Return of the Book Thread

[MahrinSkel]

Obviously I am not an un-biased commenter on Player of Games.  At the simplest level, Azad can be seen as equivalent to the examinations that have characterized Mandarin government of China for generations (and still do).  But more than that, Azad the game is equivalent to the governance of Azad the empire because many generations of using it as the determinant of who gets to rule has made it that way, the structures of governance have been molded by and for the use of those that excel at the game. 

That Gurgeh could beat the Emperor at Azad meant that the Culture was superior in exactly the way they felt was most important.  The details of what followed weren't important, culturally the Empire of Azad was already defeated, on their own terms.

--Dave

[lamaros]

At its simplest level Azad is a plot device that has no consistency or coherence. Obviously what you say is what the book was trying for, but when the game itself is so ill explored and defined as to be meaningless I found those points very forced and un-enjoyable.

That's the biggest issue for me; there was no internal energy, everything felt like it was being dumped in by the author. The game became whatever it needed to be at every point, rather than something that actually existed and translated the plot through itself. Azad never cohered as an actual game yet so much of the book was devoted to, and relied upon, it actually being so. Compare it to The Master of Go and it's juvenile.


I couldn't really enjoy it on almost any levels, which was disappointing.

All IMO, of course.

[MahrinSkel]

I'm tempted to try and design Azad...except that it would probably take decades, and when I was done there'd probably be nobody crazy enough to learn the rules and play with me.

--Dave

[Khaldun]

Almost none of the Culture novels have what I would call genuine suspense about them in terms of whether the Culture is going to get its own way. But since we know that the Culture is not altogether that concerned about what might happen to some of the individuals that it maneuvers into position, if you identify with a protagonist in a Culture novel, there's some suspense about what might happen to them. I think if you don't like the idea that the Culture is going to 'win' and be rather unconcerned about outcomes anyway you kind of don't like the books, any of them. Banks is doing his best to ask what might or could be interesting about a post-scarcity, post-human utopian society, but since he takes that premise seriously, the Culture almost can't have a genuine rival or be in genuine peril.

[lamaros]

Almost none of the Culture novels have what I would call genuine suspense about them in terms of whether the Culture is going to get its own way. But since we know that the Culture is not altogether that concerned about what might happen to some of the individuals that it maneuvers into position, if you identify with a protagonist in a Culture novel, there's some suspense about what might happen to them. I think if you don't like the idea that the Culture is going to 'win' and be rather unconcerned about outcomes anyway you kind of don't like the books, any of them. Banks is doing his best to ask what might or could be interesting about a post-scarcity, post-human utopian society, but since he takes that premise seriously, the Culture almost can't have a genuine rival or be in genuine peril.

I'm not really convinced that The Player of Games asks any interesting questions, though. Nothing turns back on the culture itself, and the game and society it does examine are not novel or deeply explored. It's not a Culture thing - I really like Use of Weapons - it's just this book being not very good. Hell, even if the other stuff did work the narrative framing is still very simplistic and the first third of the book terribly paced. It reads like a novella that has been stretched and then hedged its bets.

If someone said 'lets combine The Master of Go and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold into a Culture novel' I'd say 'Fuck that would be interesting'. But The Player of Games doesn't get even close to realising that.

[Morat20]

I liked it. First up, it was the first Culture novel I read -- so I didn't really know anything about it. While the concepts were unique, the bold-faced blackmail of a citizen and the whole Mahrin-Skel thing weren't stuff I really saw coming.

To me, much of the book was really about the lengths to which the Culture will go to get it's way -- and the absolute naivete of one of it's citizens to not only the 'real' galaxy (ie, not the Culture) but his own civilization's underside. And then, of course, the way it coldly set up the eventual fall of the Azad Empire -- not because it was a threat, but because the Culture disliked it's internal setup and morals.

The mechanism by which it did so, playing both Morat and the Azad Emperor, and discrediting the very foundations of Azad, well...I liked.

Use of Weapons was better -- but he wrote Use of Weapons later, and the best parts of it were the inverted story structure (he couldn't get it to work without it). I felt Player of Games was more focused than Consider Phlebas, but it's 'twist' ending wasn't so much a twist as a reveal of the the real motivations at work.

