Shej

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2/05/2021 1:48 pm  #1


Planetside

This was another Babbler from last year. More military sci if. It ended very abruptly, leading no doubt to the sequel, which I will no doubt read. It also left me with some questions, like is the narrator reliable? is his apparently excessive consumption of whiskey a gun on the wall, or just part of the personality? 
It was an okay read. I found the narrator somewhat self-satisfied, and not my favorite. But i will keep reading the series because i hate not knowing what happens next. 
I would take great pleasure in having a discussion with anyone who has read this, or any of the other Babblers from last year, which I am now belatedly working my way through. 

edited to add, I have just started the sequel, called Spaceside, and it seems it is moving on from the Planetside storyline, which I find a bit annoying as I thought there was a lot left unresolved in Planetside,  not least of which is a fundamental question about the point of the whole thing. In this universe, capitalism mandates that humans invade all habitable planets, regardless of whether there are intelligent species present, and take whatever they want, in service of the idea that humanity deserves it, I guess. The narrator seems to agree with this, in an unquestioning kind of way.  It is not a perspective I share, so I am asking myself why I am reading the sequel. 

Edited again to say that in fact the sequel does follow on the story line, which I guess is less annoying than if all those loose ends had been left hanging. Also, the author, or the narrator, has a strange fixation on women's hairstyles - he is always remarking on how one woman or another has her hair in a "tight bun."  Seems a bit odd to me  I mean, if tight buns are so common that many of the women he encounters wear their hair that way, why comment on it? Or is it a strange coincidence that all these women wear their hair in tight buns? Or is there any such thing as coincidence? Maybe it is a secret cabal whose recognition signal is a tight bun. 
Oh well.  This is probably not important. 


 

Last edited by Kokipy (2/05/2021 3:50 pm)

 

2/06/2021 12:48 am  #2


Re: Planetside

On the contrary, this bun issue is the thing that most has me curious about what’s going on in this series 🤯


One world -- or none
 

2/06/2021 9:52 am  #3


Re: Planetside

There are no loose ends in tight buns, of course, that is one of their main purposes.Although the narrator is in therapy, he doesn’t yet seem to have grasped the nuance that sometimes a bun is just a bun. And sometimes, of course, it isn’t IIRC, there were also tight buns in Planetside.
do you think the author is just messing with us? 

     Thread Starter
 

2/06/2021 2:03 pm  #4


Re: Planetside

That would be charitable. Maybe they have an issue with buns.


One world -- or none
 

2/06/2021 4:06 pm  #5


Re: Planetside

They certainly draw his eye. 

     Thread Starter
 

2/08/2021 2:16 pm  #6


Re: Planetside

Buns also contain hair pins - potential lock picks?

 

2/08/2021 11:51 pm  #7


Re: Planetside

Pence wrote:

Buns also contain hair pins - potential lock picks?

or weapons?


One world -- or none
 

2/09/2021 5:33 pm  #8


Re: Planetside

Well, I finished the third one. I don’t think there was more than one tight bun in the place, and none of them ever concealed weapons, so in this respect these books fail the Chekov test. They are far from the worst books I have ever read, but they seem to me to be a bit formulaic. They don’t raise new ideas nor are the characters profoundly appealing. I don’t regret the time spent reading them because, for one thing, they didn’t take very long, but I would not keep them on the shelf if I had bought them in physical format.

I moved on to First Encounter, another 2020 Babbler, but since the author chose on about the second page to name a prestigious medical institution after Ronald Reagan, I may find I am not in tune with his perspective. 

     Thread Starter
 

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