before entering the room where the killer was last seen.
The ship mind Greg continues to be quirky and unpredictable, randomly changing the ship’s thrust apparently as an emotional response, which is exactly the opposite of what you want from a ship mind.
They decide that Kira has to stay out of sight of the, ugh, “jellies” because they will recognise, ugh, “Soft Blade” on her.
Seriously, I don’t care how many times it has been pointed out, Paolini absolutely sucks at coming up with names for things.
Part (?) 2. Kira, Falconi, Nielsen, and Vishal go to the gun closet. Among all the guns you’d expect to find in the gun closet, and maintenance equipment, there's also this:
A flickering holo was mounted above the shelf; it showed a unicorn cat resting in the arms of a bony, pink-haired man with the letters Bowie Lives printed in fancy script at the bottom.
Two hundred and fifty years in the future. This is like if someone got a tattoo of medieval marginalia animals with the caption “Haydn Forever”.
Listen, Paolini. I know you’re proud of your transition from 70s fantasy nerd to 80s sci fi nerd, but not every character in your stories has to share the same taste in music and aesthetic as you do. If you’re going to write a story set hundreds of years in the future, stop referencing celebrities and trends and media from the 1980s which would most likely be long forgotten except by a few passionate individuals with a niche hobby, and then probably reconstructed inaccurately based on a few stereotypes.
Is it really so hard to make a pop singer in your world and then have characters reference them? JK Rowling did it with Celestina Warbeck, and even came up with a catalogue of songs for the characters to make reference to (A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love, You Charmed the Heart Right Out of Me, and Accio Christmas among others). And no, don’t you even think about naming your sci-fi distant future pop music band some stereotypical 1980s doo-wop sci-fi-inspired name like “The Jets” or “The Rocketeers”.
This isn’t a story about some kid from 1980s America suddenly being introduced to space battles, like The Last Starfighter or something, this is a story in which a quarter of a millennia of human civilisation has developed between now and then. Two and a half centuries. At least and probably more than eight generations. Are you still listening to the same music that your great-great-great-great-grandparents listened to? Do you still dance in the same way? Do you reference the same celebrities and talk about the same politicians? NO! Because that was 250 years ago! For us, here and now, 250 years ago was just before the industrial revolution, at the peak of the Pacific slave trade, and the continent of Australia hadn’t even been colonised by Europeans yet! Given what we know of the rate of cultural change, space travel and colonisation of interstellar planets should have produced an unfathomable variety of culture, musical and artistic trends, celebrity individuals, and linguistic changes.
Put down the 1980s pop culture, Paolini, and give your characters some culture of their own.
Anyway. The protagonists get guns, in a stock scene that may as well have been pulled out of the discount “protagonists get guns scene” bin at the local Trope-Mart. Right down to the dialogue, description of the guns available, and this:
Falconi burst out with an evil laugh. “It’s a grenade launcher. What else? Bought her at a militia surplus sale a few years ago. Her name is Francesca.”
“You named your gun,” said Kira.
“Of course. It’s common courtesy if you’re going to be trusting your life to something. Ships get names. Swords used to get names. Now guns get names.”
I don’t get Paolini’s obsession with naming things, he (through his characters) made a big speech in Brisingr about how how important and heroic weapons get names. A weapon is heroic because of the person wielding it, and that person could just as well wield a pipe wrench as a sword. But I’ve made this argument before, and there’s still more of this fun-forsaken chapter to get through.
(fun fact, I borrowed this gif from a Twilight spork)
Hwa-jung radios in to tell Falconi she has a plan to distract the jellies, and he interrupts her and tells her to do it, sight unsieen, because he trusts her that much.
Um. Dude. Captain, whatever. You do NOT want unknown activity happening around you when entering a hostile situation. What if Hwa-jung’s plan involved launching a series of delayed-blast explosive drones, and your lack of intelligence about them sends you or one of your people directly into an explosion? Miscommunications have lead to worse results in less volatile situations.
Sending your people into an unknown hostile situation against an unknown number of enemies is dangerous enough WITHOUT your own people acting on their own without your full knowledge and ability to coordinate your people and control the situation.
Then Falconi clapped Vishal on the shoulder. “Got everything you need, Doc?”
Vishal nodded. “I swore to do no harm, but these aliens lack all sense of mercy. Sometimes the best way to avoid harm is minimizing it. If that means shooting a Jelly, then so be it.”