A Fire Upon the Deep is infinitely better if you've ever spent time on Usenet, by the way. :)

[lamaros]

I liked it. First up, it was the first Culture novel I read -- so I didn't really know anything about it. While the concepts were unique, the bold-faced blackmail of a citizen and the whole Mahrin-Skel thing weren't stuff I really saw coming.

To me, much of the book was really about the lengths to which the Culture will go to get it's way -- and the absolute naivete of one of it's citizens to not only the 'real' galaxy (ie, not the Culture) but his own civilization's underside. And then, of course, the way it coldly set up the eventual fall of the Azad Empire -- not because it was a threat, but because the Culture disliked it's internal setup and morals.

The mechanism by which it did so, playing both Morat and the Azad Emperor, and discrediting the very foundations of Azad, well...I liked.

Use of Weapons was better -- but he wrote Use of Weapons later, and the best parts of it were the inverted story structure (he couldn't get it to work without it). I felt Player of Games was more focused than Consider Phlebas, but it's 'twist' ending wasn't so much a twist as a reveal of the the real motivations at work.

A Fire Upon the Deep is infinitely better if you've ever spent time on Usenet, by the way. :)

I can remember a bit about usenet, though I was pretty young then so probably a little will pass me by.

I think the blackmail/duping of a citizen bit was an interesting element (though Le Carre does it infinitely better), but unfortunately much of the book was spent on a) his boredom b) the game - which changed constantly and never sharpened into something you could actually grasp and c) how cliche dystopia bad the empire was. The idea that the Culture is trivial and boring, and ruthless and callous towards its citizens, is interesting but underexplored. The cartoon villain gets in the way of a real back and forth on these topics. It was a real 'tell don't show' book, and it needed to be the opposite.

The idea of the game destroying the empire from within is also ok, but 1) the game wasn't coherent and thus made everything look pretend, b) the narrative of the game tournament was cliche and unbelievable, and c) I see no real difference in what actually happened in the end than if the Culture had just exploded the baddies. The game wasn't really undermined apart from to the Emperor's eyes and a civilization that is built on a system doesn't live or die on one individual, and the censorship meant that didn't go that far anyway. Either the empire was doomed as soon as it knew of the Culture in the first place, in which case the game is just a sideshow, or it could have clung on and kept going until some real internal change took place.

Obviously I just wish all this stuff was better done, as I've blathered about the book enough.

[Quinton]

A Fire Upon the Deep is infinitely better if you've ever spent time on Usenet, by the way. :)

The idea of long-haul store-and-forward interstellar messaging feeling like Usenet made perfect sense to me.

I did not realize that Vinge was a CS Professor until reading A Deepness in the Sky and seeing a throwaway reference to the Unix Epoch.  At that point I flipped over to the about the author blurb on the slip cover and all became clear...

[T]he Queng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.

[Khaldun]

The game in Player of Games can't be a fixed game with simple rules, even one of those classic games where the simple rules produce deep and complex play like poker or chess, or the entire premise falls apart. Rather like in the last Culture novel published before Banks' death, The Hydrogen Sonata, Banks is up against the difficulty of describing what the expressive culture of an advanced post-scarcity galactic-level civilization looks like. It has to be in some sense more complex and more rarified than "we" the readers can appreciate or understand given the premises of the novels. But in Player of Games, the Azad game in specific has to be something that is even hard for Gurgeh, a master of games, to grasp immediately. The basic upshot is that the game is hard to master because the game is life, or at least, the bounded part of life in Azad that governs political advancement and status.

Think about the times you've heard something compared to a game. I sometimes tell my students that analytic writing in college has a game-like quality: that there are rules and boundaries, that "good writing" in the broadest possible sense may not be "good writing" for a course in sociology or history. But I also point out that the rules are often implicit, that they have many exceptions and variants, and that the best way to win the game is to both play by the rules and supercede them. (E.g., that a student often gets the most praise when they have written an essay that both does everything that a professor would ask of them and does something 'original' that was not expected or asked for but that is germane to the course or the subject.)  What's hard to know is where this description is just a good metaphor that helps students to understand something about the nature of the work they're being asked to do and where this description is actually a fairly accurate description of something literal that is actually going on. That's what Banks is working with in Player of Games. He *can't* give you a clear, simple breakdown of the game because the game's complexity is a function of its mapping onto a constrained sociopolitical institution and the way people live within that institution. You either accept that this is an interesting premise from the outset or you might as well not read on. Waiting for a clear, fixed description of the game to come down is basically refusing to accept the premise of the book, not complaining that Banks didn't do something that he could have done given his premise.

