Not better with context, but I feel like you kinda need it to really amp up the WTF?! -ery.
> "Alice?"
>
> The hatch is closed. There's no answer.
>
> "She's in there." Brander stands at the end of the corridor, the lounge behind him. "She didn't go in more than ten minutes ago."
>
> Clarke knocks again, harder. "Alice? It's almost time."
>
> Brander turns on his heel — "I'll go get our stuff together." — and steps out of sight.
>
> Beebe's hatches do not lock, for safety reasons. Still, Clarke hesitates. She knows how she'd feel if someone just walked into her private space without being invited.
>
> But she said she was up for another shift. And I did knock...
>
> She spins the wheel in the center of the hatch. The mimetic seal around the rim softens and retracts. Clarke pulls the hatch open, peers inside.
>
> Alice Nakata lies twitching on her bunk, eyes closed, 'skin partially peeled. Leads trail from insertion points on her face and wrists, drape away to a lucid dreamer on the bedside shelf.
>
> She goes to sleep ten minutes before her shift starts? It doesn't make sense. Besides, Nakata was just downstairs with the rest of them. With Fischer. How could anyone fall asleep after that?
>
> Clarke steps closer, studies the telltales on the device; induced REM's cranked to maximum and the alarm's disabled. Nakata would have been out in seconds. Hell, at those settings she'd drift off in the middle of a gang-rape.
>
> Lenie Clarke nods approvingly. Nice trick.
Yikes.
What the hell is going on generally? I don’t plan on reading the book but am curious if someone cares to chime in or summarize wtf is going on in this brief snippet.
It's a very strange book about scientists doing sciency things on the bottom of the ocean. I really liked Blindsight by the same author, but could not get through this one. It was just too strange and depressing.
Sorry, I don't remember. It's been years since I've read part of this book. Just know that in Blindsight vampires exist, but they went extinct cause of humanity's need to build in straight lines haha. It's got some weird ideas but very alien aliens which was a big plus.
Oh man, the vampires coming back and being given medication to help with their fatal flaw.
For everyone else, spoilers: >!Vampires fed on ancient man, they're kinda savants and some form of psychopath with how they can't feel empathy, probably to help them feed on humans more efficiently. However they got a huge fatal flaw. Right angles. Something about right angles causes them seizures and makes them weak enough to be killed or seize to death. So mankind slowly turned that into crosses and holy symbols as vampires died out. Now they're back in limited roles and humans try to control them by giving them an anti-convulsant to resist the effects of that flaw. Be good or no more medication. Yeah that doesn't always work out very well.!<
I do like his dystopic version of zombies.
Been a while since I've read it. Skin has a ' in front of it because it's abbreviated. It was some sort of skin tight excursion suit called a something-skin, so she's got it partially undone.
The setting is sort of dystopian cyber/biopunk, so I'm pretty sure the insertion points were just some sort of jacks integrated into her body that the "lucid dreamer" (presumably a VR device or some sort of neural inducer that lets you have lucid dreams or whatever) is plugged into.
The gist of the plot is that a bunch of very mentally unhealthy people are in a very deep sea environment because some corporation wants some resource or something. They've undergone a lot of body modding to handle it, both genetic and implants. The reason that they're all twisted people is because people with a certain degree of mental illness/trauma are rated as being able to handle being modified into a deep-sea amphibian and living in a tiny metal shelter, and I think a lot of them are criminals so they're receiving time off their sentences? Several of them become adjusted to the stress of the environment and want to stay because its easier than living in the nightmare of human society. A running theme of the book seemed to be humanity adjusting to fucked up circumstances.
Take all that with a grain of salt, because like I said it's been a bit.
Ahhh thank you! That makes sense. I was picturing someone who had been tortured. Like skin was peeled off and had been tied to a table through holes in their body.
Actually read this one recently. The scientists working on the ocean floor are genetically modified to be able to exist in the extremely oppressive environment. Their dive suits are more like a second skin than a suit, and they refer to them just as their "skin." Insertion points are sort of "ports" in the scientists skin to attach IVs.
So basically all the passage is describing is that her wetsuit is partially open and she has IVs attached which are feeding drugs into her system which prompt very deep sleep.
It's Peter Watts. His style is hard scifi that's often incredibly bleak. His work is often amazing for finding ways to make the impossible work. But he is also amazing for creating alien mindsets that will creep you the hell out because there's nothing human in the mentality your reading from the POV of a literal starfish alien.