What exactly have the, ugh, “Jellies” done that demonstrates a lack of mercy? So far from what I can gather, they’ve been targeting the weapons of the ships and such that have attacked them, and then preemptively taken out the weapons on other ships and unmanned stations that haven’t attacked them yet. The Jellies appear to be acting almost entirely defensively, at least as far as I can tell. The details aren’t all that clear. They haven't left a trail of human corpses behind them, they haven't atttacked inhabited areas or civilian operations (aside from the unmanned mining station). They haven't, that we know of, disrupted supply chains or destroyed important life support systems
Falconi tells Kira to stay out of sight, even though he gave her a gun, because it “isn’t [her] area of expertise”. Well neither is xenobiology, but she still held a steady job in that.
Kira has a brief conversation with the Entropists, in which she tells them about, heh, “Soft Blade”. The Entropists act like all-knowing demigods, because of course they do.
I swear, Paolini is the worst at coming up with names. What, nine years of time to develop his story and build his world, and the best he could do was “jellies” and “soft blade”? Please.
Anyway. She rejoins the crew, where Trig and Sparrow are wearing powered exo-suits. You know, like Ripley wore in Alien. Or the freedom fighters wore in Matrix Revolutions. Or Matt Damon in Elysium. Or in Edge of Tomorrow. Or in Avatar (although those are arguably mechs, not merely exoskeletons)
Except better, because they have shoulder-mounted missile launchers, which is exactly what you want to take onto a space ship, in space, full of potential hostiles. I don’t care about “whipple shields”, a mini-missile hitting the inside of a space ship is going to damage something important, for example possibly life support, internal pressurisation, or navigation/control functions.
Mind you, they’re also taking a grenade launcher into the hostile ship, so I guess they don’t plan to comandeer it or anything.
Somehow, despite the fact that Trig “knows how to run an exo better than any of us” according to Falconi, he is also “pasty and beaded with sweat” which implies fear , panic, and lack of experience.
Which is it, is he better than all the older and presumably more experienced people, or is he an untested teenager who doesn’t know what to expect?
The jelly ship – which, by the way, just… for Americans, “jelly” is the word for jello outside of America. So…
It’s a jelly lego spaceship. This is basically what I picture every time I read “jelly ship”. It's wibbly wobbly lemony-limey stuff.
Anyway, the jelly ship fires up its thrusters, but Greg can’t determine if anything is alive on board or if the thrusters are on an automatic program. Despite not knowing if or how many hostiles are on board, and despite one of his officers planning to do something he approved of but doesn’t know anything about, Falconi continues with preparations to board the enemy ship. Which is, in case you haven't worked it out by now, extremely stupid. Maybe that's what the chapter title is referring to? Stultum in extremis, the very cutting edge of foolishness.
And then Kira thinks this:
All the Jellies would have to do would be shoot her in the head, and suit or not, the shock of the impact would kill her. No amount of tissue restructuring on the part of the Soft Blade would save her. And that would be that. No reloading from a checkpoint or save file. Nope. One life, one attempt to get things right, and perma-death if she failed. Of course, the same was true for everyone else. No one got to run the level beforehand, as it were.
Wait, what the hell? Can someone else confirm if Kira even once ever thinks about things in terms of video games, or mentions having played video games, or makes any other reference at all that video games even exist, let alone that she plays them enough to think in these terms? This just seems to come out of nowhere, almost like it was taken from a better and more famous science fiction book. Even if it wasn’t, because we do know that Paolini enjoyed video games, it’s still very out of character for Kira to think in this way.
Kira thinks that, even though the Soft Blade has basically brought nothing but death and suffering, killed her fiancee and many of her colleagues, has taken over her body and taken away her bodily autonomy to the point of working into her brain to destroy her neural computer implants, Kira feels “perversely grateful for its presence” and likens herself prior to Soft Blade, and therefore everyone around her who does not have a Soft Blade parasite-suit, to “a shell-less turtle waving its legs in the air, exposed before its enemies”.
First, there’s no such thing as a shell-less turtle, that’s not how turtles work. Second, if there was such a thing as a turtle without a shell, it would be able to right itself because the shell wouldn’t get in the way of it flipping back onto its feet. Third, turtles on their backs are quite capable of flipping themselves upright again, albeit with some effort. Fourth, Kira’s growing dependency on the Soft Blade is psychologically disturbing. A better and more self-aware writer would make that part of a call-back to earlier in the book when Kira was asked whether the parasite was controlling her thoughts or not: in order to protect its connection to the host organism, the parasite induces feelings of codependency of the host upon the parasite.
