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antishurtugal_rebornUltimate_Cheetah
IgnoreSandra
Subchapter 1:
Alex wakes up in the middle of the night and sees Talia speaking with Chen while still pointing the bolt gun at an alert Pushkin. This Talia and Pushkin fighting over Chen conflict has been present over the entire book, but I don’t get why they are interested in him. He seems pretty well-adjusted and satisfied with his life, and didn’t show any overt interest in either of their beliefs. It really should be Alex they are trying to convince.
In story, Alex is depressed, so he is more susceptible to other people offering comfort in solutions, and each could try to solve his problem in different ways. Out of story, it would give Alex an active role in the plot and in the interactions with his crewmates, and would allow Paolini to work the dead wife subplot into the main plot.
I’m struck by - no this is a bad color. I’m - orange is better - I’m struck by the fact that the survey team has something that functions as a weapon so easily. This seems like a bad thing to pack for a long stressful journey involving four people in close proximity, two of whom seem to be intentionally antagonizing each other. Looking back at Zeta Zone, the bolt gun seems to be some kind of industrial tool. I would expect, for OSHA reasons if nothing else, the pressure on the bolt being placed to be as low as it can possibly be and still accomplish the task. This is a survey team - for what possible purpose might they need a bolt gun that expels a projectile with enough force to injure a human through their suit? Or even if they do, why would they need one that can be carried and used like a regular gun?
Maybe in case there’s other creatures on the planet that could be hostile, like the tigermauls.
Subchapter 2:
In the morning, Alex notices that Pushkin is sick. He isn’t feeling good either, and takes “a double dose of AcuWake”, which doesn’t help too much.
Seriously? Try this: “Talia & Pushkin kept to opposite sides of the shelter, their movements slow, deliberate, yet skittish and always careful to keep each other in sight.” The grammar isn’t the best but at least it gives us a decent idea of what’s actually happening in this scene. Particles and antiparticles do not have a body language humans can recognize.
Your phrasing is much better. This is too weird and makes me picture inhuman movements. Sometimes similes aren’t your friend.
Alex goes to Talia, who is “wired to the gills” on AcuWake, and tells her that they need to go back or Pushkin is going to die.
Talia really seems as if she’s lost the plot at this point. If the anomaly is affecting her mind, why isn’t it affecting everyone else? Or is this just another way to smear religious people by acting as if they are all swathed in delusions?
Here’s your answer:
She’s traumatized. She’s trying to make sure nothing like Bagrev will happen again. At this point, she’s not thinking rationally. I don’t know how to feel about this. Talia’s trauma taking over could be a good conflict, if it were built up, and respectfully handled, but instead she’s just treated as crazy and gets a horrible death later on, with no acknowledgement by the narrative or by Alex that she was pushed to her limits by the things she went through. I’m trying to judge this book on its own merits, but at this point it’s a pattern: that mental illness is used as a plot device without the respect or compassion such a subject and the people suffering from this deserve. I’m tired of mental illness being used as a cheap plot device without the pain of the characters who are suffering from it being explored and given its due weight. Mental illness cannot be separated from the experiences of the people who deal with it.
I appreciate your insight. I was thrown off by “they” and was having difficulty imagining what enemy Talia had believed she’d identified, what threat justified this kind of behavior. I thought maybe the anomaly was messing with her, but there’s not really textual evidence to support that.
I think Paolini’s trying to go for a combination of the anomaly and trauma, because he keeps hammering it in how scary the noises are and stuff, but, as you said, there isn’t evidence to support the hole affecting her.
Subchapter 3:
At least Alex finally has some sense.
Posting note: Paolini's use of brackets to denote text messages sufficiently screwed with dreamwidth's formatting that I needed to go through and remove them.
WHAT THE HELL??!! WHY WOULD HE DO THAT??!! What is wrong with this dude?! I know he’s a jerk, but there’s nothing to indicate that the infection is screwing with his brain!!
We’ve never given a reason why Pushkin hates Alex so much. This makes it quite jarring that Pushkin would rather die than accept help from Alex.
Yeah I’m not buying this. If Pushkin does not trust Alex for some reason, we need Alex to have done something really shitty to Pushkin earlier to justify Pushkin’s belief. Even still I’m having a real hard time figuring out what would drive Pushkin to this. Also why is Pushkin talking about “sympathy”? Alex isn’t offering insincere condolences, he has a plan to save Pushkin’s life or at least expedite his death. One more point that just occurred to me. These are texts. Why are Pushkin’s texts not grammatically perfect? ESL speakers tend to write very well and have more issues with speaking. Plus this is the future. Why isn’t autocorrect inserting “do” into Pushkin’s last sentence?
It’s an issue throughout this book. Pushkin writes the same way he speaks. I suspect Paolini didn’t think about autocorrect, and has never learned another language, so doesn’t know much about it at all. Additionally, Pushkin lives on Shin-Zar. Hasn’t he been exposed to at least Korean? Has he picked up any? When you’ve learned one language, learning another can be easier.
So Alex gets a notification from Pushkin and Chen which gives him access to a conversation the two had been having for a while now.
Allow me to be the unprofessional one by saying this: Paolini, fuck off. Of course Pushkin is talking about what’s important to him, he’s almost certainly going to die. And of course he’s becoming incoherent, he must be in a great deal of pain. Meanwhile Alex has broadly judged Pushkin’s beliefs as “selfish sensuality” and sees all of this as “ramblings”. Alex is an asshole, but I don’t think Paolini means for us to see him as one. There’s also stuff about Alex.
Also, Paolini forgot one thing that would make this really effective: showing it. He’s just telling us that something is wrong and expecting us to be alarmed. Is it too much to actually show us what Pushkin is saying?
Well. What Paolini is describing would take some time and thought to write. I’m remarkably good at writing off the cuff, and I would struggle with writing the passage described in one pass. The general consensus of this community is that Paolini just doesn’t go back and edit his stuff for the most part, so I suppose for Paolini showing something that would take time and thought to do would be too much.
You’re probably right.
WHAT WRONGNESS? We don’t see anything! Paolini doesn’t even summarize anything from the logs. This is lazy in the extreme.
