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Stitcher
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Posted - 2008.06.21 01:35:00 -
[1]
Book order dispatched from Amazon. Estimated delivery date: June 23rd.
:D
Definitely looking forward to that.
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Verin "Stitcher" Tarn-Hakatain. |
Stitcher
Duty.
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Posted - 2008.06.21 02:42:00 -
[2]
UK
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Verin "Stitcher" Tarn-Hakatain. |
Stitcher
Duty.
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Posted - 2008.06.23 13:36:00 -
[3]
my copy arrived this afternoon, and I'm already a third of the way through.
This thing is a masterpiece. I've got a lot of respect for TonyG's talents as an author.
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Verin "Stitcher" Tarn-Hakatain. |
Stitcher
Caldari
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Posted - 2008.07.08 19:14:00 -
[4]
Edited by: Stitcher on 08/07/2008 19:16:13
Edited by: Stitcher on 08/07/2008 19:13:58
 Originally by: KtoJest
hi-
question for the folks that have read the book.
chap. 23 (pp146-151)
Otro is trying to get a handle on Tibus Heth. In the process, he identifies a tattoo on Tibus's wrist as being a mark of the Templis Dragonaurs.
Q: How come no one else has seen it? ie T.H.'s employers; past present and prospective?
Or am i missing something? :)
It took Gariushi top-level access to Ishukone's quantum supercomputers, and a comparative eternity (several seconds) of processing time before the connection was made. My guess? Not many people would even have recognized the tattoo for what it was at all. As a megacorporate CEO however, Gariushi would probably have been briefed on all sorts of classified information that might be well above the access level of an ordinary citizen working at Heth's level of society. There's every possibility that people may have HEARD of the Templis Dragonaurs, but that their emblems and iconography are restricted information within the State to hinder their recruitment efforts.
Besides, there's every possibility he was just good at hiding it.
I agree that it's something of a stretch, however. It would have been better disclosed via a communication from some investigative agent or another that Gariushi had assigned to finding out what Heth was doing in the years he was off the grid.
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Lt. Verin "Stitcher" Tarn-Hakatain. |
Stitcher
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Posted - 2008.07.19 15:48:00 -
[5]
Originally by: Uilliam Nebel
... But outside of an Eve role-player, or any fan of the back story, or those who like drawn out descriptions of zero-G sex...
Drawn-out? Dude, it was like half a paragraph.
You want drawn-out descriptions, you need to read C.S.Goto (AKA C.S. Multilaser) sometime (Black Library Author, wrote some tie-ins with the Dawn of War games and decided to just ignore the Warhammer 40,000 PF wholesale). There's one scene affectionately known as "The R[avishing] of Taldeer" that just goes on and on and ON.
Believe me, I have read a lot of bad books in my time. Empyrean Age ain't one of them. I'll retract one of my first comments about it being a "masterpiece" now that the fangasm has worn off, but I still reckon it's a decent read.
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Lt. Verin "Stitcher" Tarn-Hakatain. |
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Posted - 2008.07.21 12:36:00 -
[6]
All I can say is, I'm very happy for you people that you've only ever apparently encountered the superlative end of sci-fi before, because I just had a run-in with a title that apparently received critical acclaim and yet, in my opinion, is far worse in the quality of its writing during it's best bits than Empyrean Age is at it's worst.
I am referring to "Split Infinity" by Piers Anthony.
Yay, here's a cliched "everybody lives in domed cities" sci fi world where, for some inexplicable reason, the vast majority of the planet's population are required by law to wear no clothing whatsoever. And there's a kind of interdimensional wall running across that whole planet that drops you on an equally cliched magical world of unicorns and werewolves, where everybody addresses each other as "thee" and "thou". The protagonist's girlfriends include a robot, a unicorn (no, really), and his alternate self's widow. His alternate self also happened to be the most powerful wizard in the world, and he's inherited that power. The dialogue is stilted in that "you can write this crap, but nobody would ever speak it" way, and the only character with any depth at all is the sodding werewolf.
And the bloody thing was the first of a series of seven, apparently. I tell you this, if that book had been published today, as opposed to the 1980s, then it would have been torn to bloody shreds. back when it was published, it got excellent reviews.
If there are "critically acclaimed" books out there whose writing style falls massively short of the standard set by Empyrean Age, I'd say it's a bit harsh to call TonyG's writing "fan fiction standard". I reckon you folks have just become jaded because you've only ever read the really, really good stuff.
