Nemesis Games by James SA Corey [SPOILERS]

[unJon]

Uh yeah I think both Starship Troopers and Gundam predate Star Wars

Its discussed in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

[Darth Richard II]

You know that would be s neat thing to try and find the origin of. Have to look into it when Im back at home.

[Lord of Oop North]

finished it yesterday, was fine, not my favorite in the series

Where is the whole intentional rock drop on Earth trope initially from? I guarantee Gundam wasn't the first.

The original drops in Gundam (Operation British) were O'Neill space colonies, not asteroids. Later on there was an attempted asteroid drop, which failed.

It's a pretty old trope. I can't recall if it is actually an asteroid drop in the Starship Troopers book, but it is definitely an asteroid in the movie.

[Happy Ent]

So, here’s what I don’t get about space ship mechanics.

Assume ship A is pursued by a bunch B of other ships. Ship A accelerates for the safety of a cluster C of friendly ships. In fact, C is accelerating towards A. This goes on for a few days. What will happen when A reaches C is that it will zoom right past them, and a few minutes later group B will zoom right past them as well. There can be no dogfighting. The only threat that C poses to B is that they shoot missiles at them that hit them frontally. Or does C shoot missiles at B that basically stop (relative to the Sun), turn around, match velocity with B to hit them from behind. I’m too lazy to actually do the math, but if the ships have burned for days (at 3 G, perhaps?), and the missiles can handle 20 G (?) that would … Hm, I haven’t thought this through at all. Anybody who has, please summarise your description.

Even more mysteriously, assume you are in ship B and want to send another ship D, without an Epstein drive, in a certain direction. B has been burning for days, say, in the direction of the Sun. But you want D to go towards, I don’t know, the Jovian system. My understanding is that B would need to brake for days, come to a “stop” (relative to the Sun), accelerate towards the Jovian system, then release D. After, B can “turn around” again and continue its sunward journey.

[Darth Richard II]

Yeah well, realistic space battles are boring.

[Happy Ent]

Ah. Retraction. The second scenario I described above does not happen; the ship in question travels at 2G.

[RedEyedGhost]

Finished it on Thursday. I loved it. I think it might be my favorite, but I'm letting it settle a bit before I lock it in there.

Three quarters of the way through, and I am pretty sure that at least one of the Roci's crew isn't going to make it. Though at this stage it's difficult to say whether Amos, Naomi, or Alex is in the most precarious position. They're all pretty much in dire straits.

If I had to bet on it, I'd go for Naomi. She was the one doing all the foreshadowing at the beginning of the story, and I reckon there has to be some kind of karmic payback for that ship she blew up.

I was actually most worried for the Roci itself in this one. When they're firing up the refractor and Holden was off ship... oooh shit, I was worried!

Also am I alone in really hoping for a Bobbie/ Alex romance?

You are not alone.

Her excellence is likely to be diminished somewhat by her inability to swear on American network TV.

I really hope they don't go down the BSG profanity road.

On SyFy they can say everything but fuck and cunt, so I'm sure they could get pretty creative in her swearing. Will they? Or will they try and keep it more friendly to try and get a younger audience? We will see.

Didn't Alex tell that to Basia back in Cibola Burn? I don't remember the exact page or chapter, but it was something about not being able to adjust to civilian/living on a planet after long career serving on spaceships.

Correct. He just couldn't handle being away from the burn.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

Correct. He just couldn't handle being away from the burn.

There had to be more to it though? Otherwise he'd be qualified for way better paying and more prestigious jobs than pilot of an ice hauler.

[RedEyedGhost]

There had to be more to it though? Otherwise he'd be qualified for way better paying and more prestigious jobs than pilot of an ice hauler.

I don't remember the details exactly, but I think he had been working a nice cushy well paying job as an orbital shuttle pilot and he got fed up to the point that he took the job that would get him gone the quickest, and that was the Canterbury.

[Happy Ent]

Finished a few days ago. I’m really happy with this one. Great (and surprising) decision to have the story be about low-tech conflict between human factions in the solar system instead of alien tech, new worlds, etc.