This would be a great time to indicate what Alex’s beliefs actually are, if he has any as well as what Pushkin actually thinks Alex believes instead.
Exactly. That would develop Alex’s character as well as add tension. What are Alex’s beliefs? How much has he changed them since Layla’s death? How does he feel about Pushkin’s interpretation of his beliefs? So many words in this book, but somehow there’s not enough to answer these questions.
The tone of the rest of this is very much…I’m struggling to find an elegant way to say it. “I’m a smart boy who easily recognizes propaganda and isn’t affected by it” is the best way I have to phrase it. It’s painting Chen as dumb for agreeing with Pushkin because Alex doesn’t see reasoning in Pushkin’s arguments instead of Alex maybe being dumb because he’s not able to see beneath Pushkin’s words into the structure of his argument underneath.
Oh yeah. I see it now. It’s quite condescending. It’s like those people that think they are rational, which makes them blind to their own biases, which, ironically, makes them more emotional and likely to be fooled.
So Alex takes screenshots of the conversation, which is one of the few smart things he does in this story. Then he leaves and hopes Pushkin doesn’t find out he was in it. I gotta say I’m really drawn in by the riveting interpersonal drama about group texts after a man has been shot and the team is being held captive by a maniac.
And then he sends them to Talia. The woman who has a gun and has already shot it once. What does he expect to happen? Honestly. I can’t even get myself to be angry at this stupidity. I’m just numb now.
Thankfully Talia doesn’t do anything and just says for them to “keep walking”.
Yeah I’m taking Alex’s smart boy point away. This was not a good choice of his.
Paolini feels the need to add:
So Talia’s actions pushing forward are being described in religious terms. Is she zealously trying to avert a repetition of her trauma as UltimateCheetah thinks, or is Paolini trying to signal that because she has religious beliefs of course she’s a violent kidnapper? Alex’s action does seem to have changed something: It ended any possibility of talking Talia down.
I think he’s trying to characterize Talia as someone single-minded and obsessed. Her religion is supposed to be part of that. I think her kidnapping everyone is due to her having trauma, as Paolini’s track record with mental illness isn’t that great.
Subchapter 4:
This is where the thuds get capitalized. They also go between every paragraph but one. There are 7 thuds for a subchapter that takes a page and a half.
Yes. It’s very annoying. Meanwhile, Alex tells us that:
Sooooo. The danger of the anomaly exceeds the design specs of their safety gear. So they just aren’t prepared for this expedition period. This is the kind of danger that they should have been able to pick up with long range scanning - take a reading of how loud it is at the edge of the anomaly, compare that to how far that edge is from the center, then do a basic battery of tests about how sound travels in this atmosphere and you’ll have a rough estimate of how loud it is at the center. So what this tells me is that the expedition just didn’t do its due diligence from first principles, even ignoring all the other issues they’ve been having.
This is the point where, had there been no interpersonal conflicts whatsoever, they still would have needed to turn back. This isn’t a story about a promising expedition being ripped apart by interpersonal conflict, this is a story about a group of dumbasses marching into danger completely unprepared for no reason at all.
Exactly. Can’t believe that this is remembered in To Sleep as something cool, rather than as a total disaster. This could work if these people were single-minded toward their goal, but Alex has been apathetic except for Layla, Chen is a nonentity, Talia’s full motivation has been only revealed now, and Pushkin didn’t even want to do this at first.
I am still absolutely not a fan of what Talia’s motivation is. If this was gonna be her motivation, we needed to see this story from her perspective.
The problem with Talia is that she isn’t portrayed as someone who has gone through trauma (for example, she isn’t vigilant in the least), until the “madness” stereotype comes out. Your point on the choice of protagonist is valid. Alex is reactive and passive throughout most of the book. The plot has been moved by other characters. Alex has made no major choices that affect the story.
Which in the case of Talia comes across very badly. She comes across as more like a one-note villain than a complicated character the way that she’s framed.
Alex takes more painkillers, which, if overdosed, could lead to kidney failure. In fact, he’s already had “one set of kidneys replaced”. On one hand, it is interesting that, in this world, the loss of kidneys is more of an inconvenience than in an emergency, but on another, Alex doesn’t know how long it could be before he gets medical care! This is stupid!
It is stupid! It also makes Alex sound like someone who doesn’t actually appreciate how advanced medicine is in this world. “Oh I’ll just get another kidney replacement, no big deal.” That’s…idk there’s people today who don’t recognize what a medical miracle it is that we have vaccines among other things, but I don’t like this trait in our protagonist.
Especially because of the extra work and stress that puts on the doctors who have to do it. It takes up time that could be used treating others. This is selfish.
We get some more melodramatic stuff:
Where is this even coming from? It’s weird. There’s nothing metaphysical or supernatural here at all.
Also call me anti-cyperpunk, but I still think it’s pretty weird to watch someone else’s memories and much less to think of doing that while you’re in a lot of pain and very stressed out on a one-way trip to Hell unless those memories bring you comfort, which it’s established that they don’t do that for Alex.
Also, Layla is said to have trusted him a lot to give him her memories, but we never see their relationship as justifying that trust.
There’s a THUD after this line, in its own paragraph and all. Alex keeps reliving all “the mistakes in their relationship” and “in each hurt they dealt, he could see the foundation being laid for future sorrow, and bitter regret filled his mouth.” Because that is a human reaction.
BEEP BOOP POETRY BOT IS A REAL BOY.
LOL. First we had Alanbot, now we have Alexbot.
Subchapter 5:
I’d just like to note that this subchapter starts at the bottom of a page. UltimateCheetah caught it, but I didn’t and I was confused for a while.
Alex sees groups of xenopsuedotestudos ranging from seven to thirty-four. Then there is a thud. The suit’s electrical system is starting to be overwhelmed. And there is another thud.
They should be panicking about their suits’ electrical systems. This is their oxygen and medicine that’s at stake.
Instead, Alex just hopes that “Riedemann’s pure fucking magic would be enough to
keep them alive”. And then doesn’t think about it anymore.
Which, if this was hard sci fi, should be followed by Alex dying of no-airitis. This does go back to my earlier point about the expedition not doing its due diligence from first principles. You can’t really hide electromagnetic anomalies like this. It should be dutifully recorded on one of their sensor passes that their suits will not function at this point. They would have needed to either ignore it or just not check.
