{"id":225,"date":"2002-05-03T14:46:19","date_gmt":"2002-05-03T19:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2002\/05\/03\/\/"},"modified":"2005-10-22T14:33:09","modified_gmt":"2005-10-22T18:33:09","slug":"diplomatic-immunity-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2002\/05\/03\/diplomatic-immunity-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Diplomatic Immunity Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Oh! Hah. It came back to me.<\/p>\n

Finished _Diplomatic Immunity_ last night. Kenpi at least hasn’t read the book yet (and will, as opposed to some of you others), so spoilers to follow. <\/p>\n

Instead of going back and picking up the tendrils of plot from the book immediately prior to this, Bujold goes back to answer three questions that have been hanging for a while: what’s been going on with the Cetagandans? What happened to Bel Thorne? What are the quaddies up to? Now, while these are all valid and interesting questions, unfortunately answering them is not really what I was hoping for from this book. A Civil Campaign was so promising on that front that I could hardly help being disappointed by this one. Both Komarr and A Civil Campaign were improved a great deal by their occasional shifts of focus from MilesMilesMiles. We got to see things from Ekaterin’s POV. From Ivan’s. From Mark’s. It was a nice break. Plus, there was lots of Barrayaran political maneuvering and interesting societal information. And, there was always the tantalizing possibility that Ivan would get fed up with all the irritating females wandering around and toss it all to run off with By Vorrutyer. ^_^<\/font><\/p>\n

Here, though, we return to the MilesAsActionHero format which dominated most of the earlier books. It’s clearly a throwback, pulling in characters we haven’t seen (and he hasn’t seen) for years. There are very few interesting supporting characters to be a foil for him, and I think that cuts down on the humor that’s so important. So, it was okay, but not one of the better ones. The next one better feature Ivan and Gregor.<\/font><\/p>\n

In other news, Okina started the computer defragmenting last night at 2am. As of now (finishing this post at 5pm ET), it is STILL GOING. Oh my GOD.<\/p>\n

Still working my way through Partner. It’s interesting so far. I read Japanese a heck of a lot slower than I read English, obviously, so it will be a while before I’m done. I do read somewhat faster if I’m at a computer while I’m doing it, because I can use the online dictionary to quickly look up words — I rarely have the patience to deal with the paper dictionary, so I tend to get the general gist of conversationally dense sections and move on without total comprehension. I think I do miss some finer points that way, but I feel like I get most of the essence of the story. In any case, reading next to the computer is highly distracting for other reasons, so I prefer not to do it. I’m thinking of investing in one of those small Wordtank things, which would be more portable but provide nice lookup power without the distraction of IE and people chatting.<\/p>\n

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Oh! Hah. It came back to me. Finished _Diplomatic Immunity_ last night. Kenpi at least hasn’t read the book yet (and will, as opposed to some of you others), so spoilers to follow. Instead of going back and picking up the tendrils of plot from the book immediately prior to this, Bujold goes back to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}