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Lt. Verin "Stitcher" Tarn-Hakatain. |
Stitcher
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Posted - 2008.07.21 14:57:00 -
[7]
Originally by: Kai Zion
Anyways, my dear Stitcher, please don't lump one person in with the next when the common ground we share is simply that there were points of the novel that disappointed us.
Yeah, I'm just playing devil's advocate. In truth, there were moments that had me raising an eyebrow as well, but I hate to see a thread that's all negative and no positive, so I'm fighting the positive corner.
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Lt. Verin "Stitcher" Tarn-Hakatain. |
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Posted - 2008.07.22 13:34:00 -
[8]
Originally by: Pottsey
Backwards engineering 20,000 year old technology thatÆs far beyond anything you have ever seen and its made of and useÆs stuff you know nothing about. Next to impossible in its self but they did it in a matter of hours if that!! ThatÆs like a Caveman backwards engineering a quad core Intel computer.
They didn't reverse-engineer it though. They just installed it and turned it on.
Any monkey an press the big red button.
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Lt. Verin "Stitcher" Tarn-Hakatain. |
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Posted - 2008.07.22 20:09:00 -
[9]
Originally by: Sepherim
No, Stitcher, the novel sais they do reverse ingeneer it before installing it and using it. So fear Amarr, people, we will soon have hundreds of those cannons!
Only partially. They didn't take it to pieces, analyze it, learn the basic operating principles and put it back together again - what they did was the equivalent of setting it up without reading the manual.
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Lt. Verin "Stitcher" Tarn-Hakatain. |
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Posted - 2008.07.23 12:26:00 -
[10]
Edited by: Stitcher on 23/07/2008 12:37:12
Originally by: Pottsey
Which should take years if not much longer. They are dealing with a technology they know nothing about using principles and fuel they know nothing about. ItÆs hard enough to get Mac hardware to work on a PC both from the year 2000. Yet alone getting hardware to work thatÆs 20,000 years age difference. Everything from the socket shape, programming language, power requirements would be totally different.
Oh? who said anything about programming language? If the trigger mechanism was just a certain voltage applied through a certain receptor, then programming language would be unnecessary - you could just wire it up to a trigger mechanism built and programmed by your own people. If the entire thing was solid-state electronics, then you wouldn't need to write any software for it at all.
Incompatible plug sockets? The EVE world is one of nanotechnology. Creating an appropriate power adapter of the correct size and shape would be the work of seconds with the right CAD/CAM tools.
Anyone with a decent brain can begin to use technology that they don't understand. I myself haven't the faintest idea how my mobile phone works, but I daresay that I could take it apart (I'm not going to, because I like having a valid warranty) and at least identify each module within it, especially because I have a vague idea of what it's supposed to do.
Those Amarr scientists were working from a basic knowledge of what the object had to do. They didn't need to understand how each component of the system worked, or how to operate it - they only needed to understand "this is a power conduit, this is a control unit, this handles a reaction of some description..."
Mass production or imitation of the technology, I agree, would take years of dedicated research, but what I gathered from the book was that the weapon was a modular system. All they needed to do was figure out which order to hook the modules up in, and how much power it required. Maybe it didn't need power at all - maybe all the energy came from its fuel source and literally all they needed to do was figure out where to plug in a fuel cell and how to trigger it.
Now, I'm not saying that a caveman could work my DVD player, but I daresay Sir Isaac Newton could have figured out how to turn on my television if he knew that it could be turned on.
Besides, past a certain threshold, operating principles aren't as much of a problem. We're past the point where any moderately advanced technology looks like magic to us - our imagination is able to grasp the idea of hyper-advanced technology. The same would be true of the Amarr. Their scientists would know full well that they were dealing with an advanced weapons system, especially given that they were apparently given a description of what it did by Lady Sarum first. That would massively expedite their efforts to figure out how to make it work.
I agree, they worked fast, but it didn't strike me as being unrealistically so.
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Lt. Verin "Stitcher" Tarn-Hakatain. |
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Posted - 2008.08.12 14:15:00 -
[11]
Originally by: Pottsey
With all the other typeing errors in the book I would assume that one is also just an error.
Yeah, I did enjoy the three separate instances of somebody being called "Mr. Lord"
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Lt. Verin "Stitcher" Tarn-Hakatain. |
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Posted - 2008.08.31 00:49:00 -
[12]
I'll drink to that. The next step for TonyG is definitely to learn how to right different characters with different speech patterns and idiosyncrasies.
Also, to get an editor who isn't drastically lazy when it comes to typos and inconsistency checks.
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Captain Verin "Stitcher" Tarn-Hakatain. |
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