[lamaros]

All well and good, but I don't think the game goes beyond plot device. I'm not expecting it to be an actual - print out the rules and play along at home - game, but it has to have some quality that takes it beyond 'its brilliant, trust me'.

As one comment I read said its very hard, but not impossible, to write well about a fictional music performance. But that doesn't mean you have to try. When it's so central to the work you have to go beyond 'its brilliant because I've told you it is'. That rarely happens in this book. More often its just a typical fanciful comeback story (time after time after time) with only vague nods at making the game itself seem a brilliant (if ineffable) thing.

I'm not expecting the game to be real and defined, I'm just expecting some coherency from it, for it to mean something as written as well as an idea.

[ghost]

I like Player of Games.  It had a very dark and dystopian feel to it.  It isn't the best Culture book to start with though.

[Soln]

I liked it a lot as well.  My first Culture book and good enough.  Still I don't remember....  why did MahrinSkel disappear again?

I never heard of Master of Go.  Other than Magister Ludi (Glass Bead Game by Hesse) any other good game books?

[MahrinSkel]

I liked it a lot as well.  My first Culture book and good enough.  Still I don't remember....  why did MahrinSkel disappear again?

I never heard of Master of Go.  Other than Magister Ludi (Glass Bead Game by Hesse) any other good game books?

Mawhrin was a twisty, too-clever SOB, who outplayed Gurgeh simply by knowing what the game really was.  Obviously, I find him completely reprehensible.

--Dave

[lamaros]

I liked it a lot as well.  My first Culture book and good enough.  Still I don't remember....  why did MahrinSkel disappear again?

I never heard of Master of Go.  Other than Magister Ludi (Glass Bead Game by Hesse) any other good game books?

Mawhrin was a twisty, too-clever SOB, who outplayed Gurgeh simply by knowing what the game really was.  Obviously, I find him completely reprehensible.

--Dave

Maybe I expect too much. I found Embassytown annoying for the same 'I see where you're going and you're not doing anything else interesting in the journey to getting there' way.

Probably the same reason I really enjoyed Stories of Your Life - because it takes a clever little story and keeps it little and clever, not making it into a novel.

I never heard of Master of Go.  Other than Magister Ludi (Glass Bead Game by Hesse) any other good game books?

Haven't read most of these, but: http://io9.com/5849161/10-recent-novels-about-the-future-of-videogames

I don't know how Doctorow keeps getting on such lists (I do, but it's stupid) seeing how he can't write good, but yanno...

[Morat20]

Hm.

The Culture isn't imperialistic in the way we'd understand it in terms of Earth politics, but they're very much so in a real sense. They relentlessly and ruthlessly export their culture, their very way of thinking, and use bribery, culture pressure, and other forms of 'soft' power to basically make sure everyone is either Culture -- or looks enough like them for jazz.

Plus, I believe Banks is pretty open that the language the Culture speaks is, effectively, ridiculously refined New-speak. Their language was created to reinforce the cultural beliefs of their founders.

Pretty much all the Culture books are either about how the Culture goes about 'fixing' anyone that isn't sufficiently 'civilized' by their lights (even if the process is ongoing)  and the depths of deceit, treachery, and outright ruthlessness they'll go to.

The Idrian War was an outright deviation from the Culture pattern -- they were forced to fight, instead of assimilate or mold. Excession was basically about a more-advanced 'Culture' basically viewing the Culture in the same light, only rather than change them, they simply moved on.

[lamaros]

Hm.

The Culture isn't imperialistic in the way we'd understand it in terms of Earth politics, but they're very much so in a real sense. They relentlessly and ruthlessly export their culture, their very way of thinking, and use bribery, culture pressure, and other forms of 'soft' power to basically make sure everyone is either Culture -- or looks enough like them for jazz.

Plus, I believe Banks is pretty open that the language the Culture speaks is, effectively, ridiculously refined New-speak. Their language was created to reinforce the cultural beliefs of their founders.

Pretty much all the Culture books are either about how the Culture goes about 'fixing' anyone that isn't sufficiently 'civilized' by their lights (even if the process is ongoing)  and the depths of deceit, treachery, and outright ruthlessness they'll go to.

