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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2808 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 29, 2024

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I did finish Surface Detail, which I mentioned a bit ago.

The book picked up a bit in the middle for me. I still considered it enjoyable. Maybe a 3/5?

One thing that really hit me after the completion is one thing that attracts me to this series overall though and I think will get me through Hydrogen Sonata, is that there's a comfort in knowing that The Culture will always win. Always. Yes a main character (or two, or three...) will die at the end, but the Minds and the Ships will triumph in the end. A story has a catch-22 where the consequences have to seem real and significant, but if the book ends with the bad guy getting off scott free then I'm left unfulfilled, or at least a little twinge in my adolescent morality tummy.

Even with that attitude, I found the end of the novel cloying and the characters more obviously good and evil than before. It was published in 10, so of course, it was tainted by the CW. The main antagonist is a super rich asshole who, despite having access to unlimited top tier sex with polymorphic hookers also happens to be a rapist. A ship also tortures and rapes a man continuously, but then is given a clean bill of moral health by wiping his memory. Another primary antagonist is literally a conservative elephant who wants to maintain virtual hell.

Then, to top it all off, the book ends in a way I would supposedly enjoy, but is too much even for me. The Culture decides, after the antagonist decides to end the eternal suffering of trillions in Hell, that they still should go ahead and let the woman he had enslaved kill him. A commenter mentioned previously how bad each of the epilogues are in these books, but wow this one was even more of a doozy than usual.

In any case, I probably have another 6 hours of reading to at least knock out the complete series. I think that's worth the investment before I pivot back to the Goodreads list full of great suggestions from here and a stint of "good for me" nonfiction.

I pivot back to the Goodreads list full of great suggestions from here

Do you have a link to the list? Somehow I've never come across it.

Sorry - this is my personal list of what I've curated from random threads about books over the years. A suggested reading list would be interesting, but I can't help but think it would be sprawling.

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