survival ethics

The Obelisk Gate

Posted on November 2, 2016

Novel Ideas apologizes for the delay, but we return with a new episode on N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate. This novel is the sequel to The Fifth Season, the Hugo award winner and a Novel Ideas favorite. We should warn you going in, since this is a recent publication, this episode is chock full of spoilers. In addition to spoilers, we also cover Chosen One plots, dark elements, shades of gray, and family. We also talk about how this story is not Harry Potter, adorable monsters, the importance of the moon, and how none of these characters are actually Gandalf.

The music bump is “The Unanswered Question” by Charles Ives in honor of all of the questions from the first book that were answered with more questions in the second book.

108 – The Obelisk Gate – Sympathetic Murderers

Our rating: A worthy follow up to the original with excellent depth of world building and characterization.

Ben: 10/10. I love the world building and the characters and anything else I forgot to mention.

Gabs: 9/10 moons. Darkness is slightly less shocking the second time around, but the complexity is great.

This entry was posted in Episodes and tagged adorable monster, answering questions with questions, Chosen One plot, complexity, darkness, Evil Earth, excellent characters, family, helping others v. helping yourself, listener Alex, listener feedback, N.K. Jemisin, not Gandalf, not Harry Potter, Novel Ideas meta-podcast, omg spoilers, oppressing the oppressors?, prejudice, protagonist traits, second person narration, shades of gray, spoilers, survival ethics, sympathetic murderers, The Obelisk Gate, throwing the moon away, trials of podcasting, trust, world building, wtf guardians, wtf Stone Eaters, zomfg spoilers.

World War Z

Posted on August 23, 2013

Welcome back to the zombie apocalypse. Or almost apocalypse. This week on Novel Ideas, we read World War Z by Max Brooks. This book is a little bit different from other books that we’ve read in that it doesn’t really have characters or a plot, but is instead written in the style of an oral history. Because of that, we changed our format slightly for this week’s episode. We talked about the movie, the breakdown of society, the nature of celebrity, and gender balance. We also discussed zombie tropes, the fact that dogs hate zombies, historical zombie fiction, and zombie war psychology. Basically, we discussed everything zombie related we could think of.

The music bump is “The Trooper” by Iron Maiden, used to bait zombies at the Battle of Hope.

Recommendations:

An interesting and compelling book about 80-90% of the time. It drags just a little at the end, but not enough to put a damper on the experience of reading it. The book includes some excellent world building in telling a well covered genre story in a different way.

Ben: 8.5/10

Gabs: 8/10

This entry was posted in Episodes and tagged Ben's a dope, breakdown of society, celebrity, dogs hate zombies, format change, gender balance, government cover ups, historical zombie fiction, mercy killing, military overload, military tactics, movies of books, North Korean zombie bunker, post-apocalyptic apocalypse, Russian paranoia, sacrifice, satellites, self-referential, state religions, statistics, survival ethics, underwater zombies, weak ending, world building, zombie tropes, zombie war psychology.