I assume a lot of the overarching story was known to the authors from the beginning, it certainly all fits very well together. I realise that we didn’t have Naomi POVs before, otherwise I would have expected her backstory to come up at least in Abaddon’s Gate. So I think it all hangs together very well.

These are good books with a tragic view of human nature that rings true to me. (Tragic in the Pinkerian sense, what Sowell calls “constrained”.) The only thing I was missing was at least a paragraph that drove home the horror of Earth after the rocks dropped. We had Amos on the ground, news feeds, cameras, so there would be plenty of opportunity to show us, however briefly, the terrible panic of a population on a extinction level disaster. The books are otherwise very empathetic, and we are privy to the fears and panics of individuals in many places. But I feel that they shy away from this particular issue. Amos could meet some hungry children, the news could show an interview with a sobbing father of 3 at the brink of existential catastrophe, a municipal worker making terrible choices with food distribution, gangs of people fighting over food, etc. The scale is gut-wrenching, and I (as a reader) want my gut wrenched. Maybe just for a paragraph or so. Instead, it feels as if the narrative blocks this out. We have some relatively clinical news reporting and Amos’s encounters aren’t terrible at all. We’re told that billions are dying, but I don’t feel anything.

I had exactly the same lack of emotional connection in Abraham’s The Price of Spring, where there is a similar situation and very little gut wrenching. I wonder if this is deliberate, because arguably, our brains simply block out terror on a massive scale – one dead child is a catastrophe, a billion is a statistic. Or if it’s too difficult to write and read.

(Ilus had a similar situation but on a much smaller scale, with highly trained professionals, lots of tech, and we were privy to some weeping and moaning. So that would be consistent with my hypothesis.)

——

Unrelated question: Does anybody want to speculate about what Duarte’s faction is up to? I understand Marco’s motivation and plan, and I understand that the Free Navy is just a pawn for Duarte’s faction. But what is their overarching goal? Maybe somebody who is sufficiently familiar with the tropes of the genre would like to guess?

[Relic]

Hmmm, so i read the shit out of this book, like i have the previous ones. Aaaaaaand...

I don't know. I liked it but i didn't love it. I was damned close, however.

My biggest issues were with Amos. I just don't find him believable, or like him very much, I could have done without his entire story. Yes, they used his tough guy POV to show us a bit of Earth, but the bit they showed lacked proper emotional resonance. Hearing talk about the billions dying from characters not on earth created this image of complete devastation and horrific loss which Amos' chapters failed to deliver on.

On the same note, Holden's reaction to the entire Apocalypse on Earth was ...well...muted? I mean billions of people are dying, his home world is nearly destroyed and it barely shows. I think they failed to drive the loss of it all home. Which left me feeling a bit empty.

Last gripe, the belter accent. It feels like someone who knows 50 words in Spanish tried to create a hybrid language in a span of thirty minutes. I wish they would just stop. Sa sa?

Otherwise, the books are great at putting you into the story and and almost forcing you to keep reading. Anytime im reading something that makes me want to skip ahead because "I NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS RIGHT NOW!!!" the story teller gets massive credit. As far as entertaining Sci/Fi goes this gets a 8/10 from me. Very interested in getting my hands on the next book.

Just less Amos/belter talk please.

[HairBearHero]

Last gripe, the belter accent. It feels like someone who knows 50 words in Spanish tried to create a hybrid language in a span of thirty minutes. I wish they would just stop. Sa sa?

The Belter dialect hits far more languages than just Spanish - I've spotted German, Italian and French. There may be others as well, but those are the only ones I have even the shakiest grasp of!

As a concept, I like it. It makes sense that a society that smashes people of different origins/languages together would eventually end up with some sort of pidgin dialect - one example I've witnessed at work a lot is the mashup of Indian (uncertain as to precisely which language) and English, which sounds utterly bizarre and is stylistically similar to Belter.

[Happy Ent]

I’m annoyed by the details of Belter as well (because languages don’t work like that), but accept it as a useful proxy for the language actually spoken by Belters.

[Happy Ent]

But I’d much rather talk about the lack of emotional impact re Armageddon that both Relic and I seem to feel.

[Spockydog]

The Belter dialect hits far more languages than just Spanish - I've spotted German, Italian and French. There may be others as well, but those are the only ones I have even the shakiest grasp of!