It could have been a dramatic revelation of body-horror when Kira realises that her feelings are being neurally manipulated to make her dependent on the parasite.
And all of that is waving right in front of her face, as Kira “struggles to ignore the intrusive sensation” of the jelly-ship compelling her via the parasite-suit to go to them.
So she’s being mentally manipulated to feel a compulsion to go towards the jelly ship, but doesn’t even once think about what that implies about the parasite’s manipulation of her brain and neural activity?
And then the chapter ends as Wallflower makes contact with the jelly ship.
…
What an extraordinarily useless waste of words this chapter was. It could have, should have, been summed up in a paragraph or two. Half a page at most.
Kira, Falconi, and the others equipped themselves with weapons, as Sparrow and Trig strapped themselves into powered exoskeletons. Trig’s face was flushed with excitement, even as his forehead and upper lip were beaded with sweat. Noticing Kira’s questioning look, Falconi explained: “Trig’s better than any of us at controlling the exoskeleton. Don’t let his age fool you, the kid’s got a lot of experience.”
As the alien ship grew closer, Kira felt a niggling sensation in the back of her mind, a compulsion to get closer, to go to the Jellies. For a moment she struggled against the sensation, breathing deeply, clenching and relaxing her fists until the feeling subsided.
From the speakers, Gregorivich’s voice called out, “Captain, we are approaching the vessel. Contact in three... two… one…”
The ship landed with a jolt on the side of the alien craft.
THERE, I FIXED IT.
No wonder this doorstopper is over 800 pages, every tiny detail as to be expanded upon but not in a good or interesting way. The story so far could have been condensed into at least half the amount of words.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read something actually interesting and enjoyable.
Next is Part 2 Chapter 6: Near and Far, with epistler.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-29 02:03 am (UTC)Don't blame you; pretty much the same thing happened to me, except I have been reading the sporks. I had intended to read the entire book and write up a review, but I just. Can't. Do it. It's so BORING.
Zing! And just wait until you see how fast she gets used to slaughtering people en masse. (Spoilers: Disturbingly fast. It's literally the exact same thing as what happened with Eragon, complete with the lack of any transitional period).
Yeah well UR just JELLY about his superior talent!!1
(C'mon, somebody had to make that joke eventually).
It's rather fitting in any case given just how much the ensuing fight scene is written like a video game. I'd better start stocking up on HALO gifs right now.
It really is. It's incredibly creepy and off-putting just how fast she goes from wanting it off her to thinking of it as a tool to be used for her own purposes, to the point that it's now suddenly a personal privilege which she alone is entitled to have. In fact not long after this she starts getting WORRIED that the jellies or whoever might "strip her of the Soft Blade" and how she'll be all incomplete without it, etc. What the actual fuck.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-29 02:29 am (UTC)Did you get up to the bit where it allegedly really "takes off" according to reviewers?
And you think my puns are bad... (still not as bad as Paolini's)
no subject
Date: 2020-11-29 02:33 am (UTC)Depends on when that bit is. If I did get to it, I didn't notice, and if I didn't then why the fuck has it not "taken off" after 500 godforsaken pages??
no subject
Date: 2020-11-29 02:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-29 04:48 am (UTC)Yeah. The book should be not wasting words. If things aren't actually happening, I shouldn't be expected to give the book the time of day. Most of the people using that argument are returning fans of Paolini, anyway.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-29 05:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-29 08:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-29 05:25 am (UTC)"I know it drags on a bit, but there's one scene near the end that totally makes it worth it. It's half a page, but it makes the other 870 pages suddenly all make sense"
no subject
Date: 2020-11-29 05:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-29 05:58 am (UTC)Better put out the kindling!
no subject
Date: 2020-11-29 05:59 am (UTC)Even though some plot threads aren't resolved, and there's a cliffhanger, all the other things are tied up in a neat little bow! Even the boring parts that seemed like a waste of time.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-29 02:40 am (UTC)Yup. I couldn't read the book, although I'm definitely reading the sporks with interest. Anyone who can take more than a chapter has my respect.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-29 03:43 pm (UTC)I do not envy you sporkers, this book is clearly a chore and a half.