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Bezig met laden... The Swan Riders (Prisoners of Peace) (origineel 2016; editie 2017)door Erin Bow (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkThe Swan Riders door Erin Bow (2016)
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Ok, so this story went in a whole weird direction that I wasn't expecting. Not really bad. It was really slow-moving though and I had a hard time staying into it. The last quarter of the book was the best part and the only part I was able to sit through and not force myself to keep going. The series as a whole was an interesting and disturbing concept. I think that this and many other stories are trying to tell us something about AI and the risks. True or not, I'm not sure I wanna take that chance lol. This sequel to The Scorpion Rules is stressful and sharp (I expected as much, which is probably why I waited over a year before reading it). In the beginning, the situation is deteriorating and seems impossibly bleak. Yet the story works its way towards solutions which are unexpected, believable and hopeful. This is a thoughtful exploration of artificial intelligence and of being human. I was glad I read it, but, like the first book, I don’t really feel compelled to spend a lot of words reviewing it. “Shuttles can be shot down.” “Don’t quote me at me,” Tallis snapped. “So what if they do shoot? I have stage three scarring, I’ve lost three quarters of my mind, people I love keep trying to kill me, and I’m going to catch a cold. I fail to see how much worse this could get.” “Greta could be killed,” said Francis Xavier. He didn’t sound as if he cared particularly. Talis sighed a long, careful sigh. “Right. When you ask if things could possibly get worse, the answer is always yes. Greta, make a note.” Excellent follow-up to the first book. This book examines the complex relationship between human and AI, and what they have in common. Very clever plots; vivid descriptions; my favorite redneck again; and a permeating sense of the beauty, worth, and value of humanity. A lot of AI stories cannot provide any explanation for why humanity is valuable if AI is an option. This book pulls it off. This is now officially The Only Other YA Book I Enjoyed As An Adult. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Onderdeel van de reeks(en)Erelijsten
"Greta was her country's crown princess, and also its hostage, destined to be the first casualty in an inevitable war. But when the war came, it broke all the rules, and Greta forged a different past. She is no longer princess. No longer hostage. No longer human. Greta Stuart has become an AI."--Cover, p. [2] Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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At the end of the previous book, to save her own life and that of her fellow condemned Prisoner of Peace Elian, the main character Greta willingly became an artificial intelligence. While the first bit of the book dealt with how she adapted to her new expansive intelligence and inhuman experiences, Greta quickly became a background character in her own story. She went from a quiet but compassionate and firm natural leader to a passive person who was largely reduced to saying character names in an admonishing tone. Taking away an aspect of a character needs to be countered with the elevation of another aspect, if it's not, you just end up with a shadow character. That's what we got in this book: a shadow character. Perhaps it was intentional, perhaps not, but it didn't engage me.
For me, the plot of The Swan Riders was weak for one reason: Talis. I found it very, very hard to care about an AI that had spent the last few centuries committing genocide, mass murder, and ritual child murder as ways to force peace onto a resistant world. I didn't care that he was in pain or his 'journey'. It's like how the Star Wars prequels tried to make Darth Vader a sympathetic character: sorry, but petulant fascism is not interesting to me.
The Swan Riders are young. Talis created an army of children to serve as beasts of burden when he wished to take a human form, burning them up quickly and painfully. In hundreds of years, he'd never thought to ask how it felt for them to be ridden. It's hard to care about Talis or Michael or whomever, when his entire ideal of world peace revolves around children dying.
Ultimately, the entire book felt far too slow to me, taking ages to get to self-evident points. It took until the end chapter to really get to the point: that peace through terror is not peace. That soldiers will willingly die for you if you give them respect. That blowing up entire cities over and over again, century after century, accomplishes nothing. Surprise.
A disappointing sequel all in all. ( )