The Idrian War was an outright deviation from the Culture pattern -- they were forced to fight, instead of assimilate or mold. Excession was basically about a more-advanced 'Culture' basically viewing the Culture in the same light, only rather than change them, they simply moved on.

Yeah, which is why Player of Games just doesn't work for me. It's a little holiday story, stretched out into a novel with a 'they aren't just different, they're torture-snuff-porn evil' comedy villain to make it even more of a sideshow.

[MahrinSkel]

Yeah, which is why Player of Games just doesn't work for me. It's a little holiday story, stretched out into a novel with a 'they aren't just different, they're torture-snuff-porn evil' comedy villain to make it even more of a sideshow.

To say that PoG's narrator was not telling everything they knew is an understatement, all the lies that Gurgeh believed were presented without denouement until Gurgeh is told, much later.  Why should we assume that the only one kept from him was the one the narrator reveals in the final paragraph?

--Dave

[lamaros]

Yeah, which is why Player of Games just doesn't work for me. It's a little holiday story, stretched out into a novel with a 'they aren't just different, they're torture-snuff-porn evil' comedy villain to make it even more of a sideshow.

To say that PoG's narrator was not telling everything they knew is an understatement, all the lies that Gurgeh believed were presented without denouement until Gurgeh is told, much later.  Why should we assume that the only one kept from him was the one the narrator reveals in the final paragraph?

--Dave

It's all well as good to say 'more was going on, it wasn't that obvious', but you have to offer up that 'more', and with some craft, if you want the readers to buy into it. Anyone with a good imagination can turn a poor story into a good one in their mind, but it doesn't mean it's on the page.

[MahrinSkel]

If Banks wanted comic-book villains enjoying snuff porn under cover of a 'judicial' system, why not have Gurgeh find out about it from chatter between other players at the game?

--Dave

[lamaros]

If Banks wanted comic-book villains enjoying snuff porn under cover of a 'judicial' system, why not have Gurgeh find out about it from chatter between other players at the game?

--Dave

The work as a whole has a lot of things going on that aren't very subtle, and aren't finely written. The points it hits are often done so with a gong sounding. I have no reason to believe that bits that seem awkwardly presented aren't in fact awkward, when all other evidence points to it being consistently so. The book has a unnecessary narrative framing, is poorly paced, riddled with cliches and borrowings from other authors, and plot-wise has quite a few holes (really, the method of the empire's undoing through the game is not at all believable).

One of the things that I thought was subtly done was the game on the train. If the rest of the story was written with that level of nuance then it would have been an excellent novella.

[Morat20]

[lamaros]

Edit: Typos. Sorry.

[MahrinSkel]

Frankly, I think that lamaros' view is why Banks started letting us peek behind the curtain and see the debates between the Minds after PoG; Trying to show their machinations as projected shadows against the wall, as a way of illustrating that Minds are masters of 11 dimensional chess and ineffable to mere human-equivalent intelligence, was simply not getting across.

--Dave

[lamaros]

The minds can be whatever they need to be, Gurgeh is not a divided mind. His characterisation problems have nothing to do with any of that.

You can think you're getting something as much as you like - its just not there in the text. Concept and execution are different things.

Maybe Banks just got better as a writer; expressed himself better, developed more considered and subtle plots, and examined his ideas more thoroughly.

A writer can get better or expresses things better over time, and they can overreach, or get bad advice, or have publishers change stuff around with suggestions, or write a book that isn't as good as their others. Wanting a book to say things it doesn't isn't unusual, but it doesn't mean everyone 'doesn't get it'.

[MahrinSkel]

The minds can be whatever they need to be, Gurgeh is not a divided mind. His characterisation problems have nothing to do with any if that.

You can think you're getting something as much as you like - its just not there in the text. Concept and execution are different things.

It's also true that a writer can get better or expresses things better over time, and that they can overreach, or get bad advice, or have publishers change stuff around a lot with suggestions.

Ahh, but see, I 'get' Gurgeh.  He's an intellectual narcissist, brilliant but always aware that it doesn't matter.  Not just because what he's brilliant at is just playing games, but because Minds are so far ahead of him that there's effectively no difference between him and a chimp playing checkers.

All his 'inconsistencies' stem from the interplay between his fundamental insecurity and the overblown bravado he conceals it with.

--Dave

[lamaros]

The minds can be whatever they need to be, Gurgeh is not a divided mind. His characterisation problems have nothing to do with any if that.