As a concept, I like it. It makes sense that a society that smashes people of different origins/languages together would eventually end up with some sort of pidgin dialect - one example I've witnessed at work a lot is the mashup of Indian (uncertain as to precisely which language) and English, which sounds utterly bizarre and is stylistically similar to Belter.

I hate the belter slang. Yanks me out of the story every time, trying to decipher that shit. It's even more annoying when it's inflicted upon you while reading from the POV of a character who speaks it fluently. When that's the case, they should just put the translation on the page.

I really hope they leave it out of the TV show. In one of those new SyFy shows (Killjoys or Dark Matter) they've got the made up space language. It just sounds so fracking lame.

[Howdyphillip]

But I’d much rather talk about the lack of emotional impact re Armageddon that both Relic and I seem to feel.

I am going to play devil's advocate here and say that I particularly enjoyed not dwelling on the post apocalypse Earth. For me personally, that story has been explored so many times, and so well by others, that it would have seemed trendy and redundant to focus on. I also think that it would have taken away from the primary story which was the reunification of the Roci crew to be able to deal with the multiple threats humanity faces at this point.

You mentioned that it was clinical in explanation, and that left you with a lack of connection for what was going on. Although I understand that reaction from you, and can see how a person would be able to come to that conclusion, I personally let my imagination run wild and actually felt the horror. I read this portion of the book right before I fell asleep, and I actually had dreams about what was going on.

[Xray the Enforcer]

I also am happy that the book didn't dwell on post-apocalypse Earth. That has been done to death.

I personally let my imagination run wild and actually felt the horror. I read this portion of the book right before I fell asleep, and I actually had dreams about what was going on.

Exactly. Because what freaks Daniel and Ty out -- what they would have focused on -- may not be what freaks me out. Instead, I was allowed to dwell in my own little pit of horror, and thus I found it much more emotionally affecting.

[Happy Ent]

As a contrast, I really enjoyed Prax’s POVs in Caliban. He really worried about many things, and I got a visceral fear about the fragility of the infrastructure on Ganymede. That we brilliant.

[Larry of the Lawn]

Hmmm, so i read the shit out of this book, like i have the previous ones. Aaaaaaand...

I don't know. I liked it but i didn't love it. I was damned close, however.

My biggest issues were with Amos. I just don't find him believable, or like him very much, I could have done without his entire story. Yes, they used his tough guy POV to show us a bit of Earth, but the bit they showed lacked proper emotional resonance. Hearing talk about the billions dying from characters not on earth created this image of complete devastation and horrific loss which Amos' chapters failed to deliver on.

On the same note, Holden's reaction to the entire Apocalypse on Earth was ...well...muted? I mean billions of people are dying, his home world is nearly destroyed and it barely shows. I think they failed to drive the loss of it all home. Which left me feeling a bit empty.

Last gripe, the belter accent. It feels like someone who knows 50 words in Spanish tried to create a hybrid language in a span of thirty minutes. I wish they would just stop. Sa sa?

Otherwise, the books are great at putting you into the story and and almost forcing you to keep reading. Anytime im reading something that makes me want to skip ahead because "I NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS RIGHT NOW!!!" the story teller gets massive credit. As far as entertaining Sci/Fi goes this gets a 8/10 from me. Very interested in getting my hands on the next book.

Just less Amos/belter talk please.

Relic have you read The Churn? It might change your perception of the Amos POVs. Maybe not.

Agree with the Belter slang, it seems kind of clumsy and doesn't seem that organic.

[Jon AS]

Glad to know I'm not the only one bothered by the Belter slang. I don't have a background in linguistics, only the experience of learning to speak several languages, but while I tought the idea of the Belt developing its own language was a good one, the actual dialogue in the books always seemed unconvincing to me (also needlessly difficult to parse).

I did like that the story didn't dwell on the destruction on Earth. It actually reinforced the helplessness of most of the main cast, as there was absolutely nothing they could do to stop it. I still felt horrified by it, and actually got extremely angry at the self-righteous arseholes in the Free Navy over it. The renegade Martians may be the greater danger in the long run, but so far their villainy is obviously much more detached, just not comparable to the senseless slaughter perpetrated by Marco and his minions.