Ah, yes, I did encounter the instance of incest earlier, and actually stopped reading for a while due to that. There are a number of the military and war-related things in this story that set me off, too, but I won't always stop reading things that contain triggering or otherwise upsetting content to me, and I do have a strong interest in finishing this story. While I certainly have stopped reading things that I've found triggering or upsetting in the past, and expect to continue to do so in the future, it's also actually pretty common for even my favorite stories to contain content that's deeply upsetting to me due to the sheer number of different things that have that kind of effect for me.
It certainly is a very information dense story. There's a lot going on, and there's a lot of new ideas to deal with all at once. There's a great deal that I feel is being expressed via the worldbuilding alone, but the plot and characterization has a lot going on too.
Interesting that we have different impressions on the number of people involved in composites. I don't think I ever saw a concrete number listed for that, so I was just going entirely off of my feeling on how large it might be based on their behavior. Though really, I have no idea what people would act like at any scale if they were all just kind of squashed into one person.
And that's an intriguing observation about the threshhold winnower. One of the things that occurred to me as I was thinking about what you've said here about that was that the Machineries of Empire universe seems so different that it may very well operate on different laws of physics than ours. So perhaps the its premise is based on manipulating the laws of physics themselves via mathematics. And this reminded me of the otherwise rather different Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy where this also (actually) eventually occurs (though the context and execution of that certainly differs considerably).
There's a lot of layers to this story. I'm sure it will give me a lot to think about for a long time to come.
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Date: 2020-02-01 01:50 am (UTC)It certainly is a very information dense story. There's a lot going on, and there's a lot of new ideas to deal with all at once. There's a great deal that I feel is being expressed via the worldbuilding alone, but the plot and characterization has a lot going on too.
Interesting that we have different impressions on the number of people involved in composites. I don't think I ever saw a concrete number listed for that, so I was just going entirely off of my feeling on how large it might be based on their behavior. Though really, I have no idea what people would act like at any scale if they were all just kind of squashed into one person.
And that's an intriguing observation about the threshhold winnower. One of the things that occurred to me as I was thinking about what you've said here about that was that the Machineries of Empire universe seems so different that it may very well operate on different laws of physics than ours. So perhaps the its premise is based on manipulating the laws of physics themselves via mathematics. And this reminded me of the otherwise rather different Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy where this also (actually) eventually occurs (though the context and execution of that certainly differs considerably).
There's a lot of layers to this story. I'm sure it will give me a lot to think about for a long time to come.