*SPOILER THREAD!* Anyone read Crash yet?

Err... a pulse? ;D

Education... drainage systems... the roads...

Ah. *Wanders off to re-read that section* I'd just assumed she was dead, too. I'm glad she's not, though - the sisters' next meeting should be something to look forward to.

On an unrelated point, I'm not entirely sure what happened at the absolute end of the book. The choice Parrish made seems a little ambiguous - was it supposed to be that way, or am I just being dense?

I finished it Saturday (during Thylacon) - which my brain has still not recovered from. It is, in various ways, different to the previous two. I like, in particular, the venture into cyberspace.

Hi marianne,
Thanks for the consideration. I'm supposed to write a review of the book and I can't get started until I've got it fixed in my mind just how the story ended. So it'll be good to chat with a few people and get their opinions, as well as yours.



Well, from the way Parrish mentioned Roo and Wombebe at the last I would have agreed with you. She makes it sound as if she can't face being responsible for the deaths of even more people close to her, so she does what she has to.

The thing that throws me, though, is a single line. 'I coiled the wire.' Perhaps I'm imagining the wire wrong, but that makes it sound as if she's putting it away, coiling it up for storage. Not-quite-Brilliance would live, her friends would die, but she'd figure out how to stop the Eskaalim.

Looking at the big picture, that's the most important thing. It does mean sacrificing her friends for the sake of humanity in general, though, so I'm unsure which way Parrish would turn.

oooh ooh! I can't stand this. Can I speak yet? or would you prefer I stayed out of it?

ooh! I can't! MC stop reading now if you don't want to know.

Maybe I could satisfy myself by saying that you are all right and that ambiguity is the key. Everything you have discussed is an angle I considered. I wanted you to make up your mind what Parrish would do.

And then - in due course you might find out what I thought she would do and what the outcome of that was. Or you might not.


On the coil issue. Coiling could be preparatory to using- a reflex action of handling a familiar weapon. or it could indeed be putting it away. What do you think she did?

MDP

Firstly, someone said post-post apocalyptic. Where is the apocalypse? What Marianne is postulating is a dystopian near future. An apocalyse necessarily implies some awful event that has changed everything - a ragnarok or armageddon - not a possible evolution on established trends (warning - I talk a bit like this normally). What we have here is a possible evolution of post-modernity. Post-modernity (slips into teaching mode) implies the right to create our own identities and to shape them and ourselves in a pastiche from the palette we have available to us. In the Tert this palette includes plastic surgery, cybernetic body modification and drug enchancement. Some of the players attempt to create from this a post-human state - a non-evolutionary change in the nature of the species by modification of the genome and surgical intervention.

Hmm, Marianne asked why I felt the flavour was different. That is hard to say. It might be just that I was reading it late at night during Thylacon, but to me the move out of the claustrophic Tert (even though we had been outside before) and its incestuous politics to the wider world and the launch into cyberspace as riders inside a virtual world gave a slightly different feel to the book.

Don't get me wrong, I liked it. I have been in a role playing game once where we had flesh and blood characters, I was playing a rogue AI and another player was a virus in my system. It had the same sort of feel of mutable reality. To me it rang true. There are 5 levels of reality (zeroeth to fourth). This level is the fifth level, the hologram. There is a constructed reality with references to the myth structures that it is built from, but with the possibility that it may become the basis of another epicycle (a full cycle of reality from the start to the end) as the players have an opportunity to construct other levels of reality within it.

Enough semiotics, Marianne, if you want an article I have written on this (and must get published someday), it is available. Warning, it is dense and mainly of interest to sociologists.