I just finished reading Floornight and I really liked it!
Some crappy observations/opinions/whatevers:
- it’s done to me what Evangelion probably was supposed to, but didn’t
- I liked that the world-changing apocalyptic event was presented in a positive-ish way - one of the biggest things I disliked about NGE (besides the unnecesary Freudian garbage) was that I was clearly supposed to think Instrumentality was bad, but I didn’t really see why
- for some reason it looked to me like something that has nonbinary characters, but it didn’t and I was mildly surprised
- shiny rainbow all-knowing Maria, the ridiculous Precure-esque glittery colour wave engulfing the simulated city and the giant army of feral magical children are my favourite fictional imagery now
- LUDWIG was a cinnamon roll
- Herm is not the best name for a trans character
- I was surprised that Kyle ended up unimportant, but I wouldn’t have wanted to see more of him
- the weird children’s mythology was great! I’m not really sure what role puberty played in it though
- were the script scenes in the final chapter referencing the last episodes of Evangelion
- Ratio was a realistic and believable depiction of a person with an ASD, but as an autistic person who can barely count I’m still waiting for an autistic character who doesn’t rediscover an entire field of mathematics for fun
- I immensely enjoyed the changes in writing style and the metafictional layer
- I
kind ofreally want to see the Metric S ethical status scale- I don’t think I’ve ever read something that could’ve been as easily adapted into an anime
- “– we’re closer now, we’re so close we complete one another’s –” “– existences.”
- I’m definitely going to draw fanart
- please read Floornight if you haven’t already
Floornight has some of the most brilliantly weird applications of language in anything I’ve ever read.
I just read the entire 42 chapters in one sitting, and I still can’t decide if I love it dearly or despise it with every indivisible quantum of my (one-who-individuates).
Um … thanks, conditionally?
(via bigwordsandsharpedges)
To reward myself for writing so much of the northern caves lately i have drank some alcohols. to the point that visual focus is abit difficult. i am going t o got to bed soon.
however i am posting now to say that if you are reading this because of TNC you should also consider reading Floornight! If you haven’t already. It is complete and I put a lot of work into it but it has gotten less attention than TNC. You might like Floornight if you like TNC although they are very different. I should get in bed now. I love you all
kerapace asked: I read Ada on a loose and indirect recommendation from you via your blog. Very strange book; the big structural conceit I'd initially imagined to be the main draw wound up being almost a footnote in broader context, with the novel's longwinded and allusive prose overpowering most of its larger structure for me. (I'd call it stream-of-consciousness but I can't, it's too precise.) Still, I powered through and wound up enjoying it in the end. Think I grok some more of TNC's influences now, too!
Also, I went through all of Floornight in a day sometime in June and it was one of the high points of my summer. I loved the weirdness and the introduction of new concepts and writing styles and recontextualizations. Many times you’d pack a sentence so full of strangeness that I’d giggle aloud when I read it. The characters were somewhat muted, but their narrative perspective offered room for more experimentation and I liked Ratio a lot.
Cool, thanks for letting me know!
You may have already seen them, but I have some notes on Ada up online here, from a summer reading group I did in 2013. (The notes are in 11 parts, which are listed as “Chapters” on the linked page.) In my experience Ada gained a lot on re-reading, because it was so strange to me the first time that I had a hard time making anything of it, and on the second reading I no longer had the same “WTF” reaction and thus was able to think about it more clearly.
I am being very self-indulgent tonight
heresyarchictect-deactivated201 asked: I'm thrilled and fascinated by The Northern Caves, jealous even. You've hit a crossroads of things I love - inscrutable monoliths, the metatexts and conflicts that their followers end up weaving around them, and false documents amongst other things - that's had me gripped since I was introduced to it around C10. Haven't read Floornight yet; I'm holding off until TNC is done because I know I'll end up using it, however wrongly, to try and second-guess TNC. But aye, keep up the good work
Thank you!
I would say “I intend to update soon” except I always say that, and then sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. But I’ve been sick since Wednesday or so and now I’m over it, so there’s that.
