Btw, I saw an encounter with this author on r/fantasy. He really hates Bakker and TSA lol.

Did (s)he say why?

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A bit late to this party. My take on the womb-plague/ark function and purpose:

There are hints that originally the Ark had insertants to start up the concept / device (whether it was called no-god then or not we can't know) to reduce the population to 144k. Why or how 144k we don't know.
Ark falls, device breaks and Inchoroi and Ark badly damaged/decimated.
Stuff happens. Including the innoculation.
Shae gets involved and figures (or assumes?) some stuff out.
Helps A&A rebuild the no-god.

To me the no-god is what stops the cycle of souls and effectively allows war / disease to reduce the population. No births and dead is dead. So the no-god needs to remain active for long enough to achieve that, otherwise you face a global war to keep trying to achieve 144k.

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Quote from: mostly.harmless on December 20, 2018, 01:16:16 pm

Quote from: Wilshire on December 20, 2018, 01:06:36 pm

Rejoice is on my shortlist. Hoping for it to be one of my last books this year.

Quote from: mostly.harmless on December 19, 2018, 09:35:11 pm

Quote from: BeardFisher-King on December 19, 2018, 09:26:29 pm

A new Steven Erikson novel is out in hardcover. "Rejoice, A Knife In The Heart", a first-contact story. Looks interesting.

I went to a signing here London, UK when it came out a few weeks back.
Then quickly read it. I liked it a lot. It's not Malazan, it's not willfull child, but its own thing.
It's sci-fi set in today's world, not decades down the line, and that made me care more, I think.
The contemporary criticism is not subtle, but that doesn't make it less relevant.

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Jealous. I purchased one signed from Goldsboro - not the same as getting it signed though. Will probably sell it later.

Its the first signed book I have
One guy brought a whole duffel bag of all his Malazan books hah

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Well congrats!
The first time I saw Bakker, I brought TJE and WLW. The last time I brought like 2 copies of every TSA book. An uncorrected proof and a 1st/1st. You gotta take advantage of these things .

Also, jealous of that..

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Rejoice is on my shortlist. Hoping for it to be one of my last books this year.

Quote from: mostly.harmless on December 19, 2018, 09:35:11 pm

Quote from: BeardFisher-King on December 19, 2018, 09:26:29 pm

A new Steven Erikson novel is out in hardcover. "Rejoice, A Knife In The Heart", a first-contact story. Looks interesting.

I went to a signing here London, UK when it came out a few weeks back.
Then quickly read it. I liked it a lot. It's not Malazan, it's not willfull child, but its own thing.
It's sci-fi set in today's world, not decades down the line, and that made me care more, I think.
The contemporary criticism is not subtle, but that doesn't make it less relevant.

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Jealous. I purchased one signed from Goldsboro - not the same as getting it signed though. Will probably sell it later.

Its the first signed book I have
One guy brought a whole duffel bag of all his Malazan books hah

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Hmm, sounds interesting. Get a file not found error now with the buy button though. Maybe amazon can help me..

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I glanced through the article.

I think I tried something like this when I was younger, actually to help me with taking college entrance exams. The method I used suggested that you place a dot at the start of a line and a dot at the end, and basically scan your eyes from dot to dot. Once you get the feel for it, you can obviously go without the visual reference, and just scan from first word to last word. Same idea as the article, just a slightly different technique. Have not heard of or tried the peripheral vision thing.

It is extremely effective. I saw a dramatic increase in speed without much loss of comprehension, to the point where my score incrseased like 8 points - which, on a test that scores from 0 - 40ish, a jump form 25 to 32 is pretty exceptional.

To practice I sped read my favorite book at the time.

I'll say that the risk is going to fast and missing stuff. I don't do it because, as madness mentioned, I enjoy the process of reading. I imagine I read far slower than the average reader, but this doesn't really bother me much.

I'm also out of practice now so I'd have to practice a bit before I did it, but it does work.

Thanks for sharing Wilshire.
When I have time (hahaha..) I'll try this. As you say, reading is too enjoyable to do it for everything, but if I can speed up my reading for work stuff that's a win because I'll create more time for fun reading

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Quote from: mostly.harmless on April 15, 2018, 05:51:30 pm

Quote from: Madness on April 09, 2018, 11:15:55 pm

That's amazing, again, Wert.

I have quibbles but this time around they aren't worth interrogating because I am very much among the minority regarding interpretations of TUC's end.

Thanks for your work.

Interesting you say that Madness, there seem to be some points of contention settled in this summary.

Is this confirmed as accurate by the man himself?!

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Insofar as he confirms anything, yes. I'd say its at least as authoritative as the What Has Come Before sections in the books themselves.

Interesting..

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