They realize that they aren’t going to make it to the hole that day, and rest. We get this description of Pushkin resting and pinching his arms:
Eww. We all needed this.
Good goddess. Fucking why.
Subchapter 6:
This chapter starts with this weird phrasing:
The “two hands” measurement is really weird. Is it “two hands” worth holding your hands in front of you and looking at the sky that way, in which case it would be midafternoon, or does it look like only two hands can fit between the sun and the horizon? Talia tripping is also supposed to be sudden. Having an entire clause before the action diminishes it. I would try something like this:
“The sun hung low over the horizon, the light causing the dust in the air to sparkle. The group shuffled forward on fatigued muscles.
Talia stumbled over a vein of gallium and went down on one knee.”
I added a transition, as the start and end of the original sentence don’t go together.
Anyway, Pushkin takes advantage of this and throws a rock at Talia, who dodges faster than normal. She points the gun at him and says something which is obscured by the sound. This is very annoyingly notated like so:
Are dashes not good enough? How is this pronounced? Is the reader just supposed to picture static?
I think the reader is supposed to picture static, but in that case I would just write “static - the only one w- augments. Keep going. -T-static”. Of course I have no idea if I’m describing a verbal conversation or an exchange of text messages. If it’s the latter, the way Paolini did it is fine.
It’s text messages, I think. He did do the same thing with verbal conversation earlier, though.
Alex gets all alarmed and thinks:
This will never be answered, by the way. Also, it’s kind of weird that Talia getting enhancements, probably to defend herself, either during or after the fact, is being used as something sinister, to build tension. It’s kind of obvious why she would want to have augments. Her past isn’t exactly mysterious.
Certainly if I’d survived an occupation where 50% of everyone died and it was particularly bad to be a woman there, if I had the means I’d get whatever was fucking available to make me more able to escape or protect myself if that were to happen again.
Subchapter 7:
In this chapter, Alex finally acts like a xenobiologist. A xenopsuedotestudo (strange false tortoise) comes “no more than twenty or thirty meters away”, and he takes his chip lab, walks up to the turtle, and does some readings.
He then tries to communicate with it, but omits scent-based communication, as he doesn’t want to accidentally insult it. In a meta sense, as it is hinted scents might have worked, this wasn’t built by the Wranaui, so scent-based communication might not have been successful.
Talia does order Alex not to walk up to the xenopseudotestudo, but Alex ignores her. You know, the person with the gun. Alex has absolutely no reaction to this instead of, you know, being scared. At this point Alex should probably get shot if we’re meant to see Talia as a villainous bad guy.
Why’d Talia let him walk away in the first place?
Uhhhh. Because Alex is the protagonist and therefore Talia can’t just shoot him even though she clearly should for defying her in this moment?
That, however, is Alex’s only consequence for disobeying the armed gunwoman. Alex thinks that his need to contact potentially intelligent species is more important than any regulation or that gun Talia’s holding. Which I’d love if that felt like a contiguous part of his character in this story.
This kinda comes out of nowhere. We get that Layla would have done it as justification, which has carried us throughout the whole book, but he’s had that justification before and hasn’t acted this way.
This is the wrong place to put this. This is a tense part of the story, the endgame. The exploration should’ve been put earlier.
Subchapter 8:
This subchapter is short. Basically, Alex gets a reading on Pushkin’s blood again, and finds out that he is still okay, “but only just”. Also, he is having trouble concentrating, most likely because of the noise.
Yeah. This is maybe six paragraphs. I’m not sure why this subchapter is here except to tell us what we already know - Pushkin is dying.
Subchapter 9:
The Thuds are now bolded and italicized as well as Capitalized. There are 12 thuds for a four page subchapter, for an average of three thuds per page.
I admit I haven’t done much origami. But that last design seems pretty implausible when working with a flat sheet.
It is. She could take multiple sheets and do Kusudama origami, but paper can only be folded so much.
It’s also not the kind of design I would expect from someone in the middle of a traumatic break. I’d expect a person in that mindset to concentrate on simple, practical things instead of anything abstract. I’m not sure what the significance of the song is except to borrow points from mentally ill characters portrayed in film. Why is the song maddening? Can we see a sample?
It may be the song from earlier in the book. In that case, she would be singing it as a comfort.
Alex thinks that Talia’s taken more AcuWake, and Pushkin’s probably done the same. He thinks that there’s probably going to be violence between Talia and Pushkin soon and he doesn’t want to be involved. The hell is he talking about? There already was violence between Talia and Pushkin! She’s killing him right now! And buddy boy you’re already involved. You chose Talia’s side earlier today. And considering he’s injured and she’s armed, doing nothing is picking Talia’s side.
I can’t get over this shit. This is literally white freshman college boys saying “But but if I get involved I violate my ethical principles! Never mind that one side has militarized cops and the other side has soccer moms in t-shirts so not taking a side is definitely taking a side!” If Talia is supposed to be the villain of this story as she’s being portrayed to be in this chapter, Alex’s refusal to do anything about her marks him as a coward who is failing to live up to his minimum responsibility. And if she’s not “the villain”, he’s still a coward because this expedition is a shitshow and he should be putting his foot down even if he gets shot for it! Rule 303. Use it for your protagonists. Good goddess.
Exactly! If Alex has the opportunity to stop this, and he doesn’t use it, he is complicit!
Anyway our most special little boy has got to get his beauty sleep while Pushkin bleeds out, so he tries to sleep. He’s not very good at sleeping however, so he dreams of melodrama. Specifically, his wedding day with Layla. I don’t care. I really don’t care.
Sooooo. How did Alex and Layla really meet? I know we’ve been told something, but the kind of people who don’t actually have friends, as seems to be the case with Alex, typically don’t get married. Because someone is usually a friend before they’re your spouse. Why is she the one friend he had? Why? How the hell is this guy such a damn island?
We don’t get any answers on this. For a character-centered book, it’s quite bereft of character.
Alex describes Layla’s dress, as “blue as sapphire”, which brings to mind the question of how he knows about sapphires, and describes his “jacket” as “red as a robin’s breast”. He wasn’t even born on Earth! Why is he thinking of robins? He is a xenobiologist, but still, he’s far away from Sol.
