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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25597 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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Gideon had a rather straightforward plot, happening in meat space. I could summarize it okay from memory.

Harrow had a plot where most of the action was neither straightforward nor happening in meat space, apart from Harrow's culinary achievements (which I enjoyed). Most action happened on a mesa-narrative plane or the river of souls. I would be hard-pressed to give up a plot summary. On the plus side, I found the mesa-narrative thing kind of novel and fun -- the book was basically trying to gaslight me about what had happened in Gideon.

Nona felt more down-to-earth, low stakes, with the action taking place planetside on a planet with an actual human civilization on it (I was beginning to wonder if they existed). Personally I found it the least engaging of the three books so far, but YMMV.

I guess spoilers I guessed what was going on with the gaslighting part way through and was not happy about it. It made the majority of the book a waist of time for me.

mesa-narrative

Mesa-narrative? Is that when KSR uses the word 'escarpment' forty times in Red Mars?

It might simply be a typo of meta-narrative, but if it's the intended word, then 'mesa' is sometimes used as the opposite of 'meta' (cf. here). So that would be, I think, the process of creation of stories inside the fiction - for example, a propagandist spinning events for consumption by in-universe peers or underlings, where we as a reader have a more complete view of the actual events being referenced and know what is being left out and what is being exaggerated.

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