Yo! I just read this book and I'm hungry for Discourse >:)
I personally liked Eight Antidote a lot, and I was impressed Martine managed to do a book like this where there wasn't really a protag whose sections I wanted to skip. To each their own, I guess!
Definitely agree on the ending, though--it felt like it was all going to build up to some massive clever conjunction of events, Vernor Vinge style, and then...whoomf, turns out all you need to do is Eat That Fungus? We didn't even get a climactic chapter of the hivemind trying to integrate Swarm, that somehow got relegated to the Epilogue!
And yeah, strong agree on Swarm being weirdly a cipher for someone who's so important to the plot and so interesting in the story's universe. I had this feeling of "mruh, am I supposed to be inferring more about his personality or something? I don't really Get Him and it feels like Getting Him is supposed to be a big part of reading the text."
That said, I thought a lot of the book was really well-done -- I'm impressed at how real the relationships and the world felt, and how much feeling it evoked in me.
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Date: 2021-08-22 07:21 pm (UTC)I personally liked Eight Antidote a lot, and I was impressed Martine managed to do a book like this where there wasn't really a protag whose sections I wanted to skip. To each their own, I guess!
Definitely agree on the ending, though--it felt like it was all going to build up to some massive clever conjunction of events, Vernor Vinge style, and then...whoomf, turns out all you need to do is Eat That Fungus? We didn't even get a climactic chapter of the hivemind trying to integrate Swarm, that somehow got relegated to the Epilogue!
And yeah, strong agree on Swarm being weirdly a cipher for someone who's so important to the plot and so interesting in the story's universe. I had this feeling of "mruh, am I supposed to be inferring more about his personality or something? I don't really Get Him and it feels like Getting Him is supposed to be a big part of reading the text."
That said, I thought a lot of the book was really well-done -- I'm impressed at how real the relationships and the world felt, and how much feeling it evoked in me.