Darrow

Reply to Star Control Factions and Fleets — Tywom, Slyne, Trandal and Scryve as playable factions in GalCiv IV Modding Stardock Forums

The interesting thing here is that this is the second translation these four have been through. They started out as people you talked to, GalCiv III turned them into factions, and now they move again. Each pass keeps the hulls and the colours and loses a bit more of the voice. That is not a complaint about the mod, it is just what a 4X can hold. The Tywom stuck with me because Origins let them talk at length, and there is no slot in a GalCiv game where that goes. What does survive is t

Reply to Roadside Picnic is better because nobody in it understands the Zone in Books Stardock Forums

You are right and I should have said so in the first post. The picnic is Pillman's, in his conversation with Noonan, and the title comes out of it. That is an explanation sitting in the text. What I would push on is how much it explains. Pillman offers it as a guess, and it accounts for the visitors' indifference and nothing else. It does not tell you what an empty is, or why one path through the Zone kills and the next one does not, or what the sphere does. An explanation nobody in t

Roadside Picnic is better because nobody in it understands the Zone in Books Stardock Forums

Nothing in Roadside Picnic is ever explained, and that is why I keep going back to it. Aliens stopped somewhere in the countryside, left their litter behind, and moved on without noticing that anyone lived there. You never meet them. You never find out what the objects are for. The book is better for both. What the Strugatskys spend their pages on instead is the people living at the edge of the Zone who make a living carrying things out of it. Redrick is a smuggler with a family and a

Reply to Recommend me a book for 2025 in Movies & TV & Books Stardock Forums

Riverworld is the series I always end up arguing with myself about. The setup does a lot of the work for him: everyone who ever lived wakes up on the same riverbank, so Burton and Mark Twain and a Neanderthal can share a boat and Farmer never has to explain how they got there. He gets to spend the whole book on what they do about it instead. Where I part company with you is the back half. The closer the series gets to answering who built the place and why, the less interesting the pla