Alex describes going through with the wedding as “An expression of faith” and just end me now. Okay? Paolini should not be talking about faith.
Faith in what? Themselves? Their union? It’s never clarified.
So Alex wakes up and everything sucks and he tries to self-harm through his suit. He looks on over to Chen’s alcove and has a really fucking hard time understanding that Talia’s standing over Chen, her hands on either side of his head, Chen is looking up at her, and whoops. Maybe stop peeking, Alex. Or better yet use this opportunity to grab her gun.
I kid. What’s actually happening is that Talia is delivering a religious sermon and Chen is receptive. My point about grabbing her gun stands.
It is uncanny how Chen is kind of hypnotized, but I don’t see anything more dangerous than letting Talia keep taking everyone toward the hole. Why is Chen like this anyway? He seems to be receptive to Pushkin, not Talia. It’s supposed to be the hole, but it seems everyone would be annoyed, angry, and high-strung rather than having changes in personality.
So Alex keeps on listening and he thinks what’s happening is an exorcism and that he’s qualified to make that determination even though he admits that he’s never heard an exorcism and doesn’t know what the prayers would be.
“Love of gold and silver”? That's quite an archaic comparison for a newly-established sect.
There’s an awful lot of this, but this sounds a lot less like an exorcism and a lot more like praying over someone. Also if Talia can do an exorcism, then she’s a priest according to Adysópitos Orthodoxy but way back in Alpha Zone we established that she’s probably not a priest because she does a really awful job of arguing for her faith. Both Talia and Chen have taken their helmets off, so they’re risking contamination and Alex has no reaction. After all it’s not like a member of a scientific expedition has a duty to look out for other members of that same expedition.
I probably wouldn’t tell Talia to put her suit back on, to be honest. I’d GRAB THE FREAKING GUN.
WELL YEAH. But if mopey boy doesn’t have any urgency about that, he can have urgency about protecting his team. It’s also just occurred to me that Alex was thinking about grabbing her gun earlier, and yet he doesn’t use this golden opportunity to do it. Does he just not care because Pushkin was being a meany pants to him?
Paolini probably forgot about it. Most of his scenes do one thing at a time.
In story, Alex really has no reason not to try. It’s not even said that he’s afraid of how Talia would react if he told her to put her suit back on. He doesn’t seem to be scared of her at all.
Also, why has Chen taken his helmet off? This is completely out of character. What about this does he find so alluring? He’s the least-developed character in this entire thing. The blurb said that there were supposed to be “ghosts of their pasts”. So far, Pushkin and Chen have almost no pasts, and no ghosts. I feel ripped off.
Talia’s chanting has apparently fallen into “sync” with the thuds naturally, which is supposed to be scary and stuff. It doesn’t really work. The THUDs are 10.6 seconds apart. That’s not a rhythm that really can be followed. Talia’s either chanting really slowly, or somehow has an equal number of syllables every 10.6 seconds she talks.
The chapter ends with a thud.
Next is Breaking Point with Snarkbotanya
And may God have mercy on her soul.
IgnoreSandra
Subchapter 1:
Alex wakes up in the middle of the night and sees Talia speaking with Chen while still pointing the bolt gun at an alert Pushkin. This Talia and Pushkin fighting over Chen conflict has been present over the entire book, but I don’t get why they are interested in him. He seems pretty well-adjusted and satisfied with his life, and didn’t show any overt interest in either of their beliefs. It really should be Alex they are trying to convince.
In story, Alex is depressed, so he is more susceptible to other people offering comfort in solutions, and each could try to solve his problem in different ways. Out of story, it would give Alex an active role in the plot and in the interactions with his crewmates, and would allow Paolini to work the dead wife subplot into the main plot.
I’m struck by - no this is a bad color. I’m - orange is better - I’m struck by the fact that the survey team has something that functions as a weapon so easily. This seems like a bad thing to pack for a long stressful journey involving four people in close proximity, two of whom seem to be intentionally antagonizing each other. Looking back at Zeta Zone, the bolt gun seems to be some kind of industrial tool. I would expect, for OSHA reasons if nothing else, the pressure on the bolt being placed to be as low as it can possibly be and still accomplish the task. This is a survey team - for what possible purpose might they need a bolt gun that expels a projectile with enough force to injure a human through their suit? Or even if they do, why would they need one that can be carried and used like a regular gun?
Maybe in case there’s other creatures on the planet that could be hostile, like the tigermauls.
Subchapter 2:
In the morning, Alex notices that Pushkin is sick. He isn’t feeling good either, and takes “a double dose of AcuWake”, which doesn’t help too much.
Talia and the geologist kept to the sides of the shelter and always opposite one another, as if particle and antiparticle repulsed by the presence of their mirrored self.
Seriously? Try this: “Talia & Pushkin kept to opposite sides of the shelter, their movements slow, deliberate, yet skittish and always careful to keep each other in sight.” The grammar isn’t the best but at least it gives us a decent idea of what’s actually happening in this scene. Particles and antiparticles do not have a body language humans can recognize.
Your phrasing is much better. This is too weird and makes me picture inhuman movements. Sometimes similes aren’t your friend.
Alex goes to Talia, who is “wired to the gills” on AcuWake, and tells her that they need to go back or Pushkin is going to die.
Talia really seems as if she’s lost the plot at this point. If the anomaly is affecting her mind, why isn’t it affecting everyone else? Or is this just another way to smear religious people by acting as if they are all swathed in delusions?
Here’s your answer:
“Everyone’s life is on the line,” she said with a sudden snarl. “Do you
know what will happen if they attack us? We’ll lose. Humanity will lose.
All gone. Dead. Planets blasted bare. Men, women, children, and the
screaming, the screaming.” Her eyes went round and white-rimmed, as if
she’d seen a horror. “We can’t let it happen. Not again.”
“Not ag—Nothing’s happened. You’re imagining things. We have to—”
“No!” She raised the bolt gun, placing the weapon between them. Then,
with the speaker on her skinsuit, she said, “Everyone outside! Now!”
