googoogjoob

They're colored spheres in the original games, too. I suppose they might be called "box mines" because they sometimes contain a Creation lying in wait? But they don't all have Creation traps. It's never really made sense.

It depends. The "mine with waving feeler" sprite is used for three different types of mines. One type (probably the rarest overall) is clustered in a group around a yellow crystal- these you can deactivate by interacting with the crystal before it goes off, and passing a Mechanics check. Another type can be deactivated by using a spore box in the area- which may or may not require passing a Mechanics check to use, depending on where it is. The last type can only be deactivated by detonating them remotely with a spore baton of the appropriate color (nb: the color of the mine's sprite doesn't necessarily indicate which-color spore baton will detonate it), which doesn't involve Mechanics at all.

I'd say that the recently-launched Geneforge 1: Mutagen is the best place to start. It's an excellent game, well-written, and a good introduction to its fictional universe, and Geneforge is Spiderweb's most unique, distinctive franchise, in terms of both worldbuilding (high sci-fantasy with philosophical concerns) and mechanically (a very detailed and involved summoning system, basically). Queen's Wish: The Conqueror would be another good starting point- it's a very good game- although it's less typical of Spiderweb's games overall, in ways both large and small, and thus maybe not the best introduction to Spiderweb's games (it adds a base-building element not present in any other Spiderweb game, and its party/character-building, inventory, dungeon-delving, etc design elements are all also atypical). The Exile/Avernum games are a well-loved series of more straightforward (but still offbeat and idiosyncratic) high fantasy RPGs, but it's trickier to recommend them to a newcomer. The original Exile 1-3 are very, very dated, and require jiggering to get running on modern systems; the original Avernum 1-3 remakes (titled just "Avernum 1-3") are good, but somewhat dated (they run on modern Windows, basically, but lack many small QoL conveniences in a way that can be intimidating if you aren't used to old-school CRPGs of that sort); and the more modern Avernum re-remakes (titled "Avernum 1: Escape from the Pit," "Avernum 2: Crystal Souls," and "Avernum 3: Ruined World") have modern niceties like changable screen resolution and achievements, along with plenty of modern QoL changes, but design-wise they are very very bland as RPGs, and lose some of the flavor of their ancestors.

I think the inventory system is... it's a set of design decisions mostly in favor of "immersion" or "realism" and against convenience, which doesn't really create many interesting decisions for the player, doesn't really make the game more immersive, and intermittently creates irritating situations. It's not unbearable, but it's not great. That is- it doesn't create interesting decisions for the player in that, I believe, there's actually room in the inventory for every combat-usable item. The player isn't confronted with the issue of deciding which set of pods, spores, and crystals they want to use so much as they're confronted with the issue of how many pods, spores, or crystals they're willing to forego having immediately available, in favor of having open slots for eg passive buff items (kinda marginal) or alternate pieces of equipment (a ranged character swapping out batons situationally is probably the case where this is most important). It doesn't really make the game more immersive in that there's nothing actually stopping the player from hoarding items and leaving them in their junk bag, or in huge suspension-of-disbelief-straining piles of valuable/enchanted items in one of the towns- it just makes it slightly more tedious to do so, with there being no other mechanics to penalize this playstyle. (The removal of an inventory weight limit, and the existence of the junk bag at all already favors a hoarding playstyle, just one more focused on hoarding combat items and vendor trash.) It intermittently creates mildly irritating situations, such as when you have a bunch of Shaper equipment you want to turn in in the Junkyard- but Shaper equipment doesn't stack, so you have to make several trips from a town to the Junkyard as you pull the equipment out of your junk bag. It's hardly game-breakingly bad, but I think the inventory system is probably the one part of the remake that doesn't really feel like it has clear design objectives. Even if you play in the most obsessive hoarding way possible, it just adds maybe 10-15 minutes overall to a 20-25-hour-long game.

Nope. It's just for show.

As a Shaper, the best way to deal with pylons is to use Airshock to kill them from outside their attack range (since Airshock has AoE that can stretch beyond their range). You can try to kill them with Creations- pylons are weak to simple physical damage- but they do a lot of damage, and explode when they die, so this isn't really optimal. Note, though, that you're not obligated to visit every zone on the map, and Mutagen makes it harder to see and do everything in one playthrough than it was in the original. Pylons in Mutagen are designed to be a huge pain (or at least a tedious problem) unless you're focusing on Stealth.

There's a semi-secret dungeon in the far southeast of Exile 3's world map- and this is preserved in Avernum 3 and Avernum 3: Ruined World, though it remains easy to miss- called the Monastery of Madness. It's populated by, as the name implies, mad monks, and the entire dungeon is an extended spoof of/reference to martial arts B-movies of the 70s/80s. One of the "special moves" the monks strive to learn and master is the "feisty slap of pain."

They do do something, but there is no explicitly marked quest associated with it, and no NPCs will tell you, AFAIK. You'll figure it out on your own... or you'll look it up or ask for spoilers. Good luck.

