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rachelmanija Jan. 11th, 2019 11:19 am)
rachelmanija Jan. 11th, 2019 11:19 am)I was delighted to see that way more people had read Ash than I had expected. My review elided most of the plot and character discussion because nearly everything about both is spoilery. So, if anyone wants, let's discuss Ash!
Massive spoilers below and in comments. I'm not doing another review, more some notes and providing a discussion space.
My favorite character, of course, was Florian/Floria. I tend to think of her more as Florian even though I read her as a cis lesbian woman, not a trans man or genderqueer/nonbinary person. Her power of ending miracles was a very original riff on the usual concept of "power to negate magic" - she didn't just make spells not work, she made them into something real: the heraldic hart becomes an ordinary beast, magic transmuted into meat.
Did anyone understand how the "stop miracles" power kept the sun shining in Burgundy even though what the Wild Machines were doing to the sun wasn't magical in nature? I think that what the miracle-workers were doing wasn't magic per se, but collapsing probabilities so unlikely things happened (Ash and the Faris; also the priests), and the bloodline of Burgundy was preventing that so the normal things to happen (the deer is just a deer) stay true. But the Wild Machines' effect on the sun wasn't probability collapse, right? They were just sucking up solar energy.
What did you all think of religion and alternate religions in the book?
History, alternate history, and how we perceive history?
Genre switches? (I thought it was pretty neat how the genres all come together at the end, in a perfect parallel to the multiple timelines and probabilities collapsing into one reality).
The extreme darkness punctuated with bursts of light, such as the surprisingly happy ending?
Gender and sexuality?
War?
Or anything else!
Massive spoilers below and in comments. I'm not doing another review, more some notes and providing a discussion space.
My favorite character, of course, was Florian/Floria. I tend to think of her more as Florian even though I read her as a cis lesbian woman, not a trans man or genderqueer/nonbinary person. Her power of ending miracles was a very original riff on the usual concept of "power to negate magic" - she didn't just make spells not work, she made them into something real: the heraldic hart becomes an ordinary beast, magic transmuted into meat.
Did anyone understand how the "stop miracles" power kept the sun shining in Burgundy even though what the Wild Machines were doing to the sun wasn't magical in nature? I think that what the miracle-workers were doing wasn't magic per se, but collapsing probabilities so unlikely things happened (Ash and the Faris; also the priests), and the bloodline of Burgundy was preventing that so the normal things to happen (the deer is just a deer) stay true. But the Wild Machines' effect on the sun wasn't probability collapse, right? They were just sucking up solar energy.
What did you all think of religion and alternate religions in the book?
History, alternate history, and how we perceive history?
Genre switches? (I thought it was pretty neat how the genres all come together at the end, in a perfect parallel to the multiple timelines and probabilities collapsing into one reality).
The extreme darkness punctuated with bursts of light, such as the surprisingly happy ending?
Gender and sexuality?
War?
Or anything else!