You can think you're getting something as much as you like - its just not there in the text. Concept and execution are different things.

It's also true that a writer can get better or expresses things better over time, and that they can overreach, or get bad advice, or have publishers change stuff around a lot with suggestions.

Ahh, but see, I 'get' Gurgeh.  He's an intellectual narcissist, brilliant but always aware that it doesn't matter.  Not just because what he's brilliant at is just playing games, but because Minds are so far ahead of him that there's effectively no difference between him and a chimp playing checkers.

All his 'inconsistencies' stem from the interplay between his fundamental insecurity and the overblown bravado he conceals it with.

--Dave

Except he has no real understanding of the consequences of his relationship to the minds. He has no understanding of the Culture. Did I mention he's never really toured? That he goes OMG when he gets onto a GSV? Lets MAKE IT CLEAR FOR THE READER - Gurgeh is a Culture hick everyone!

Yet he's also capable of pulling out a perfect expression of what the Culture is, in a game, consciously. In order to somehow subvert a Empire that is based on the game but only really understood by the Emperor, who has only been there a little bit but somehow embodies said system for the purpose of the novel saying that beating him in said game, in a censored environment under the eyes of those who already know the Culture is light years ahead of them, is going omg destroy them from with. Because like, the minds are so brilliant they can see the subtle difference between just killing a dude and getting him to die from a bullet reflected off a drone shield through his brain after losing a game and going crazy. Oh and did I mention there's all this FIRE going on? It's symbolic and deep and I pity the fools who just don't GET IT because it's impossible the book could just be ham-fisted.

Edit: Obviously this is probably a point to go 'Ok, you just like it more than me, c'est la vie.' In danger of being offensive and all that which really does any one no good. The book was ok. I wish the book was better, but at least least there have been some conversations in here about it.

[MahrinSkel]

Yeah, now we're picking nits.  I still think, on the question of 'comic book villains', that we have enough foreshadowing about the ability of a drone to fake the video to say that it has to be considered as an explanation.

Beyond that, Banks was trying to show a human being manipulated by transhuman intelligences.  It's impressive that Banks doesn't make Gurgeh carry the Idiot Ball more often.

--Dave

[lamaros]

Yeah, now we're picking nits.  I still think, on the question of 'comic book villains', that we have enough foreshadowing about the ability of a drone to fake the video to say that it has to be considered as an explanation.

Beyond that, Banks was trying to show a human being manipulated by transhuman intelligences.  It's impressive that Banks doesn't make Gurgeh carry the Idiot Ball more often.

--Dave

It's plausible, it just doesn't really matter. Or make sense. Gurgeh never went far enough into 'Azad ain't so bad' in the first place. He didn't want to go back to the club. He knew they were inhumane arseholes. He still wanted to win.

The idea that he a) renewed his desire to win by seeing real or faked tv, and b) became a heaps better player through the power of rage and reconnecting with the culture, is somewhat absurd. It's a game. If someone punches me in the gut before I play Blood Bowl against them I might be really pissed off, but I'm not going to want to win any more than usual - I always want to win - and I'm not going to get magically heaps better at the game.

For me these things are significant, not nit-picks, as they undermine the fundamental plot elements. Minds knew that Gurgeh was going to nearly lose at Azad many times and then make a miracle comeback every time, and then get allowed to continue despite all of this, survive the assassination attempts, defeat the emperor, turn him into a nutjob who tries to kill everyone, etc. etc. Why not just place a pebble in the right place to set off an equally involved chain of co-incidences that set off an local uprising of the male and female classes instead? The contrivance is too much - it takes the dramatic power from the work.

The dramatic power should be amplified by a reveal at the end, after a believable intense ignorance beforehand, not entirely subverted throughout.

Eh, I'm not good at letting things go...

[Morat20]

The idea that he a) renewed his desire to win by seeing real or faked tv, and b) became a heaps better player through the power of rage and reconnecting with the culture, is somewhat absurd. It's a game. If someone punches me in the gut before I play Blood Bowl against them I might be really pissed off, but I'm not going to want to win any more than usual - I always want to win - and I'm not going to get magically heaps better at the game.

That's not even remotely what happened. The TV stuff was basically just a small wake-up call -- peeling back the idealized view of Azad culture he had, because like 95% of it was the game. And Gurgeh was in love with Azad-the-Game. (Which itself isn't surprising. Games and playing games are his passion, his life's interest. And Azad was like a game-on-crack. The ultimate challenge).

