Lắng Nghe Điều Bình Thường - Tái bản 12/13/2013 tải xuống LIT miễn phí

Dariya Lisich _ariya_isich — ** spoiler alert ** Consider Phlebas was the first "Culture" novel that Banks wrote, but because I have already read The Player of Games, I knew how this one was going to end: the Culture wins, of course. This perhaps made the book not as enjoyable as it otherwise would have been. Who knows? Maybe I would have given the book four instead of three stars if I hadn't known that Horza's quest to find the Mind on Schar's World was doomed (or at least that it would not change the outcome of the Culture/Idiran war). Horza is a "changer" -- a genetically modified humanoid that can change his appearance to other humanoids, after studying them sufficiently. He works for the Idiran's (a tripoidal war-loving race) and fights against the Culture, a post-scarcity, communist society run by super smart "minds" -- artificial intelligences that reside in giant ships, artificial worlds called orbitals (man-made rings that orbit around a star), and sometimes just out in space. Horza is asked to find a Mind that narrowly escaped destruction at the hands of the Idirans by jettising itself out of the ship it was controlling and warping into a nearby planet: Schar's World. Schar's World is protected by a super-sentient being of a race called the Dra'Azon, which exist only as consciousness floating in space time and protect Planets of the Dead as memorials to the destructive capability of the galaxy's various inhabitants. The Mind is hiding itself in a system of train tunnels underneath the surface of Schar's World which were built as a hiding place for the political leaders of Schar's World in the event of nuclear warfare, which inevitably did occur, scouring the planet of all life forms. The book is essentially the story of Horza's attempts to get to Schar's World, past the Dra'Azon, and find and capture the Mind. Horza falls in with mercenaries/pirates, travels with them to an orbital that the culture is going to blow up as a lesson to the orbital's populace for supporting the Idirans, takes over the pirates by killing their leader (in an exciting brawl around and actually under several hovercraft that are evacuating the oribital's citizens) and then "changing" into him. Horza makes it to Schar's World, but most of his pirate band gets killed by Idirans that are also there looking for the Mind, and Horza himself is eventually killed. The Idirans are incredibly hard to kill, and one of them, who is left for dead, crawls into one of the trains in the underground shelter and drives it into another train in the tunnel system. Getting to Schar's World takes up the bulk of the book, and although Banks has plenty of really cool ideas and several fun action sequences getting there, the book seemed a little disjointed. It was as if Banks had a list of ideas he wanted to explore, and just had Horza run from one scene to the next as he encounters and interacts with those ideas (many of which, like I said, were really cool: an orbital that was essentially an enormous circle of water, circumnavigated by enourmous cruise ships the size of cities; an escape from a former Culture General Systems Vehicle (dozens of kilometers in size) by blasting its way out of the ship). Banks also populated his book with colorful, memorable characters, but, again, much of it seemed unnecessary -- almost self-indulgent. Do I really need to know all of the players of a card game (with the ultimate of high stakes), when the game, called Damage, isn't fully explained and doesn't really advance the story that much? Again, some of the characters are really cool, original, and unique (Horza's love interest, a feline-like humanoid that Horza impregnates but ultimately is killed, the culture agent/spy that is though to have been killed during Horza's rescue from a gerintocracy at the beginning of the book but shows up on the GSV just before Horza leaves for Schar's World and just after he has killed the pirates' leader). But many of the characters almost seemed like cameos in the book. There was also one completely disgusting part of the book, that really was not necessary at all. It involved a cannibalistic group of people living on a little island on the water orbital, and explored religious beliefs and other political ideas that were already developed elsewhere in the story.

Agata Ka _gata_ — Dare I say it? Could it be better than the Percy Jackson series?? I'm not entirely sure, but it's a definite tie for epically freaking awesomeness! I love all the characters and the story is, as always, fantastically gripping and funny. I'm too excited about the next one!!!