The sooner I finish, the sooner I can get to my reward:
The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss.
pg 74
-Finally, MFLF mentions the 1-year contract to Vince and F! Everyone has to follow it (except the religious fanatics who left with all that precious equipment.)
-F! wants to go talk to NAH! so he can get a special job.
pg 79
-NAH! provides a vehicle, equipment, and 'training' for Vince and F! to be a scout/surveyor team.
-Now its mentioned that discovery of the alien artifacts didn't cause much of a fuss, Vincent never heard about them.
pg 84
-Captain Jack Solo (Walfor) Mr. Black Market FTL ship guy:
"full of bluster and good cheer"
A fucking Dictionary wrote:blus·ter
/ˈblʌstər/ Show Spelled[bluhs-ter] Show IPA
–verb (used without object)
1. to roar and be tumultuous, as wind.
2. to be loud, noisy, or swaggering; utter loud, empty menaces or protests: He blusters about revenge but does nothing.
–verb (used with object)
3. to force or accomplish by blustering: He blustered his way through the crowd.
sounds like a sociopath
"impeccably honest", "black marketer"
-He constantly hits on Tanja, Planetary Administrator #2, whom depending on the mood of the writer, is either completely uninterested or slightly uninterested, for the moment. I.e. this is one of three pairs/couples in the book that doesn't get busy.
-flies an aerocopter. not an ornithopter. yet another 'fakey' name meant to sound what? more science fictiony? Why not Fanjet, or Ultra-Whirlygig or spin-y-blade plane? how about HELICOPTER, since that's what it is?
-Has access to FTL ships, which are cumbersome. Finally Mr. BA Physics realized that FTL is still SAS in interstellar space.
pg 85
-
"As he worked the controls with great confidence, Tanja (PA2) thought he looked particularly handsome."
pg 86
-PA2 has retarded cousins who think its funny to unhook floating buildings and watch them crash into each other. She has to pay for the damages and scolds them, they laugh in her face and don't understand why she doesn't think its funny. Y'know, typical 3 line microplot from KJA.
Pg 87
-No way, Ridgetop is a secret source of Iperion, richer than even the de carre mines! We sure are lucky that no one discovered this until it became useful to NAH! and his nu-rebellion. Its almost like a secret treasure trove that miraculously appears just at the right time so you can complete the project of your dreams!
-Here I skipped a lot of meaningless crap (about 10 pages). Nobles talking about useless
'politics', more setting up for THE MYSTERIOUS ASSASSIN.
-Pg 97 Backstory! (we get lots of these and they aren't always the same, even when told by the same character...) The first rebellion in 4 pages or less! (2 actually)
-NAH! gave up his inheritance, joined the military.
-Lots of secondary sons in military.
-NAH!'s dad dies, then his brother. NAH! fights in court to regain his inheritance, no, you can't have it back.
-NAH! and all the
"second-stringers" get assigned to a survey ship sent to study a
"well-cataloged and predictable nova that was due to flare up"
-Well, of course the coordinates for the survey ship seem weird, and all the officers start questioning why they would send a ship to survey a nova that is already so well known. They radio in and are told not to ask questions and yes those are the coordinates.
-NAH! gets out a calculator and punches some buttons and Hey...someone is trying to kill us! Like you need a calculator to tell you the coordinates they gave you are
"squarely in the death zone" of a well known nova.
pg 100
-This is where Franck goes all rambo and storms into his families old manor and murders everyone.
-NAH! and his officers decide to rebel, so they
"commandeered a group of larger military vessels"
-which is apparently as easy as eating pancakes, since they use those ships and
"seized a fleet of old but still functional warships."
-Man, it couldn't be easier to build a fleet
if they just gave him the ships.
Here's the interesting part: the rebellion takes 5 years. That's 4 years, 11 months, 30 days longer than it should have taken, because space travel revolves on a keystone: the stringline hub. Take it out and boom, EVERYONE is stuck using old FTL (unless they were already in transit and paying attention)
-What is NAH! going after in the first scene? What does he capture? WHAT DOES HE SURRENDER?
-
Example: Imagine Paul, standing before the Guild, threatening to unleash the water of death. Then Shaddam pulls a knife and threatens to kill some innocent civilians, and Paul surrenders.
But, hey this isn't my story, so we'll just have to accept the possibility that a population of sub 75 IQ humanoids somehow created a space-faring society.
-Oh, it also means that the first rebellion was lesser nobles fighting major nobles. I have no idea why the rabble would give a shit about that.
Pg 104
-Col. Muttonchops
"His silvery muttonchop sideburns even puffier than usual" regales his son with his version of what happened on that fateful day.
Pg 105
-
"cufftabs" 'scuse me a moment Eyes.
FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK CALL THEM WHAT THEY FUCKING ARE. DO YOU SERIOUSLY THINK ANYONE, ANYONE THINKS THAT FUCKING CUFFTABS! ARE COOLER THAT CUFFLINKS?