The point of the whole TV thing was to push him into seeing Azad as it really was. It wasn't like he went all "GRR! Must destroy system!". Hell, if anything, all it did was give him a slight advantage in understanding his opponents. It didn't even really enrage him, IIRC all it did was prevent him from throwing a game out of pity to his opponent.

The payoff of the TV was later, at the end. The whole epiphany/understanding/better play thing game at the end, when he looked at the Azad board and realized the Emperor was kicking his ass, using a play style he truly didn't understand and couldn't handle.

The game was a metaphor for society -- Azad society and, to Gurgeh, his own. (Hell, they spelled that out, given the whole success-at-Azad is success-at-life thing). He never leveled up in gaming, or even got significantly better in terms of play. (Shit, at the end, he was more obviously doped to the gills with performance enhancers to keep up than his opponents).

Anyways, the basic point is at the end, the Emperor is crushing him because Gurgeh didn't grasp that Azad-as-image-of-society really meant the Emperor was playing like a ruthless empire would, and Gurgeh was playing like a Culture citizen would. It was a conflict of values, of social concepts. He didn't have a chance in hell of winning until he figured that out. And sure, if you look back through the book -- the drone nudged him that way, exposing him to the real Azad empire so he'd recognize it in the game later, and talking to him in Marian and reinforcing his own culture later.

But the end game he was flat-out losing, and even when he realized what the game really was (one the Emperor knew the whole time -- they guy was more insightful than Gurgeh, and certainly less naive) he still didn't exactly curb-stomp his way through it.

[lamaros]

Yeah, except that's a bit silly. Because it's a game. And he's good at games. Or at least, games as we understand them. His personality is described as that in detail at the start of the novel - he don't even like virtual shooters - so the idea that Azad goes beyond that into some sort of lifelike bridge between games and living, rather than being a game that does it metaphorically, isn't really consistent. Or at the least, wouldn't make him the best fit for playing it from the Culture.

I'm not sure you can say that his play in Azad wasn't set up as a series of crises from which he makes miracle comebacks. First it's the greatest comeback ever, then we're talking 'oops forgets it's competitive after the 5v5, comes back to win by 1 point to make second', then it's 'can't work out game right up until the end when he has a 'game as social expression' epiphany and starts stomping. All of this isn't really consistent, and isn't consistent with his character before or after either. All of these things are rather awkward dramatic setups that don't follow from character or setting, and are foreshadowed or supported similarity awkwardly (IMO obviously).

The idea that he can be both a great game player - the best - but vary so wildly in performance, that he can be both a naive tool of the Culture and yet it's master expressionist, that Azad is held together by a system that is subverted through the defeat of an individual (and a series of deaths), etc, makes a novel of irreconcilable conflicts. Not tensions, which it was going for, but straight out conflicts that cannot be resolved.

I think we are both on the same page here about what the book was going for, it's just that I don't feel it got there and you and Mahrin do. I guess we can't really get any further than that.

[Ironwood]

I think you read it wanting to know how to play the game.

Shame.

[Khaldun]

Honestly, when I find myself talking with a bunch of fairly smart people who saw more in a book than I did and they're fairly persuasive about it, I allow for the possibility that I got an impression and tried too hard to sell it to myself.

[lamaros]

Nah, i just wanted a coherent fully thought through work. If I wanted a game I'd buy a game - I got the book because I'd been told it was a good book and I really like Use of Weapons.

If I didn't think y'all were smart I'd have not bothered discussing, but I'm not especially persuaded; there's nothing here I didn't see, I just didn't feel it. It's not uncommon for people to just not agree, things impact people differently (Ancillary Justice, for instance: quite a few flaws there, but I found it really engaging through them all). I'll just have to settle with that.

A Fire Upon the Deep is a slow burn so far. Quite interesting but a measured pace. I'm assuming it continues thus all the way through. Doesn't look like it'll take me a day as tPoG did.

[Morat20]

All of Vinge's books seem slow burn to me. I like them, but they're not exactly grab you by the balls first chapter sorta works.

[lamaros]

All of Vinge's books seem slow burn to me. I like them, but they're not exactly grab you by the balls first chapter sorta works.

Indeed. It got going though, and was pretty great.