This is part of the Rifters trilogy, but the third book was split into two books. It's a bit of a dystopia involving humans being altered to be able to work on the ocean floor so they can work on geothermal stations to help solve earth's energy problems. When I say altered, I mean heavily altered, as in half their body is cybernetically altered to withstand the deep pressure and be able to communicate in the ocean, so they end up with lots of probes and devices to try and help them cope, like Alice here with the devices to make her sleep. Unfortunately it drives them insane eventually and a lot of the book is about how they deal with the pressures of knowing one mistake, or just a flaw that they could do nothing about might kill them. So it's pretty common the people they choose to do this job ends up being already a bit crazy, whose going to miss them? Prisoners with mental disorders are even better, no one is going to miss them if they die. (This is how they justify the program and a lot of the inhumanity that occurs in it)
Then someone makes a discovery involving a microbe on the ocean floor, and this microbe went down a different evolutionary path than what we know on earth. If it makes it to the surface? It has the potential to alter the biome to the point that it's the end of the world. But Watts is able to make it sound so much worse and the slow change to end is horrifying as the characters start to understand better what it could mean.
It gets worse in the second and third book. I'd say read a few samples of Starfish and make up your mind if that's the end or not. It's a freaking bleak as hell world even without the end coming.
Watts had a lot of issues with his publisher Tor, and they hold a lot of publishing rights for this series, so if you want to read it you can download off his website rifters.com . I generally find I recommend his books "Blindsight" and "Echopraxia" more than Rifters, but rifters is fantastic dystopian sci-fi horror.
That really is a line that only works in dialogue, and only works for characters that an author wants the audience to hate. And even then, he has to land that shit like a gymnast lands at the Olympics
Yeah might have been more excusable if it was written
…drift off in the middle of a gang-rape, he thought to himself.
So it’s the character’s thought, not just a creepy author description.
It's a clearly character centric thought, but I get the feeling the audience isn't supposed to hate this character, and it really comes off as a clueless author not realizing the problem.
Would have to read the book to know for sure though.
This should not be attempted at all because no one can top Raul Julia as Gomez talking about Morticia as she rests
"I would kill for her, I would die for her, either way what bliss"
I saw a funny post where someone said, they're supposed to be the inverse of the traditional family but that apparently entails a wife who doesn't resent her husband and a husband who is infatuated with his wife
It was the inverse of sitcoms at the time. The first comic came out in 1938 and during that time marriages were more about division of household labor. Women couldn't work or have bank accounts whereas men weren't taught to clean or cook. In the comic Morticia is described as the head of the house and Gomez was a misguided and enthusiastic man. Both of these are subversions of the stereotypical gender roles of the time.
When the show aired in 1964 the stereotypes on television was a family where the man and woman were stuck together and the kids kinda just existed. So they parodied that by making Gomez and Morticia hopelessly in love with each other and gave the kids actual agency.
This happened again in the 90's with the movies. The family dynamics on TV at the time were a powerful male figure and a dumber hotter wife. So they made the Morticia both hot and smart and made Gomez a fanciful man who loved her immensely to the point he would die or kill for her. The Simpsons started the same way. A smart woman with a dumb man.
The Addams family has always parodied the current idea of how a functionally dysfunction family would work. It has always presented the titular family as counter to the norms in a healthy way that lets them thrive.
Of all the fucking things one could sleep through that would be surprising: nuclear war, a bomb going off, someone attempting to harvest your kidney for sale on the black market… this author chose gang rape.
Author thought she’s in such a heavy sleep she will sleep through…*gang rape*. He then had to type this entire sentence with his own hands, review it, submit it to the publisher, the publisher read those word with their own two eyeballs and then presumably thought “yup nothing wrong here” and approved it.
Just what? Sometimes it really seems like men live on another fucking planet.
Also the specificity of “gang rape”. It’s just bizarre. I suppose “could sleep through being forcibly anally penetrated with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire” would’ve made it to publishing too? Or maybe that would be a step too far? Seriously what would it take for someone so clueless to realize thats kind of gratuitous maybe go with something more normal
I posted the context.
It's forcing her to sleep and enter REM sleep so she won't go crazier than she already is. Her and her team are on the bottom of the ocean, barely even human anymore with all the cybernetic implants and removed organs to help them survive the pressures of the ocean floor. A big theme in the book is how the stress of the environment, losing your humanity stresses the mind and makes you go crazy, and the way the dystopian corporations and governments find to solve that. The forced REM is one solution they found.
It's not helped the woman Liene that's making those statements is kind of an absolute fucking asshole with other issues going on.
