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im: sadRep: bi side character
The world, status of mankind, and magic/technology system are pretty original and specific, without much explanation or hinting as to how any of this came into being. It is a lot of information to digest for a short story, with new revelations as to how the world works throughout. Human minds as libraries and the engineer / archivist occupations are really interesting though, as is the main character's conflict between the professions.
What a really solid, thought provoking story! While I didn't fall in love with the writing style, I found the story of A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Proposed Trade-Offs for the Overhaul of the Barricade to be creative, exciting, and emotionally gripping, even at times, humorous. I loved following Ritter on the job, a job that everyone answers to his father on. The strained relationship between father and son was portrayed so well and I loved the complexity and authenticity of it all. I loved th...
This was annoying. I loved the story, but I want MORE! And I'm pretty sure this is it...There's so much World in these 32 pages. I need to know more about Turbulence, and Libraries, and Engineers, and ... Everything!
A Cost-Benefit Analysis is filled with beautiful prose and an emotional father-son bond, but it falls short as a great story as there simply aren't enough words in the piece to let me really fall into the world that Chu is trying to build. There's something interesting going on with feral libraries and mystical turbulence, and engineers who build things with their minds, but I never really grasped what exactly was happening. I know that sci-fi is a genre where strange and novel situations are co...
Weird, confusing, but very interesting and compelling. I think it would be better suited to be a novel.
Review first posted on My Blog.The Turbulence is always out there, trying to breach the walls to destroy minds and bodies and machines alike. There is a sentience to it as it probes first one spot and then another looking for weakness. There are men with incredible minds who can see where the walls need to be fixed and can make it happen through sheer force of will until other men can come along and build their design into reality to keep the Turbulence out. Ritter's father is one of the best En...
Science can’t fix everything, but it can be a good place to start.Ritter was a likeable protagonist. His chosen profession wasn’t something that necessarily came easily to him. He had the magical abilities to fix the barrier that protected his people from the things that wanted to destroy them, but he wasn’t naturally good at these tasks like his father was. The conflict between his father’s regimented style and his more relaxed one provided plenty of fodder for plot development. It also made me...
It was almost really cool. But it was super confusing, it was really hard for me to understand what the author was trying to describe with all of the cool ideas. And the way it ended very much made it feel like it was really a chapter of a book and not a complete short story. Three quarters of the way through big, dramatic things happen. Then everything after that is disappointingly mundane, it just peters out with almost no response to the big climax. It's very odd. It just ends like the end of...
Second John Chu story I've read, I think. He doesn't disappoint. In this story, the Turbulence destroys machines and minds. Engineers must constantly maintain a barricade to protect civilization. Love how the human mind's knowledge and memories are visualized as multidimensional libraries, walls of shelves lined with books. It borders on the fantastical.
Weird in the way Yoon Ha Lee's work is - intricate machineries that are somehow both physical and metaphysical, a bit hard to comprehend, but intriguing.
Based on that tongue-twister of a title and the opening paragraphs, I wasn't sure I was going to like this one at all. It seemed a tad too mechanical for me.The ways various processes are explained eventually won me over, though.For instance - minds are described as libraries, with shelves and reference materials. Things that you've seen, studied, or heard about are stored and filed under specific sections in your mental library.And I really wish I had the ability to take shapes and patterns fro...
Interesting short story, but felt like it ended too soon. Wheres the novel??
