Dawn War? Plans that are billions of years old? Preservation and destruction as a deal?
I wonder what kind of revelations will wait for us in the deepest, coldest space
I really struggled with that ****ing name so people wouldn't be like 'oh it's Revelation Space' so I swapped to 'Morning War' and then that was in Mass Effect and I think I tried something else but the Xeelee books had used it so I said '**** it' and now it's a TRIBUTE
The overall direction of things isn't super Revelation Space, though, and everything went ****ty after Redemption Ark anyway. You do point out some interesting similarities but I think they're more cases of convergence or consonance.
Feel no shame! It's fictional sci-fi opera with ships flying in nonrelativistic speeds and distances and blasting each other with magical photon beam cannons. A little namedrop here or there is only honest.
But hey! Finally I can pour some bad metacritique into a long and incoherent post which makes no sense whatsoever, thank you!
The overall hyperplot of Revelation Space series isn't really that interesting or good. The books excel in depicting interstellar travel and political plotting in transhuman socities, but when it comes to the bigger plot it all fells apart, because Reynolds really can't limit himself. But that's irrelevant. What's more interesting, though, is that several themes of Revelation Space are quite commonly encountered throughout sci-fi media. And many of those themes are encountered in Blue Planet as well. Actually those themes are encountered in almost every FS installation due to the nature of the original game. No, wait, those themes are encountered in most sci-fi that goes into the universum-wide scale. Aagh. That's not an accusation, they are generally standard pieces of storytelling in sci-fi opera toolbox. They form the greatest scifi cliche of all time - the monomyth of apocalypse. Our universal nightmare - we run to the stars and are swatted like flies for an unknown purpose. "Oh no", we scream, "our wonderful identities! Our ability to make moral choices! Please, Mister or Miss Author of Intergalactic Survival Tale that spans billions of years, give us an impression that our plucky individualism really matters!" And the author relents, and our human nature leads us to conquer the
Shivans Reapers Wolves Tyranids Zerg Elders Cthulhu Slavers Liir Sith Old Gods Angels WHATEVER and maybe someone makes a heroic sacrifice.
Look at this:
- "The timescales in conflicts are so huge as to be inperceivable to humans"
- "The destroyers from beyond the stars interested in preserving life in the long run which means sacrifices in the short run"
- "The deals are ancient and arcane and your monkey brains wouldn't understand, except when they would, because here it is, OK well honestly it's just near-religious explanation of thing A or B or a word salad, but really SUPER IMPORTANT that's why you must die"
you conquer this with power of love, harmony or disco music
- "Despite the age the technological development of the [insert ancient power here] has been surprisingly stagnant compared to humans"
- "Things are not the way you think they are"
- TRANSCEND TO THE ASTRAL PLANE *vangelis*
- The Ascendance of the Prophet
- "There is always a choice" seems to be a natural part of our literary psyche; the ability to make a choice - good or bad - is imperative to most scifi narratives. In nearly every apocalyptic scenario the humanity is offered some kind of choice, which generally has unpleasant short-tems effects and unknown long-term effects.
- The everpresent series of conspiracies: there is a motivator beyond whatever we discover. Pure chaos or existence without any kind of deeper meaning would be severely limitating to apocalyptic sci-fi. Some day we will encounter the prime mover of apocalyptic scifi, and then the world will end.
it's love, it will conquer
I could throw that pack into most of current sci-fi and a large amount of it would stick. And I like it, it's dramatic and gives a great backdrop for shooting people with plasma beams. But it's also easy to make fun of and in larger works it becomes highly predictable, putting the author's skills to a test.
e: haha exactly
it was a bad book.
really bad.