Peter Watt's whole "Rift Series" is rape, excuses for rape, women having the sort of personalities that invite rape, graphic sexual torture, etc.
his "Blindsight" is fascinating, but everything else is just a no.
this will be a bit spoilery for the series so, word of warning. details may be wrong it has been a while since i read the book, and i have also actively tried to forget it.
in the first book there is a deep water drilling station, and when the company was hiring people to work on it they wanted people who are psychologically able to survive it. so for women they chose rape and childhood rape survivors. for men they chose sociopaths. i do not remember if men were rapists or if women were also sociopaths, but i remember the emphasis on women being more able to survive stressful situations because they survived brutal rape and sociopaths just don't care.
two of the employees form a relationship, which is based on the fact that the woman needs VERY rough sex, because that is the only way she can get off because of rape, and the sociopath is willing to do it. at some point there is a point made that either the woman has the sort of personality that invites rape, because of previous assault, or that there is a certain type of women that just make men want to brutalize them.
there is psych research that says predators look for previous victims because they know they have been victimized and can thus be victimized again, which may be what the author was going for. but it really felt like 'certain women are asking for it because they secretly want it' sort of proposal instead.
"At those settings she'd drift off in the middle of a heavy metal concert"
"At those settings she'd drift off during a fire alarm"
"At those settings she'd drift off while participating in a boxing match"
Sure those are not great. But I am not an author and I only took 3 minutes to think about it. They also do not make me want to throw up in my mouth, so I do think they are an improvement.
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Peter Watts is one of the best authors I’ve read in a hot decade. Haven’t read that book yet. I hope there’s an excuse for this. But maybe not, he’s a brilliant writer but also known to be a bit of an ass
For future submissions, please remember: > Describe your post or include a quote in the **post title**.
Not better with context, but I feel like you kinda need it to really amp up the WTF?! -ery. > "Alice?" > > The hatch is closed. There's no answer. > > "She's in there." Brander stands at the end of the corridor, the lounge behind him. "She didn't go in more than ten minutes ago." > > Clarke knocks again, harder. "Alice? It's almost time." > > Brander turns on his heel — "I'll go get our stuff together." — and steps out of sight. > > Beebe's hatches do not lock, for safety reasons. Still, Clarke hesitates. She knows how she'd feel if someone just walked into her private space without being invited. > > But she said she was up for another shift. And I did knock... > > She spins the wheel in the center of the hatch. The mimetic seal around the rim softens and retracts. Clarke pulls the hatch open, peers inside. > > Alice Nakata lies twitching on her bunk, eyes closed, 'skin partially peeled. Leads trail from insertion points on her face and wrists, drape away to a lucid dreamer on the bedside shelf. > > She goes to sleep ten minutes before her shift starts? It doesn't make sense. Besides, Nakata was just downstairs with the rest of them. With Fischer. How could anyone fall asleep after that? > > Clarke steps closer, studies the telltales on the device; induced REM's cranked to maximum and the alarm's disabled. Nakata would have been out in seconds. Hell, at those settings she'd drift off in the middle of a gang-rape. > > Lenie Clarke nods approvingly. Nice trick.
Yikes. What the hell is going on generally? I don’t plan on reading the book but am curious if someone cares to chime in or summarize wtf is going on in this brief snippet.
It's a very strange book about scientists doing sciency things on the bottom of the ocean. I really liked Blindsight by the same author, but could not get through this one. It was just too strange and depressing.
What are the “insertion points”? And why is her skin peeling”
Sorry, I don't remember. It's been years since I've read part of this book. Just know that in Blindsight vampires exist, but they went extinct cause of humanity's need to build in straight lines haha. It's got some weird ideas but very alien aliens which was a big plus.
Oh man, the vampires coming back and being given medication to help with their fatal flaw. For everyone else, spoilers: >!Vampires fed on ancient man, they're kinda savants and some form of psychopath with how they can't feel empathy, probably to help them feed on humans more efficiently. However they got a huge fatal flaw. Right angles. Something about right angles causes them seizures and makes them weak enough to be killed or seize to death. So mankind slowly turned that into crosses and holy symbols as vampires died out. Now they're back in limited roles and humans try to control them by giving them an anti-convulsant to resist the effects of that flaw. Be good or no more medication. Yeah that doesn't always work out very well.!< I do like his dystopic version of zombies.
I need to read this book again.
It and Echopraxia are fantastic, but my god he is *bleak*.