She’s traumatized. She’s trying to make sure nothing like Bagrev will happen again. At this point, she’s not thinking rationally. I don’t know how to feel about this. Talia’s trauma taking over could be a good conflict, if it were built up, and respectfully handled, but instead she’s just treated as crazy and gets a horrible death later on, with no acknowledgement by the narrative or by Alex that she was pushed to her limits by the things she went through. I’m trying to judge this book on its own merits, but at this point it’s a pattern: that mental illness is used as a plot device without the respect or compassion such a subject and the people suffering from this deserve. I’m tired of mental illness being used as a cheap plot device without the pain of the characters who are suffering from it being explored and given its due weight. Mental illness cannot be separated from the experiences of the people who deal with it.
I appreciate your insight. I was thrown off by “they” and was having difficulty imagining what enemy Talia had believed she’d identified, what threat justified this kind of behavior. I thought maybe the anomaly was messing with her, but there’s not really textual evidence to support that.
I think Paolini’s trying to go for a combination of the anomaly and trauma, because he keeps hammering it in how scary the noises are and stuff, but, as you said, there isn’t evidence to support the hole affecting her.
Subchapter 3:
Alex kept waiting for an opportunity to grab the bolt gun from Talia, but
she was far too careful for him.
At least Alex finally has some sense.
Finally, Alex sent a private text to Pushkin:
If you distract Talia, I can grab the bolt gun. – Alex
Fuck you. – Pushkin
Posting note: Paolini's use of brackets to denote text messages sufficiently screwed with dreamwidth's formatting that I needed to go through and remove them.
WHAT THE HELL??!! WHY WOULD HE DO THAT??!! What is wrong with this dude?! I know he’s a jerk, but there’s nothing to indicate that the infection is screwing with his brain!!
What’s wrong with you? If you don’t get medical attention, you’re going
to be screwed. – Alex
The geologist glanced with hate-filled eyes back over his shoulder. Now
you care? Fuck off. I not need your sympathy, asshole. – Pushkin
We’ve never given a reason why Pushkin hates Alex so much. This makes it quite jarring that Pushkin would rather die than accept help from Alex.
Yeah I’m not buying this. If Pushkin does not trust Alex for some reason, we need Alex to have done something really shitty to Pushkin earlier to justify Pushkin’s belief. Even still I’m having a real hard time figuring out what would drive Pushkin to this. Also why is Pushkin talking about “sympathy”? Alex isn’t offering insincere condolences, he has a plan to save Pushkin’s life or at least expedite his death. One more point that just occurred to me. These are texts. Why are Pushkin’s texts not grammatically perfect? ESL speakers tend to write very well and have more issues with speaking. Plus this is the future. Why isn’t autocorrect inserting “do” into Pushkin’s last sentence?
It’s an issue throughout this book. Pushkin writes the same way he speaks. I suspect Paolini didn’t think about autocorrect, and has never learned another language, so doesn’t know much about it at all. Additionally, Pushkin lives on Shin-Zar. Hasn’t he been exposed to at least Korean? Has he picked up any? When you’ve learned one language, learning another can be easier.
So Alex gets a notification from Pushkin and Chen which gives him access to a conversation the two had been having for a while now.
The conversation was unbalanced in the extreme: Pushkin directing a torrent of words at Chen, and Chen answering with only single words or short sentences. The bulk of Pushkin’s texts centered on the same few topics he and Talia had been arguing about night after night. Questions of belief and beauty and morality, all wrapped in a philosophy of selfish sensuality.
Worst yet, Pushkin’s ramblings showed clear signs of deterioration. Even over the course of a few hours, Alex could see the Zarian growing increasingly incoherent, words and phrases becoming disjointed, unhinged, free of causality. Something seemed deeply wrong with the man’s brain.
Allow me to be the unprofessional one by saying this: Paolini, fuck off. Of course Pushkin is talking about what’s important to him, he’s almost certainly going to die. And of course he’s becoming incoherent, he must be in a great deal of pain. Meanwhile Alex has broadly judged Pushkin’s beliefs as “selfish sensuality” and sees all of this as “ramblings”. Alex is an asshole, but I don’t think Paolini means for us to see him as one. There’s also stuff about Alex.
Also, Paolini forgot one thing that would make this really effective: showing it. He’s just telling us that something is wrong and expecting us to be alarmed. Is it too much to actually show us what Pushkin is saying?
Well. What Paolini is describing would take some time and thought to write. I’m remarkably good at writing off the cuff, and I would struggle with writing the passage described in one pass. The general consensus of this community is that Paolini just doesn’t go back and edit his stuff for the most part, so I suppose for Paolini showing something that would take time and thought to do would be too much.
You’re probably right.
and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled as he read paragraph after paragraph of Pushkin arguing not for violence, but for the utter wrongness of what the geologist took to be Alex’s beliefs.
WHAT WRONGNESS? We don’t see anything! Paolini doesn’t even summarize anything from the logs. This is lazy in the extreme.
This would be a great time to indicate what Alex’s beliefs actually are, if he has any as well as what Pushkin actually thinks Alex believes instead.
Exactly. That would develop Alex’s character as well as add tension. What are Alex’s beliefs? How much has he changed them since Layla’s death? How does he feel about Pushkin’s interpretation of his beliefs? So many words in this book, but somehow there’s not enough to answer these questions.
Most disturbing of all, Chen seemed to be agreeing with Pushkin more and more. Somehow Pushkin’s incoherence was proving persuasive, though Alex couldn’t fathom how or why. Perhaps the sheer number of words was enough to sway Chen’s opinion. Either way, he seemed entranced by the stumbling artifice of Pushkin’s verbal gymnastics.
The tone of the rest of this is very much…I’m struggling to find an elegant way to say it. “I’m a smart boy who easily recognizes propaganda and isn’t affected by it” is the best way I have to phrase it. It’s painting Chen as dumb for agreeing with Pushkin because Alex doesn’t see reasoning in Pushkin’s arguments instead of Alex maybe being dumb because he’s not able to see beneath Pushkin’s words into the structure of his argument underneath.
Oh yeah. I see it now. It’s quite condescending. It’s like those people that think they are rational, which makes them blind to their own biases, which, ironically, makes them more emotional and likely to be fooled.