Pg 106
-Col. Muttonchops tells his son about how one of his own crewmen shot him in the head after he threatened NAH! with death to the civilians:
"Right after I delivered my ultimatum, that's when the traitor on my staff rushed from his station, pointed his sidearm at me and actually fired!" But Col. Muttonchops was too fast, he dodges (mostly, still hit in the head) and pulled his own gun out and killed the traitor.
-now I'm a little skeptical of this story for 3 reasons.
1, never mentioned in the beginning, so how was it
'right after I delivered my ultimatum"
2, In this scene seems a little senile...and he and his son don't exactly see eye to eye.
3, you'll have to wait for.
Pg 108
-"Mercifuls" a secular order of nurses.
Pg 111
-discussion of how stringline ships work. basically iperion markers draw out a pre-mapped safe route through space so that ships can move along them at
"superfast" speeds. Doesn't use any kind of dimensional shifting or hyperspace, so ships have to stick to a schedule so they don't run into each other.
-Man, it sure is a good thing that nothing in space moves...
Pg 113-117 Keanu!
dinner catered by Olive Garden!, okay not really, but from the language used, it convinced me that KJA considered Olive Garden to be such high-scale fare, that even Princesses of Star Realms eat like this:
"(Keanu) took a last bite of seafood mousse, then sopped up the white sauce with her bread".
-okay, now admittedly I don't know much about dining with royalty, but sopping up the sauce with the bread is something fat white pasty middle class people like me and KJA do, not people with actual table manners. Its something Jabecca does at Olive Garden, I'll put $50 on that right now.
-chardon' Google replies: Did you mean:
chardonnay wine
-wines are named for regions. if you aren't going to use the real name then make up a different one.
-here's a freebie, they are on Sonjeera, call it Sonjerade.
-Oh no! Lord de Carre is being arrested for being a useless twit who abandoned his duties. I really think they want us to feel sorry for him. Why. HE IS GUILTY. Apparently he's missed six votes in council without naming a proxy or representative and ignored a call to debate his failure to maintain his holdings.
-They slap an adhesive band over his mouth
"we are enforcing your right to remain silent"
-
"Through the gag on his mouth, Louis couldn't even shout a farewell to her." Good, put one on her too.
-
"She knew Louis had shirked some of his tedious duties in order to spend more time with her, but she hadn't believed any of the meetings were particularly important."
pg 118-119
-Hey, lets all try to explain agriculture on Hellhole so that Amp will STFU about the vineyard!
-
"everything had to be laid down from scratch, Base soil level fertilizer matrix, primary nutrients."
-
"In the open fields, we're getting some crops to survive the native blights...so far only a handful of hardy cereal grains do well. Most crops need to be grown inside the domes."
-actually, it was at this point that I figured it out. You see, Hellhole is really nothing more than KJA going through his clip file of lost stories, things he couldn't fit in other books. Well, we all know his Dune stuff, and his Star Wars stuff.
His X-files hack work will show up later in the book, so where do these super-plants come from?
Last days of Krypton. That's right, these hardy cereal grains and vineyards must be surviving lightning storms that burn the ground and alien ultra-parasites
because they are literally super-plants. I mean its either that, or the author has to admit that he totally forgot about just how harsh the ultra-bad weather was in his own creation.
-Oh, and those parasites are so persistent they can still get through the filtering systems in the hydroponic domes and have to be carefully, almost surgically removed, plant by plant, or they will kill them in a matter of days.
Pg 123
-static storms create St. Elmo's Fire. Okay, see, this is the time to create a new name for something that historically in your universe
would have a new name by now. Tiny gripe, I know.
Pg 125
-Goler (Mark Bellison, from
The Invention of Lying), a Deep Zone administrator that everyone thinks is a bad guy, even the bad guys and even his own assistant (who is a secret good guy). But he's a good guy, who is smart enough to use his bad guy status to his advantage. I use the name of the guy from
The Invention of Lying because:
"(Mark) had actually convinced the Constellation that goldenwood leaves are valuable and could be processed into exotic materials and coatings (though he had never been entirely convinced about the idea himself) No one on Ridgetop saw much use in the leaves..."
-He pulls off another astounding con later,
which shifts the balance of power in the entire universe. Not because he's a good conman, but because he lives in a space-faring society where no one has an IQ over 75.
pg 126
-mentioned that FTL trips to the deep zone (not stringline routes) take months to years.
pg 131
-PA2
"Hiking was one of her favorite forms of exercise...The exertion was not hard for her, since she kept herself active and fit. Her cousins thought she was funny, laughing that she would try to avoid feminine plumpness."
-
"earadio" STOP IT.
-
"she...heard a distant sonic boom, (Captain Jack Solo) showing off in one of his shuttles,"
-he's supposed to be meeting her covertly to take a shipment of iperion to Hellhole
-
"slingvator" I SAID STOP IT!