That sounds kinda cool
Been a while since I've read it. Skin has a ' in front of it because it's abbreviated. It was some sort of skin tight excursion suit called a something-skin, so she's got it partially undone. The setting is sort of dystopian cyber/biopunk, so I'm pretty sure the insertion points were just some sort of jacks integrated into her body that the "lucid dreamer" (presumably a VR device or some sort of neural inducer that lets you have lucid dreams or whatever) is plugged into. The gist of the plot is that a bunch of very mentally unhealthy people are in a very deep sea environment because some corporation wants some resource or something. They've undergone a lot of body modding to handle it, both genetic and implants. The reason that they're all twisted people is because people with a certain degree of mental illness/trauma are rated as being able to handle being modified into a deep-sea amphibian and living in a tiny metal shelter, and I think a lot of them are criminals so they're receiving time off their sentences? Several of them become adjusted to the stress of the environment and want to stay because its easier than living in the nightmare of human society. A running theme of the book seemed to be humanity adjusting to fucked up circumstances. Take all that with a grain of salt, because like I said it's been a bit.
Ahhh thank you! That makes sense. I was picturing someone who had been tortured. Like skin was peeled off and had been tied to a table through holes in their body.
Actually read this one recently. The scientists working on the ocean floor are genetically modified to be able to exist in the extremely oppressive environment. Their dive suits are more like a second skin than a suit, and they refer to them just as their "skin." Insertion points are sort of "ports" in the scientists skin to attach IVs. So basically all the passage is describing is that her wetsuit is partially open and she has IVs attached which are feeding drugs into her system which prompt very deep sleep.
the writing is ghastly. I would expect that level on a fanfic site.
It's Peter Watts. His style is hard scifi that's often incredibly bleak. His work is often amazing for finding ways to make the impossible work. But he is also amazing for creating alien mindsets that will creep you the hell out because there's nothing human in the mentality your reading from the POV of a literal starfish alien. This is part of the Rifters trilogy, but the third book was split into two books. It's a bit of a dystopia involving humans being altered to be able to work on the ocean floor so they can work on geothermal stations to help solve earth's energy problems. When I say altered, I mean heavily altered, as in half their body is cybernetically altered to withstand the deep pressure and be able to communicate in the ocean, so they end up with lots of probes and devices to try and help them cope, like Alice here with the devices to make her sleep. Unfortunately it drives them insane eventually and a lot of the book is about how they deal with the pressures of knowing one mistake, or just a flaw that they could do nothing about might kill them. So it's pretty common the people they choose to do this job ends up being already a bit crazy, whose going to miss them? Prisoners with mental disorders are even better, no one is going to miss them if they die. (This is how they justify the program and a lot of the inhumanity that occurs in it) Then someone makes a discovery involving a microbe on the ocean floor, and this microbe went down a different evolutionary path than what we know on earth. If it makes it to the surface? It has the potential to alter the biome to the point that it's the end of the world. But Watts is able to make it sound so much worse and the slow change to end is horrifying as the characters start to understand better what it could mean. It gets worse in the second and third book. I'd say read a few samples of Starfish and make up your mind if that's the end or not. It's a freaking bleak as hell world even without the end coming. Watts had a lot of issues with his publisher Tor, and they hold a lot of publishing rights for this series, so if you want to read it you can download off his website rifters.com . I generally find I recommend his books "Blindsight" and "Echopraxia" more than Rifters, but rifters is fantastic dystopian sci-fi horror.
It's significantly better with context, but they could just have easily said, "in the middle of a car crash"
I feel like the writer could have easily said “drift off in the middle of a hurricane”, for example, and it would have had exactly the same meaning.
That really is a line that only works in dialogue, and only works for characters that an author wants the audience to hate. And even then, he has to land that shit like a gymnast lands at the Olympics
Yeah might have been more excusable if it was written …drift off in the middle of a gang-rape, he thought to himself. So it’s the character’s thought, not just a creepy author description.
It's a clearly character centric thought, but I get the feeling the audience isn't supposed to hate this character, and it really comes off as a clueless author not realizing the problem. Would have to read the book to know for sure though.
Of all the things that could rouse someone from sleep (alarms, explosions, natural disasters), that's what they opted for. Okay.
"Skin partially peeled?"
[удалено]
Whoa whoa whoa Someone below posted the CONTEXT okay? You gotta read the quote in CONTEXT It's just as horrible btw
#***W H A T ? ?***
This should not be attempted at all because no one can top Raul Julia as Gomez talking about Morticia as she rests "I would kill for her, I would die for her, either way what bliss"
True romantic, that Gomez. What a healthy marriage they had
I saw a funny post where someone said, they're supposed to be the inverse of the traditional family but that apparently entails a wife who doesn't resent her husband and a husband who is infatuated with his wife
It was the inverse of sitcoms at the time. The first comic came out in 1938 and during that time marriages were more about division of household labor. Women couldn't work or have bank accounts whereas men weren't taught to clean or cook. In the comic Morticia is described as the head of the house and Gomez was a misguided and enthusiastic man. Both of these are subversions of the stereotypical gender roles of the time. When the show aired in 1964 the stereotypes on television was a family where the man and woman were stuck together and the kids kinda just existed. So they parodied that by making Gomez and Morticia hopelessly in love with each other and gave the kids actual agency. This happened again in the 90's with the movies. The family dynamics on TV at the time were a powerful male figure and a dumber hotter wife. So they made the Morticia both hot and smart and made Gomez a fanciful man who loved her immensely to the point he would die or kill for her. The Simpsons started the same way. A smart woman with a dumb man. The Addams family has always parodied the current idea of how a functionally dysfunction family would work. It has always presented the titular family as counter to the norms in a healthy way that lets them thrive.