So Alex takes screenshots of the conversation, which is one of the few smart things he does in this story. Then he leaves and hopes Pushkin doesn’t find out he was in it. I gotta say I’m really drawn in by the riveting interpersonal drama about group texts after a man has been shot and the team is being held captive by a maniac.
And then he sends them to Talia. The woman who has a gun and has already shot it once. What does he expect to happen? Honestly. I can’t even get myself to be angry at this stupidity. I’m just numb now.
Thankfully Talia doesn’t do anything and just says for them to “keep walking”.
Yeah I’m taking Alex’s smart boy point away. This was not a good choice of his.
Paolini feels the need to add:
Talia’s face had the grim set of a zealot whose every belief had been confirmed.
So Talia’s actions pushing forward are being described in religious terms. Is she zealously trying to avert a repetition of her trauma as UltimateCheetah thinks, or is Paolini trying to signal that because she has religious beliefs of course she’s a violent kidnapper? Alex’s action does seem to have changed something: It ended any possibility of talking Talia down.
I think he’s trying to characterize Talia as someone single-minded and obsessed. Her religion is supposed to be part of that. I think her kidnapping everyone is due to her having trauma, as Paolini’s track record with mental illness isn’t that great.
Subchapter 4:
This is where the thuds get capitalized. They also go between every paragraph but one. There are 7 thuds for a subchapter that takes a page and a half.
Yes. It’s very annoying. Meanwhile, Alex tells us that:
The sound of the hole had exceeded sound. It was beyond anything Alex’s ears could handle, even with the suit’s noisecanceling (The doc is doing a spell check here. Apparently, this should be two words.) system.
Sooooo. The danger of the anomaly exceeds the design specs of their safety gear. So they just aren’t prepared for this expedition period. This is the kind of danger that they should have been able to pick up with long range scanning - take a reading of how loud it is at the edge of the anomaly, compare that to how far that edge is from the center, then do a basic battery of tests about how sound travels in this atmosphere and you’ll have a rough estimate of how loud it is at the center. So what this tells me is that the expedition just didn’t do its due diligence from first principles, even ignoring all the other issues they’ve been having.
This is the point where, had there been no interpersonal conflicts whatsoever, they still would have needed to turn back. This isn’t a story about a promising expedition being ripped apart by interpersonal conflict, this is a story about a group of dumbasses marching into danger completely unprepared for no reason at all.
Exactly. Can’t believe that this is remembered in To Sleep as something cool, rather than as a total disaster. This could work if these people were single-minded toward their goal, but Alex has been apathetic except for Layla, Chen is a nonentity, Talia’s full motivation has been only revealed now, and Pushkin didn’t even want to do this at first.
I am still absolutely not a fan of what Talia’s motivation is. If this was gonna be her motivation, we needed to see this story from her perspective.
The problem with Talia is that she isn’t portrayed as someone who has gone through trauma (for example, she isn’t vigilant in the least), until the “madness” stereotype comes out. Your point on the choice of protagonist is valid. Alex is reactive and passive throughout most of the book. The plot has been moved by other characters. Alex has made no major choices that affect the story.
Which in the case of Talia comes across very badly. She comes across as more like a one-note villain than a complicated character the way that she’s framed.
Alex takes more painkillers, which, if overdosed, could lead to kidney failure. In fact, he’s already had “one set of kidneys replaced”. On one hand, it is interesting that, in this world, the loss of kidneys is more of an inconvenience than in an emergency, but on another, Alex doesn’t know how long it could be before he gets medical care! This is stupid!
It is stupid! It also makes Alex sound like someone who doesn’t actually appreciate how advanced medicine is in this world. “Oh I’ll just get another kidney replacement, no big deal.” That’s…idk there’s people today who don’t recognize what a medical miracle it is that we have vaccines among other things, but I don’t like this trait in our protagonist.
Especially because of the extra work and stress that puts on the doctors who have to do it. It takes up time that could be used treating others. This is selfish.
We get some more melodramatic stuff:
The fractals [that he’s seeing in the visual grains as his suit vision is getting worse] felt like a patterned veil draped over reality—a veil that separated the known from the unknown. He could almost see what lay on the other side, shimmering and shifting, summoning him with liquid singing. . . .
Where is this even coming from? It’s weird. There’s nothing metaphysical or supernatural here at all.
Also call me anti-cyperpunk, but I still think it’s pretty weird to watch someone else’s memories and much less to think of doing that while you’re in a lot of pain and very stressed out on a one-way trip to Hell unless those memories bring you comfort, which it’s established that they don’t do that for Alex.
Also, Layla is said to have trusted him a lot to give him her memories, but we never see their relationship as justifying that trust.
He’d tried watching more of Layla’s memories, but the interference from each
There’s a THUD after this line, in its own paragraph and all. Alex keeps reliving all “the mistakes in their relationship” and “in each hurt they dealt, he could see the foundation being laid for future sorrow, and bitter regret filled his mouth.” Because that is a human reaction.
BEEP BOOP POETRY BOT IS A REAL BOY.
LOL. First we had Alanbot, now we have Alexbot.
Subchapter 5:
I’d just like to note that this subchapter starts at the bottom of a page. UltimateCheetah caught it, but I didn’t and I was confused for a while.
Alex sees groups of xenopsuedotestudos ranging from seven to thirty-four. Then there is a thud. The suit’s electrical system is starting to be overwhelmed. And there is another thud.
They should be panicking about their suits’ electrical systems. This is their oxygen and medicine that’s at stake.
Instead, Alex just hopes that “Riedemann’s pure fucking magic would be enough to
keep them alive”. And then doesn’t think about it anymore.
Which, if this was hard sci fi, should be followed by Alex dying of no-airitis. This does go back to my earlier point about the expedition not doing its due diligence from first principles. You can’t really hide electromagnetic anomalies like this. It should be dutifully recorded on one of their sensor passes that their suits will not function at this point. They would have needed to either ignore it or just not check.
They realize that they aren’t going to make it to the hole that day, and rest. We get this description of Pushkin resting and pinching his arms:
Almost as if he were
trying to pull off pieces of his skin, like chunks of moldy bread.
Eww. We all needed this.
Good goddess. Fucking why.
