Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

There are many paths through the Nebula, and many ways to reach a destination. The novels based on Heaven’s Vault, by the same writer as the game’s narrative, tell the story of one such path, and what comes after (and before).

The first two books, The Loop and The Vault, follow archaeologist Aliya and her robot Six through a story close to, but not quite the same as a play-through of the game. Side quests are left out, some incidents are rearranged, and flashbacks tell the story of El and Oroi exploring the decaying buildings of Elboreth as orphan children, and how Aliya found the Nightingale. You get to meet a couple of her older robots, including the very talkative Three, and a (thematically appropriate) seventh robot from before Iox.

They’re different enough from an actual playthrough that it still feels like you’re experiencing something new if you’ve played the game, and tell a solid enough narrative that you don’t need to have played the game to read them (though I imagine the target audience is mainly people who have).

The second book diverges further from the game in details. In part it’s because a linear story can only have one path, so I think the author was trying to combine elements of different paths through the game that block each other out. (This is one reason the game is so replayable: you want to see what would have happened if you’d made a different choice.)

Sailing the rivers is much more physical than the calm, flow-state experience in the game, more like actually sailing a small boat. Aliya strains muscles, the boat crashes into the occasional rock (and moon), she gets injured, the boat needs to be repaired.

Translating Ancient

Ancient writing is woven throughout the books. Fragments introduce some chapters, along with the numerals. Scene breaks use the glyph for separation.

The experience of actively translating is, well, translated to prose by showing Aliya and Six puzzling out the meaning based on how the glyphs combine. Some bits are translated completely, others partially, some left as extras for the reader. At one point in book three Aliya spends several pages trying to work out whether it’s even possible to translate names from written Ancient to modern Ioxian or Elborethian, aside from the one name, Mazwai, that has survived the ages with context intact.

Occasionally a chapter is introduced with passages from Mazai’s writings, credited here as being translated by Huang or Aliya.

Before and After

The third book, The Flood, gets weird.

It picks up in the aftermath of one of the endgame choices (you can probably guess which one from the title), as the moons are cut off from each other, and Aliya and the people of Elboreth attempt to deal with their new reality of too much water instead of too little.

A secondary story thread follows Mazwai herself in another age. It gets into some of the bigger questions about the Loop: Is it real? If so, is time a literal loop in which the future becomes the past, or is it linear, but with similar events recurring? Are people really reborn time and time again in different ages? And just what does a robot’s Ethical Core mean, anyway?

Book four is coming later this year. I’m looking forward to reading it. For now, I’m playing through the game for the third time.

As password managers go, I like Bitwarden better than LastPass. It’s got a better track record certainly, and it’s encrypted in a way that makes it really difficult for someone to break into your vault, but it’s still a cloud service, which carries some risks.

It’s got a web app, mobile app and browser extensions, of course, and the browser extension (Chromium-based, Firefox-based and Safari) has a convenient keyboard shortcut to auto-fill on demand. There’s also a desktop app, which is useful when logging into desktop or command-line applications. I haven’t used the mobile app, but the others run more smoothly than LastPass.

As well as passwords, it’ll store SSH keys and payment cards, and it can act as a TOTP authenticator. That’s certainly convenient, but it kind of defeats the purpose of having two-factor authentication, if you’re using the same vault for a password and its 2FA codes.

It does share the same problem I’ve found with LastPass and KeePassXC-Browser, which is when you generate a new password for a site that’s already in your vault, it doesn’t always get updated automatically. I’ve taken to copying the generated password to the clipboard just in case I need to paste it back into the login record.

Personal accounts have a free tier, and the current pricing is reasonable ($20/year individual, or $48/year for a family of up to 6). In addition to shared vaults, organizations can self-host their vaults, which provides more control and keeps the vault inside your network.

Nice, simple app for handling the local files on your phone or tablet. It doesn’t get fancy or connect to cloud storage. It doesn’t even try to use network access, just local storage.

It does show you thumbnails and file properties, and you can move, copy, rename, delete, or compress (as a .zip) files one at a time or in batches. Searching by filename is included, though it’s slower than Google’s Files app.

I switched to this as my main file manager on my phone ages ago, and disabled “Files by Google.” This way if I save something locally, I know it’s staying local.

One of those apps you install only because they’re required for something else. It handles most account management actions, but it really wants to upsell new devices or services when you just want to check your bill or change something about your line. And it will repeatedly spam you with offers on “T-Mobile Tuesdays” unless you turn notifications off again after using it.

There are some things you can only do on the website, and some you can only do in the app, and no clear reason for what’s in each category. And some things still don’t work, such as activating an e-sim for a phone that the app doesn’t know can accept e-sims. (Once I got ahold of a real person, I could give them the IMEI and EID numbers and they could email me an activation code.)

There are also phones that work just fine on T-Mobile’s network, but can’t run the app. Which is fine 99% of the time, but when you do need to do something that can’t be done on the website, you need another phone on your plan that can run it, or else you need to just call them and deal with the phone menus until you convince it to connect you with a real person.

Hainish Stories

Most of Le Guin’s Hainish stories are about imagining different ways for human societies to live. These in particular are mostly about different ways for men and women to relate. They’re all self-contained, though the first one probably works better if you’ve already read The Left Hand of Darkness.

Coming of Age in Karhide

Left Hand… explored what an androgynous society might be like. This story answers any lingering questions you might have about sex among humans who only experience gender once a month (and never know for sure which they’re going to be ahead of time).

The Matter of Seggri

In many real-world societies, women are oppressed to “protect” them. On Seggri, the situation is reversed: Most people are women, and the few men are kept apart and guarded to make sure that there are enough around for procreation. They don’t really have much to do except fight and play sports (I still can’t decide whether the stereotyping is a weak link or a deliberate counterpoint to the way women get stereotyped in reality), and occasionally help someone get pregnant.

It’s told as a mix of Ekumen survey reports and local stories, not unlike Left Hand…. Some of the stories are dry, while others get into forbidden romance territory.

Unchosen Love and Mountain Ways

Two stories set on the planet O, where marriages consist of four people: two men, two women, one each from two different divisions of society. As you’d imagine, setting one up is…complicated.

“Unchosen Love” is kind of a gothic romance/ghost story, about figuring out how to deal with your new extended family. That really doesn’t do it justice, and it’s the more satisfying of the two.

In “Mountain Ways,” the partners in a torrid affair try to pass one of the women off as a man so they can fill in the missing role, bending a strict tradition in one way in order to uphold it in another. It…sort of works…for a while. (This one’s available to read online at Clarkesworld.)

Solitude

A society of introverts, where people stick to the absolute bare minimum connection needed to continue humanity. An Ekumen observer embeds herself and her children in one of the loose villages in order to understand it. This is one that sticks with you, and I’ve written about it in more detail.

Old Music and the Slave Women

The most brutal of the stories in what is now Five Ways to Forgiveness, in which a Hainish observer (Old Music is his name) is held captive for an extended period by the slave-owning side in a civil war.

Stand-Alone Stories

The Birthday of the World

It’s a good title, but it’s far from the best story in the collection. Mainly what sticks in my head is the low-tech interpretation of prophecies involving high-tech events. (A house falls in fire but still stands, for instance.)

Paradises Lost

A standalone novella about the middle generations of a multi-generation starship, and what happens when some of them come to believe that nothing outside of the ship actually exists. Well worth the read, and I’ve reviewed it in more detail already.