Am I the only one who always reads the sample chapters, which means that by the time the book comes out, I’m already halfway done with it?
On the other hand, I continue to basically enjoy them, so I suppose it doesn’t matter much.
I think the most interesting revelation in TSOG is clearly:
The reason for the change - Rudi is given a vision of a dystopian future where technology has gone too far, presumably due to some version of the singularity. So God(s) step in and presumably restart things with two simultaneous experiments: Nantucket sent back in time so that technology can be re-spread more or less from scratch, and the modern world continuing without technology.
One criticism:
I thought the ending was rushed and out of nowhere. Suddenly the king of Iowa, which is this super-powerful kingdom we’ve never heard of, which of course has a douchebag king, randomly decides to send Rudi out on a quest and give him one month or else his friends will be killed. Who actually acts that way?
I don’t think there’s going to be crossover between the Changed world and Nantucket in the past.
That is, unless Stirling forgets about the prologue in Against the Tide of Years That was a short exerpt from a history book written in 57 AE, and published by the Nantucket press. Surely if there had been contact it would have been referenced.
But they do admit “a wizard did it”! Or at least, that the changes to the laws of physics are so specific that the change must have been done on purpose…some entity or entities decided to limit human technology for some unknowable purpose.
The term of art in alt-history for these entities is “Alien Space Bats”. They introduce arbitrary changes to the space-time continuum, and then the author writes a story about them. The comparison to the MacGuffin is obvious. The author wants to write a story about modern humans reduced to feudal level technology, that’s the point of the book. Concentration on the Alien Space Bats themselves is a mistake, since nobody cares about the Alien Space Bats themselves.
Why and how the Emberverse was created is irrelevant in the context of the books themselves, because no characters in the books would ever be able to find out. And it’s irrelevant to the reader and the author as well, because they are simply a device to create the milieu the author wanted to explore. Even if the characters finally figure out why the Alien Space Bats did what they did it won’t mean anything, because the real meta-reason is that the author wanted them to. Likewise, James Bond might spend the entire movie trying to recover the secret plans from the villain of the week, but the secret plans themselves are completely uninteresting. Spending more than one or two minutes explaining the plans is a waste of time, because the audience doesn’t care about the plans.
Same thing with the proximate cause of the alt-history divergence point. Why do the ASB kill Abraham Lincoln? Because the author wanted to explore what would happen if Lincoln died. Nothing more complicated than that. Of course, a stray musket ball fulfills the same story needs. The more your time-travel/alt-history novel concentrates on the ASB the worse it is. All the readers care about is that the briefcase contains the secret plans and the good guys have to get it back.
I just got the book, and have been reading through it.
Did anyone catch a small detail in one of Juniper’s visions, near the beginning of the book? She saw the dying Pope in one of them. There was a doctor, a couple of cardinals, and a military figure at his bedside. Juniper could understand their speech, even though she didn’t know Italian. Did you note the physical description of the military guy? Dark skinned, middle aged, speaking Italian with an accent she thought “sounded” Texan.
Hmmm, sounds like Luke Hutton must have made it through the change, but it doesn’t sound as if Juniper knew him for who he must be.
Take into consideration that I haven’t got a third of the way through the book yet.
And when did Signe Havel become a witch? Wasn’t she fairly strongly Christian in the first three? I don’t remember anything one way or the other in Sunrise Lands, and I just reread it before this one came out.
How does one pronounce “Signe” anyway? Is it like “Sonya?”
Well, he’s obviously a neopagan messiah-figure and destined to be an emperor. Flaws wouldn’t fit. Not unless they’re extremely noble, tragic flaws, worthy of an Aeschylus or Sophocles character.
I don’t think he’s going to be an emperor. At least he doesn’t think he is, he’s told Mathilda he’s destined to die at the end of the quest, in battle, with his sword in his hand.
No, I do that also. I’m going to try and stop myself this time around (he already has the first two chapters of the next book up] because I can never remember where I leave off.
I somehow missed that. Could you tell me the page so I could reread it?
Like others have said, I find myself skimming over some of the paragraphs because Stirling really love his descriptions.
I liked the book well enough, not as much as I liked the first one though. And I understand why Rudi is so perfect, but it still bothers me. And I wish the Clan McKenzie wasn’t the focus of everything. I’d much rather hear more about Portland and the Bearkillers.
My favorite thing about the series though is seeing who the different places model their society after. The Romans, Normans, English, etc.
I’d love to play a Medieval: Total War type game going up against the various factions.
Sorry if this is too corpsified to bump, but I just finished Scourge of God and I was wondering if anyone could clarify this revelation. I don’t remember that scene at all. Rudi’s dreams seemed completely and definitely not an earth shattering secret spiller like you describe. Did I just completely blank over a whole chapter or something?
As for me, I thought the book was mostly filler, but I was intrigued by one thing…
[spoiler]Gods/demons/Alien Space Bats of some kind are real and interacting with the people of the Changed world. And they appear to each character (Sethaz, Rudy, Juniper and Ignatius differently to match each one’s belief structure.
However, I was pissed this one ended almost exactly like the first one! Mathilda and Odard were captured again! And Rudi has to do some heroics to save them again! Christ![/spoiler]
It was a vision Rudi had while injured, right before talking to whatever God/higher power he talked to. He saw what clearly seemed to me to be a sort of hyper-technological dystopia, and then the God showed up and said “some times you have to give someone a bit of a smack”.
I thought that’s what you were referring to. I think you may have read into that vision a bit too much…
[spoiler]God (The Wanderer) doesn’t show Rudi any hyper-technogical dystopia. But they do discuss what to do with a child who’s a bit of a pyromaniac and purposely torches a house. The god asks Rudi if he would kill the child and Rudi replied no, he’d just give it a smack so it would learn.
I can see how that could be applied to the Change and saving the earth from humanity or some such, but their was no super-technolgy vision.[/spoiler]
Here’s the crucial passage, from chapter 10, which is one of the preview chapters on smstirling.com (and hopefully I won’t get in trouble for pasting here):
I sure interpret that as “technology was going to lead to a horrible future in which the forest was replaced by nanotech rabbit-eaters, so we took technology away from people like you’d take a sharp knife away from a kid”.
I see where you’re coming from, but this is a Dies the Fire book. If history is any guide, a revelation that important would have gone on for several pages, not a quick paragraph.
Are you sure? I’ve read all Stirling’s novels but Scourge of God and several shorts and I don’t remember that in any of them.