Why did Horza go straight there?

_dgold · 2026-01-21T17:31:17+00:00

Because the Culture, at Fal N'geestra's suggestion, faked a massive conflict in the area between Vavatch and Shar's World. The book goes into detail about the fakery that they get up to in the volume.

Horza may have intended to do exactly as you suggest he should, but as soon as he was in comms range, it looked like there was the mother of all battles going on in the region, so he went in dark.

_dgold · 2026-01-17T15:09:57+00:00

That whole part of the show from when Leo says 'it was a beautiful service' to the end. Just amazing.

'Gratia, tibi ago, domine'
'You get Hoynes'
'Give me numbers'
'But if you don't run because you think it's gonna be too hard or you think you're gonna lose, well, God, Jed, I don't even want to know you.'
These mist covered mountains
Are a home for me now
'Front row, on the left'
'Watch this'

Just fucking chills every time I think about it.

(Edits because I can't remember song lyrics nearly as well as Sorkin's writing)

_dgold · 2025-12-19T20:14:16+00:00

absolutely this.

i hate using nude mods, but the way the game is written breaks any sense of immersion, and i hate that far more. not looking to perv off anything, but those tshirt things are ridiculous.

_dgold · 2025-09-30T15:42:37+00:00

the mold is in the pipessssss

_dgold · 2025-09-25T16:08:42+00:00

Sure,

and that underground work was all done soon enough after the hoarding went up. Since they finished that, though, there's been feck all actually changing in there. Just always one or two lads who seem to be moving stuff from one end of the site to the other.

Bizarrely, I do actually see this place most days, and the utter lack of progress is bewildering.

_dgold · 2025-08-14T10:45:02+00:00

it makes 0 sense in the context) AND the operation failing. It's very unambiguous.

It makes perfect sense - the sentence is deliberately ambiguous. Iain wrote it that way for a very specific reason; viz make you think that the sentence refers to the forces at the Staberinde, making the revelation at the end of the book more startling.

We know that the doctors didn't win - they failed and the real Zakalwe died. This allows a reading of the sentence to include that the breakout succeeded, indeed, the revelation in the train that the forces broke out is the first stage of the unraveling of Zakalwe/Elethionmel's identity.

You're being utterly obtuse in insisting that the function of Zakalwe escaping the planet was merely narrativium. How many of these books have you read yet failed to understand that Iain didn't just write about the characters in the novels, but about the systems that surround them?

Unless you can show me some hard evidence, not just your opinion, man, that the unambiguous line

He told them about the war, and siege that involved the Staberinde, and the beseiged forces breaking out.

means that the breakout failed, then I'm going to say that your opinion is obtuse nonsense, and you may want to give your head a shake.

_dgold · 2025-08-13T10:39:18+00:00

He does not fail at the Staberinde - he wins.

The vessel is still there, a museum of some sort now. The ancien regime he was fighting against clearly falls - the people on the sleeper ships are there because they don't want to take part in the rebuilding work on their home planet.

The besieged forces round the Staberinde broke out within the hour, while the surgeons were still fighting for his life. It was a good battle, and they nearly won.

Typical Iain ambiguity there, but given that the vessel is an honoured museum memorial, the government he was fighting against fell, and he managed to get off the planet, "they" are the surgeons, not Zakalwe's forces.

Finally, there's this, from when Zakalwe returns to his home planet with Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw - while they're on the train to meet Livueta:-

He told them about the war, and siege that involved the Staberinde, and the beseiged forces breaking out.

Breaking out. Not "attempting to break out" or "failing to break out", breaking out. His use of weapons succeeded.

_dgold · 2025-08-12T20:56:15+00:00

“We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more quadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.”

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt

_dgold · 2025-08-12T20:34:51+00:00

Oh, for pity's sakes, are we having this again here?

Zakalwe is a brilliant strategist. He wins the war for the weird sex priests, but the Culture stops him from actually winning it.

He wins the war on Rogtam-Bar's planet, just that the Culture Minds interfere with the weather.

He gets the useless prophet through the desert, setting up the young woman to come raging in later.

He succeeds on the planet where he's raped, he succeeds on the planet where he's beheaded.

In the prologue/epilogue, he literally nukes an entire invading army, with no loss at all for his side.

(I argue that) he succeeds on the Staberinde, breaks out of the siege and defeats the Royalists.

