SYMBIONT open thread!: seanan

SYMBIONT open thread!

To celebrate the release of Symbiont, here. Have an open thread to discuss the book. Because nothing says "Thanksgiving" like "tapeworms." Judging by the comments I'm seeing, some of you have had time, and I'd really, really rather book discussion (sometimes including spoilers) didn't crop up on other posts.

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

Seriously. If anyone comments here at all, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. So please don't read and then yell at me because you encountered spoilers. You were warned. (I will not reply to every comment; I call partial comment amnesty. But I may well join some of the discussion, or answer questions or whatnot.) I will be DELETING all comments containing spoilers which have been left on other posts. No one gets to spoil people here without a label.

You can also start a discussion at my website forums, with less need to be concerned that I will see everything you say! In case you wanted, you know, discussion free of authorial influence, since I always wind up getting involved in these things.

Have fun, and try not to bleed on the carpet.

thoughts in my (tapewormless) brain

cara liebowitz

November 30 2014, 02:31:25 UTC 2 years ago

New comment

Seanan, I know I said this to you after the latest Vel adventure, but THANK YOU FOR CREATING COMPLEX DISABLED CHARACTERS. Dr. Cale is paraplegic. It's a fact of her life now. It's not overemphasized OR ignored. Accessibility is important, so the hideout (IN A FUCKING CANDY FACTORY) is set up so that she can access things. Sal has PTSD/a phobia of cars and driving. It doesn't magically go away when it's inconvenient. She panics even when she knows it's necessary in order to get away. Tansy is.......well. Tansy I guess would be neurodivergent in a variety of interesting ways. Adam too in some ways. But they're all wonderfully rich characters that aren't reduced to one trait, their disabilities. Thank you. Seriously, thank you. You're one of the only authors I've ever known who gets it right. And the only one who gets it right who writes dystopian/fantasy/etc.

On other notes:

-I nearly shit myself when I realized what Sal was about to do at the end.
-Is Joyce ever going to wake up??? She doesn't have an implant anymore, does she, because of the antiparasitics??? So if she wakes up, what is she going to be like?
-How much of Tansy was taken from her host body? The implication was that she was still herself. Did Dr. Banks only take a little bit and cultivate the rest to form a fully mature tapeworm before inserting it directly into Claudia's (now Anna's) brain?
-What did Ronnie do??? I wasn't quite clear on that. Did he dump antiparisitics into the water supply? Didn't they said that that wouldn't work for some reason?
-Why are the sleepwalkers, y'know, sleepwalkers and Sal and the other chimeras aren't? What's the difference? Is it because Sal and the others were already "vacated" so to speak? But why is Anna not a sleepwalker then?

My prediction for Chimera is that the old Sally will re-emerge somehow in some way and Sal will have to struggle with having two identities in one body.

One last thing. The first time I started Parasite, months ago, I stopped after a few chapters, because it wasn't hooking me. I felt bad because here I was, a huge Seanan/Mira fan and I didn't like Parasite. But since Symbiont was coming out and I had a few friends who LOVED Parasite, I gave it another shot. And after pushing past the somewhat slow (in my opinion) beginning, I was hooked. BOY, was I hooked. I finished Parasite and Symbiont in the span of about four days. It's similar to Newsflesh in a lot of ways, but in a lot of ways it's not. I love it. I can't wait for more.