Subchapter 6:
This chapter starts with this weird phrasing:
The sun sat two hands above the horizon, glowing behind a scrim of
sparkling dust, when Talia stumbled over a vein of gallium and went down
on one knee.
The “two hands” measurement is really weird. Is it “two hands” worth holding your hands in front of you and looking at the sky that way, in which case it would be midafternoon, or does it look like only two hands can fit between the sun and the horizon? Talia tripping is also supposed to be sudden. Having an entire clause before the action diminishes it. I would try something like this:
“The sun hung low over the horizon, the light causing the dust in the air to sparkle. The group shuffled forward on fatigued muscles.
Talia stumbled over a vein of gallium and went down on one knee.”
I added a transition, as the start and end of the original sentence don’t go together.
Anyway, Pushkin takes advantage of this and throws a rock at Talia, who dodges faster than normal. She points the gun at him and says something which is obscured by the sound. This is very annoyingly notated like so:
Y$&’re 01101110 01101111 01110100 00001101 00001010 the only one w✹&# augments. Keep going. – T✹(ia
Are dashes not good enough? How is this pronounced? Is the reader just supposed to picture static?
I think the reader is supposed to picture static, but in that case I would just write “static - the only one w- augments. Keep going. -T-static”. Of course I have no idea if I’m describing a verbal conversation or an exchange of text messages. If it’s the latter, the way Paolini did it is fine.
It’s text messages, I think. He did do the same thing with verbal conversation earlier, though.
Alex gets all alarmed and thinks:
Talia’s augments . . . heightened reflexes like hers were normally only gene-hacked into athletes or military personnel. Just what did you do in Bagrev? he wondered.
This will never be answered, by the way. Also, it’s kind of weird that Talia getting enhancements, probably to defend herself, either during or after the fact, is being used as something sinister, to build tension. It’s kind of obvious why she would want to have augments. Her past isn’t exactly mysterious.
Certainly if I’d survived an occupation where 50% of everyone died and it was particularly bad to be a woman there, if I had the means I’d get whatever was fucking available to make me more able to escape or protect myself if that were to happen again.
Subchapter 7:
In this chapter, Alex finally acts like a xenobiologist. A xenopsuedotestudo (strange false tortoise) comes “no more than twenty or thirty meters away”, and he takes his chip lab, walks up to the turtle, and does some readings.
He then tries to communicate with it, but omits scent-based communication, as he doesn’t want to accidentally insult it. In a meta sense, as it is hinted scents might have worked, this wasn’t built by the Wranaui, so scent-based communication might not have been successful.
Talia does order Alex not to walk up to the xenopseudotestudo, but Alex ignores her. You know, the person with the gun. Alex has absolutely no reaction to this instead of, you know, being scared. At this point Alex should probably get shot if we’re meant to see Talia as a villainous bad guy.
Why’d Talia let him walk away in the first place?
Uhhhh. Because Alex is the protagonist and therefore Talia can’t just shoot him even though she clearly should for defying her in this moment?
Talia gave him an ugly look as he made his way back to the sledges.
That, however, is Alex’s only consequence for disobeying the armed gunwoman. Alex thinks that his need to contact potentially intelligent species is more important than any regulation or that gun Talia’s holding. Which I’d love if that felt like a contiguous part of his character in this story.
This kinda comes out of nowhere. We get that Layla would have done it as justification, which has carried us throughout the whole book, but he’s had that justification before and hasn’t acted this way.
This is the wrong place to put this. This is a tense part of the story, the endgame. The exploration should’ve been put earlier.
Subchapter 8:
This subchapter is short. Basically, Alex gets a reading on Pushkin’s blood again, and finds out that he is still okay, “but only just”. Also, he is having trouble concentrating, most likely because of the noise.
Yeah. This is maybe six paragraphs. I’m not sure why this subchapter is here except to tell us what we already know - Pushkin is dying.
Subchapter 9:
The Thuds are now bolded and italicized as well as Capitalized. There are 12 thuds for a four page subchapter, for an average of three thuds per page.
Talia kept one hand on the bolt gun in her lap, while with the other, she folded and refolded the foil top to a meal pack. She seemed obsessed with it. First she folded a flower. Then, a sword. Then a ship. Then an abstract design that curled upon itself in ever smaller iterations. And all the while she kept humming the same maddening song to herself.
I admit I haven’t done much origami. But that last design seems pretty implausible when working with a flat sheet.
It is. She could take multiple sheets and do Kusudama origami, but paper can only be folded so much.
It’s also not the kind of design I would expect from someone in the middle of a traumatic break. I’d expect a person in that mindset to concentrate on simple, practical things instead of anything abstract. I’m not sure what the significance of the song is except to borrow points from mentally ill characters portrayed in film. Why is the song maddening? Can we see a sample?
It may be the song from earlier in the book. In that case, she would be singing it as a comfort.
Alex thinks that Talia’s taken more AcuWake, and Pushkin’s probably done the same. He thinks that there’s probably going to be violence between Talia and Pushkin soon and he doesn’t want to be involved. The hell is he talking about? There already was violence between Talia and Pushkin! She’s killing him right now! And buddy boy you’re already involved. You chose Talia’s side earlier today. And considering he’s injured and she’s armed, doing nothing is picking Talia’s side.
I can’t get over this shit. This is literally white freshman college boys saying “But but if I get involved I violate my ethical principles! Never mind that one side has militarized cops and the other side has soccer moms in t-shirts so not taking a side is definitely taking a side!” If Talia is supposed to be the villain of this story as she’s being portrayed to be in this chapter, Alex’s refusal to do anything about her marks him as a coward who is failing to live up to his minimum responsibility. And if she’s not “the villain”, he’s still a coward because this expedition is a shitshow and he should be putting his foot down even if he gets shot for it! Rule 303. Use it for your protagonists. Good goddess.
Exactly! If Alex has the opportunity to stop this, and he doesn’t use it, he is complicit!
Anyway our most special little boy has got to get his beauty sleep while Pushkin bleeds out, so he tries to sleep. He’s not very good at sleeping however, so he dreams of melodrama. Specifically, his wedding day with Layla. I don’t care. I really don’t care.