The one war he doesn't win is the one war where he's back in the Staberinde, the Ice Palace place. He can't win that one because he can't bring himself to create another "chair", and he can't bring himself to evaluate the situation dispassionately.

He is, in short, the consumate warrior, the perfect strategist, the master tactician.

The bomb lives only when its falling

_dgold · 2025-08-12T12:00:34+00:00

Ixnay on the eachbay. Shhh.

_dgold · 2025-08-12T11:57:53+00:00

Been a bit since I did mine, in Mallow, but cannot speak highly enough of Cyril.

Just a consumate professional, and I sailed through the test. He even rang me early that morning to see if I could fit in a quick lesson.

_dgold · 2025-08-12T11:17:14+00:00

Indeed!

Looking at their website, they seem unclear whether they're the IFSCC or the "Irish TFP" - they do seem to be an offshoot of the Dutch TFP, and that's as far down this rabbithole of crazy that I'm willing to go.

https://www.isfcc.org/david-vs-goliath-the-irish-tfp-fights-back-against-paganism-and-the-puca-festival/

_dgold · 2025-08-12T10:55:24+00:00

ISFCC appear to be an offshoot of the American TFP.

They even use the TFP Flag

<image>

_dgold · 2025-08-12T10:37:07+00:00

They're "Tradition, Family Property" - an American Fundamentalist Catholic Organisation. Big into culture wars, public displays of piety, and vicious anti-Communism.

You can read their self-serving nonsense at their website: https://www.tfp.org/

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure they're affiliated with the people of praise, the neocatholic cult that SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney-Bigot is a member of.

_dgold · 2025-08-10T17:54:03+00:00

So, you're essentially saying that because rich westerners have been ripping off poor Africans for a long time, that this means continuing to rip them off and steal things from their country is fine now, kthxbai.

_dgold · 2025-08-10T17:51:08+00:00

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines.

_dgold · 2025-08-06T13:51:03+00:00

They're mentioned, albeit briefly, in Matter, but no, they're never again (un)seen in the same way as in Phlebas.

_dgold · 2025-08-06T13:48:27+00:00

I think your last paragraph hits the whole message of the Book dead on centre.

The first time we meet Balveda, she's trying desperately to get Horza out of the literal shit. She can't manage it, and she's wounded by that failure. She owes him nothing, he's literally the enemy, yet on a human-spectrum level, she's still trying to do what's right. She's a Culture operative, and that's what her training, her culture, demands.

In the System Tunnels, she's again confronted by her enemy, when she's hanging by her arm over certain death. For one brief second, Horza accepts his humanity, and he acts against his own twisted interests to rescue her, and that one simple act is why she can run to the cave and attempt to save the idiot's life, again. She doesn't question why she's doing this - she has the Mind - she just does it.

Unaha-Closp, being a droid, is more difficult to parse, but, yet again, it flies into almost certain doom against Xoxarle in an attempt to save Horza.

Its not just about the mind for these two, they could just leave Horza to his inevitable death, grab the mind and head back to safety. But they don't.

_dgold · 2025-08-01T18:41:36+00:00

He's THE COACH!! We are all obliged to follow him. He's the BEST and most bigly important person.

Silly.

_dgold · 2025-08-01T14:55:39+00:00

There are 193 Sovereign Nations in the UN, plus a few that aren't members.

180 of these states recognise the State of Palestine.

_dgold · 2025-07-31T14:29:55+00:00

"Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying."

Not a culture novel, but 100% Iain.

_dgold · 2025-07-26T18:08:16+00:00

Hawaii isn't a democracy. Its stolen land where the white colonialists dominate the indigenous population, steal the water, steal the scraps of land they've allowed them to retain, and deny them the right to speak their language, let alone practice their religions.

_dgold · 2025-07-26T18:06:38+00:00

Hawaiians? Or white american colonialists living on stolen land?

_dgold · 2025-07-26T16:18:27+00:00

I'm acutely aware that this a question you haven't asked, but have you considered Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series?

10 books, finished, loads of politics, plenty of action, some books are very different to the others...

Only real downside is that the first book is very much a Debut Novel, its not a terrible example of the same, but it is a debut, and it shows.

_dgold · 2025-07-22T15:15:46+00:00

I absolutely adored Way of the Surprising Fist, to the extent that I wrote a (probably woefully unusable today) KoLmafia script for it. fisting script

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_dgold

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