Floornight is very different from TNC, but I can understand your motivation for not reading it yet. My goal is to finish TNC by the end of 2015.
somnilogical asked: There was a part in Floornight where a character fast forwards through an emotional state. How does this work out? Because it seems that however fast you simulate a mind experiencing an emotion, from the point of view of the mind, you don't go any faster. You can notice acceleration but without an outside frame of reference, you don't know how fast you are thinking. There is no experiential difference. Is this some quirk of the R[souls] (reality adjoin souls) world? Do they somehow transfer th
This looks like it was meant to be part of a series of asks but I only got this one?
Anyway, I think what I was going for was something like “perception of duration can be altered by various factors (e.g. people reporting ‘time slowing down’ during crises, the effects of various drugs) and you could imagine exaggerating that sort of effect while isolating it from any other effects, so that you experience the same 10 minutes of emotion you would otherwise, but it ‘feels like’ it takes 10 seconds (or the like).”
you have a really distinctive writing voice, interesting recurring themes, i know more about you now. anyway, this definitely feels like some kind of precursor to floornight, to me. i dont think its badly written, and its very creative/interesting–
the main bit that seems kid-ish/college-y to me is its pretty clear the author doesnt have a very good grasp on the possible inner lives of people who arent strange supernatural entities or teenage boys/young men from a specific kind of background?
Yes, that is part of what is jarring to me about it now – I imagined these very fantastical situations but then conveniently filled in a lot of parts of them with people who were a lot like me. I mean, I think I still do that, because it’s hard not to? But hopefully … less?
I guess some of that was deliberate, as sort of this Neil Gaiman-ish “supernatural beings have mundane problems just like us” thing. But I was doing this kind of … artificially, following a template. You can see this in the brief bit of “Part Two” that I wrote – there was going to be a whole long section about Calvus having this very generic high school life and dealing with teenage boy problems, and I never actually ended up writing much of this because I couldn’t figure out how to make it interesting. Because it … well, it just wasn’t interesting. I was like “man, if I wrote this really mundane, generic high school story that would be a cool contrast to all the supernatural stuff!” but I didn’t actually have a handle on how to write “mundane” stuff and make it interesting, real, not just a string of cliches.
I guess the cliches are the other thing that jars me about it. The romantic angst, the sort of artificially painted-in “normal people stuff,” but also the chaos vs. order thing with Inverness and Unil. I don’t think I would have written such a straightforward chaos vs. order binary nowadays because that binary doesn’t really make much intuitive sense to me, but back then I just thought it was “the sort of thing you write about”? I think I wasn’t very confident in my own intuitions, and was relying on things I had seen other fiction writers do, but then, again, my heart wasn’t in it.
(As may have been clear, there was going to be a tension where some people in Inverness, like Calvus, start to take the threat from Unil very seriously and to make their lives more “ordered” in order to confront the threat, which then is kind of a betrayal of the values of Inverness, since it’s the “chaos” side. This was at least a bit more interesting than pure chaos vs. order, but I’m still not sure I would have been able to make it make sense or be compelling.)
It is definitely reminiscent of Floornight in the strange constructed environments, parallel universes, military conflict between two philosophically defined groups, and people having illustrious parallel universe backstories that aren’t immediately made clear. That was all kind of surprising to me when I re-read it, since I wasn’t thinking about any of that stuff consciously. Just stuff I like, I guess.
Whenever I write one of these posts “explaining” something about Floornight, I always look back at what I wrote and feel like I’m looking at some kind of Time Cube-esque screed. I just put so much weird bullshit into that story and I tend to forget about the sheer volume of it except when I actually have to write it down explicitly.
rangi42 asked: Finally finished Floornight. I re-read the middle chapters about the New City and Selp's people, having put down the book for a while after first getting there, which helped to make sense of the rest of it. The ending was... unexpected, but not inappropriate. I was glad that LUDWIG's pneuma wasn't forgotten at the conclusion. Browsing your floornight tag, I see I'm not the first to compare it with Starfish (Floornight contrasts the Sphere's claustrophobia and darkness with the open plains [1/3]
(rest of ask below a cut because of spoilers)