The domed church had opened its doors, and the guests in their finery stood before folding chairs set in ordered rows. Friends, family —mostly her friends, none of his family. His buddies from work were there out of politeness. They didn’t really know each other.
Sooooo. How did Alex and Layla really meet? I know we’ve been told something, but the kind of people who don’t actually have friends, as seems to be the case with Alex, typically don’t get married. Because someone is usually a friend before they’re your spouse. Why is she the one friend he had? Why? How the hell is this guy such a damn island?
We don’t get any answers on this. For a character-centered book, it’s quite bereft of character.
Alex describes Layla’s dress, as “blue as sapphire”, which brings to mind the question of how he knows about sapphires, and describes his “jacket” as “red as a robin’s breast”. He wasn’t even born on Earth! Why is he thinking of robins? He is a xenobiologist, but still, he’s far away from Sol.
Alex describes going through with the wedding as “An expression of faith” and just end me now. Okay? Paolini should not be talking about faith.
Faith in what? Themselves? Their union? It’s never clarified.
So Alex wakes up and everything sucks and he tries to self-harm through his suit. He looks on over to Chen’s alcove and has a really fucking hard time understanding that Talia’s standing over Chen, her hands on either side of his head, Chen is looking up at her, and whoops. Maybe stop peeking, Alex. Or better yet use this opportunity to grab her gun.
I kid. What’s actually happening is that Talia is delivering a religious sermon and Chen is receptive. My point about grabbing her gun stands.
It wasn’t his business. He didn’t know the whys behind their behavior; there was no reason to think anything was wrong, except for his instinct that insisted something was.
It is uncanny how Chen is kind of hypnotized, but I don’t see anything more dangerous than letting Talia keep taking everyone toward the hole. Why is Chen like this anyway? He seems to be receptive to Pushkin, not Talia. It’s supposed to be the hole, but it seems everyone would be annoyed, angry, and high-strung rather than having changes in personality.
So Alex keeps on listening and he thinks what’s happening is an exorcism and that he’s qualified to make that determination even though he admits that he’s never heard an exorcism and doesn’t know what the prayers would be.
“… Cast away from his soul every malady, all disbelief, spare him from the furious attacks of unclean, infernal, fiery, evil-serving, lustful spirits, the love of gold and silver, conceit, fornication, every shameless, unseemly, dark, and profane demon. Indeed, O God, expel from Thy servant, Chen, every energy of the devil, every enchantment and delusion; all idolatry, lunacy, astrology, necromancy, every bird of omen, the love of luxury and the flesh, all greed, drunkenness, carnality, adultery, licentiousness, shamelessness, anger—”
“Love of gold and silver”? That's quite an archaic comparison for a newly-established sect.
There’s an awful lot of this, but this sounds a lot less like an exorcism and a lot more like praying over someone. Also if Talia can do an exorcism, then she’s a priest according to Adysópitos Orthodoxy but way back in Alpha Zone we established that she’s probably not a priest because she does a really awful job of arguing for her faith. Both Talia and Chen have taken their helmets off, so they’re risking contamination and Alex has no reaction. After all it’s not like a member of a scientific expedition has a duty to look out for other members of that same expedition.
I probably wouldn’t tell Talia to put her suit back on, to be honest. I’d GRAB THE FREAKING GUN.
WELL YEAH. But if mopey boy doesn’t have any urgency about that, he can have urgency about protecting his team. It’s also just occurred to me that Alex was thinking about grabbing her gun earlier, and yet he doesn’t use this golden opportunity to do it. Does he just not care because Pushkin was being a meany pants to him?
Paolini probably forgot about it. Most of his scenes do one thing at a time.
In story, Alex really has no reason not to try. It’s not even said that he’s afraid of how Talia would react if he told her to put her suit back on. He doesn’t seem to be scared of her at all.
Also, why has Chen taken his helmet off? This is completely out of character. What about this does he find so alluring? He’s the least-developed character in this entire thing. The blurb said that there were supposed to be “ghosts of their pasts”. So far, Pushkin and Chen have almost no pasts, and no ghosts. I feel ripped off.
Talia’s chanting has apparently fallen into “sync” with the thuds naturally, which is supposed to be scary and stuff. It doesn’t really work. The THUDs are 10.6 seconds apart. That’s not a rhythm that really can be followed. Talia’s either chanting really slowly, or somehow has an equal number of syllables every 10.6 seconds she talks.
The chapter ends with a thud.
Next is Breaking Point with Snarkbotanya
And may God have mercy on her soul.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-20 01:43 am (UTC)As far as I'm concerned, Pushkin has become Alex Jones, and Chen seems to be agreeing with him in order to get him off his case. The description of Pushkin's "hedonistic" beliefs, and his take on Alex's mysterious, undisclosed beliefs never got any more elaboration, because there was never any further detail with which to begin. This seems more like a concept paper a director would use to sell a script, rather than the script itself, which is why I call bullshit: yes, this was a lot of material allegedly covered, but Paolini could have used his powers of forcing the reader to read between the lines for good, for once, and provided a small sample text so we could draw our own conclusions. Unfortunately, this seems to only happen when he does not intend to be subtle, but it would be really great if he could harness this ability so his writing could be just a little bit more interesting, and a lot less frustrating to read.
As for Talia, I don't even...yes, she has been showing signs of strain, and has been behaving in an unbalanced manner, but the only indication this trauma bomb has been ticking, so far as I can tell, was several chapters ago when Pushkin poked the proverbial bear. Besides that, it seems her Hollywood mental breakdown has come out of left field. What happened now, that left her catatonic and fearing for humanity? The only thing I can really think of is the author sitting down to write, and saying to himself, "okay, if this story is going to go where I want it to go, this character needs to have a mental breakdown, time now." Which, of course, makes very little sense in context to the readers.
From how this sporking seems to have played out, it appears Paolini has done it again: he has a very different story playing out in his head than whatever it is he actually typed. Maybe all of the nuance and valuable content is bouncing around his mind and never made it into the written word. As sad as that prospect seems for a writer, it's that much more annoying for readers, who are now being gaslit whenever the author mentions anything about the work that lives in his mind, as opposed to the one they have read.
Great sporking, and godspeed for the next!