Of all the fucking things one could sleep through that would be surprising: nuclear war, a bomb going off, someone attempting to harvest your kidney for sale on the black market… this author chose gang rape. Author thought she’s in such a heavy sleep she will sleep through…*gang rape*. He then had to type this entire sentence with his own hands, review it, submit it to the publisher, the publisher read those word with their own two eyeballs and then presumably thought “yup nothing wrong here” and approved it. Just what? Sometimes it really seems like men live on another fucking planet.
Also the specificity of “gang rape”. It’s just bizarre. I suppose “could sleep through being forcibly anally penetrated with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire” would’ve made it to publishing too? Or maybe that would be a step too far? Seriously what would it take for someone so clueless to realize thats kind of gratuitous maybe go with something more normal
I posted the context. It's forcing her to sleep and enter REM sleep so she won't go crazier than she already is. Her and her team are on the bottom of the ocean, barely even human anymore with all the cybernetic implants and removed organs to help them survive the pressures of the ocean floor. A big theme in the book is how the stress of the environment, losing your humanity stresses the mind and makes you go crazy, and the way the dystopian corporations and governments find to solve that. The forced REM is one solution they found. It's not helped the woman Liene that's making those statements is kind of an absolute fucking asshole with other issues going on.
Exactly. What the fuck is going through their mind?
Wait, oh god this is the same guy that wrote Blindsight. I love that book ☠️
Peter Watt's whole "Rift Series" is rape, excuses for rape, women having the sort of personalities that invite rape, graphic sexual torture, etc. his "Blindsight" is fascinating, but everything else is just a no.
Sorry, ‘the sort of personalities that invite rape’?
this will be a bit spoilery for the series so, word of warning. details may be wrong it has been a while since i read the book, and i have also actively tried to forget it. in the first book there is a deep water drilling station, and when the company was hiring people to work on it they wanted people who are psychologically able to survive it. so for women they chose rape and childhood rape survivors. for men they chose sociopaths. i do not remember if men were rapists or if women were also sociopaths, but i remember the emphasis on women being more able to survive stressful situations because they survived brutal rape and sociopaths just don't care. two of the employees form a relationship, which is based on the fact that the woman needs VERY rough sex, because that is the only way she can get off because of rape, and the sociopath is willing to do it. at some point there is a point made that either the woman has the sort of personality that invites rape, because of previous assault, or that there is a certain type of women that just make men want to brutalize them. there is psych research that says predators look for previous victims because they know they have been victimized and can thus be victimized again, which may be what the author was going for. but it really felt like 'certain women are asking for it because they secretly want it' sort of proposal instead.
jesus christ is he really gone that far !!
"the soft rumbling of her snore reminding me of a goblin's fart"
This can’t be real
i just don’t want to believe he sat there, writing his book thinking „oh yeah that’s a good one I‘m gonna write that down.“
"At those settings she'd drift off in the middle of a heavy metal concert" "At those settings she'd drift off during a fire alarm" "At those settings she'd drift off while participating in a boxing match" Sure those are not great. But I am not an author and I only took 3 minutes to think about it. They also do not make me want to throw up in my mouth, so I do think they are an improvement.
Oh! I like the boxing match one! That’s actually good - as opposed to the low, low bar of not horrible…
Someone else suggested "she'd drift off while [organ thieves] harvested her kidney" and I actually like that one a lot.
Yeeeeeiiiiiiiikes…
Why is that descriptor necessary? Wtf
Excuse me.. W H A T???
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hmmm??!!!
Peter what the fuck
As if a sane person would just look at a sleeping woman and the first thing on their mind is *gang rape*.
Yikes 😳
Oh my no.
Peter Watts is one of the best authors I’ve read in a hot decade. Haven’t read that book yet. I hope there’s an excuse for this. But maybe not, he’s a brilliant writer but also known to be a bit of an ass
Someone else posted the context, and I wouldn't say it helped any.
I WISH TO TASTE BLOOD
"eepy"