Creation level is entirely dependent on skills. Specifically, each Creation type has a base level, and then, added to this, are 1) the relevant Shaping skill, above the threshold necessary to Shape the Creation- for example, a Drayk requires 2 Fire Shaping to make, and each level of Fire Shaping above 2 adds a level to the Drayk; 2) the PC's skill at Shaping the Creation in question- in Mutagen, this is necessarily the number of canisters one has used with the relevant Creation knowledge- this value is always necessarily at least 1; and then 3) each level/stat boost applied to the Creation, either at the time of Shaping or afterwards, adds another level. Each Creation can have up to five total level/stat boosts, with the stats it's possible to boost depending on the Creation's type. (Expending Essence to give a Creation active/passive abilities does not affect the Creation's level, however.) Creations do not gain experience, and they don't gain levels in any other ways than noted above. Further, a Creation's level is recalculated in real time if any of the above factors change- if you add a point to your Battle Shaping skill, all your Battle Creations that already exist will gain a level, and if you find and use a canister of Create Artila, all your already-extant Artilas will gain a level. It's thus also possible for Creations to lose levels- for example, if the PC is wearing a piece of equipment that provides +1 to Fire Shaping when they create a Roamer, and later remove that piece of equipment, losing the stat boost, the Roamer will lose the level it previously gained from that point of Fire Shaping.

It's curious that the Fire Creation leap attacks (Swoop/Fiery Pounce) use Strength instead of Agility. If it's deliberate, it's an odd choice. Unless the abilities get shuffled and/or the new Creations in 2 have other physical ranged attacks, there won't be any others until the War Tralls in 4, which kinda devalues Agility (in addition to the evasion nerf compared to the original games). (Also, your list of Creation abilities is missing the Cryodrayk Swoop.) The tooltip shows the percent increase in damage in parentheses after the base damage numbers (eg, my Roamer has 7 Magical Skill, so it shows "(+35%)" after the base damage numbers in the tooltip for its main breath attack). It's a little odd that it doesn't show the actual effective number, with the multiplier applied.

Jeff's talked in the past about wanting, maybe, someday, to do an "Avernum 0," set decades before Avernum 1, when the Kingdom of Avernum was just being set up, and most of the land it came to rule would've been occupied by Slith cultists and demons. I think there's a decent chance that he'll make this game, eventually. I think there's basically zero chance of an Avernum game set after 6, though- 6 is deliberately a very conclusive end to the series, and further entries would be too much treading old ground.

The Research Quarters are in the northeastern part of the map; you probably won't see them until relatively late in the game unless you're allied to the Takers.

Swanwick's quest has two parts- the first one is to retrieve cockatrice design information from the Research Quarters, and the second is to fight the cockatrices in the lower level of the Barrens Bunker. You probably need to finish the first part to activate the second one.

I'm pretty sure the door on the upper level only opens from the opposite side- there's another door (that you have to lockpick a lever to open) in the east-central part of the map that leads into that part of the zone. As for the lower level- the entire area is only relevant to a quest you get from Mind Swanwick. You can't do anything else with the area, and the door won't open unless you deal with the relevant quest.

(This should actually be in the Mutagen subforum, but...)

Geneforge (or at least, this Geneforge) doesn't really have a reputation system. The game tracks how pro- or anti-Servile you are, and whether you've joined a particular faction. But there's no reputation system to be affected. Possibly. The way stealing in Spiderweb RPGs generally works is- Taking items that are not marked "NY" isn't stealing per se; taking items marked "NY" has no effect unless an NPC sees you doing it- and the inventory screen will indicate whether you were seen or not. If you are seen stealing enough times within the same zone, then the NPCs there will turn hostile. How many times is "enough" may or may not vary by location (someone will have to test Mutagen to find out if it does). Note that 1) this is tracked by-zone, rather than by-faction- Vakkiri and Ellhrah's fort will track how many items you were seen stealing separately, although making one hostile will (presumably) also make the other hostile; 2) this should be tracked consistently across visits to the same zone- you can't pop in, be seen stealing a few things, and then come back later to steal more; 3) a zone made hostile this way will remain hostile, even if you leave and come back. There's often a cheat to make hostile towns turn friendly again; I don't know what it is for Mutagen. Once a zone is made hostile, you cannot talk to anyone there again (without having cheated to pacify it... which is cheating). I don't know of any cases of this affecting dialogue choices elsewhere, except insofar as potentially making other zones hostile. Being seen stealing less than it takes to make a zone hostile doesn't affect any dialogues either, as far as I know. If you eg make Pentil hostile, then you obviously can't talk to Rydell to join the Obeyers. But it wouldn't affect the other factions, and stealing fewer items than required to make Pentil hostile shouldn't affect his dialogues.

I suspect what might be happening- based on the appearance of the quotation marks in your posts- is that your browser (or the iPad itself, or whatever input method you are using) has "smart quotes" enabled. That is, it automatically implements fancy, contextual, printed-book-like quotation marks (“...”) instead of the more common, noncontextual, computer standard "dumb quotes" ("..."). And I think what might be happening is that the forum software is not interpreting the smart quotes as quotation marks, for the purposes of searching. You can try to turn off smart quotes, if that's something that won't bother you otherwise, but an even simpler option is to type "Tower of Barriers" (without quotes, this time) into the search box, and then, from the search page, select the "The phrase "Tower of Barriers"" option from under the text input box, which will automatically put dumb quotes around the search string, and get you the results you need. (On further investigation: the smart quotes in your posts are actually inconsistent- sometimes the end-quote character is actually a generic slanted-quotation-mark character, and sometimes it's two slanted single quotation marks in a row, etc. So that's almost certainly what it is.)

If you search for "Tower of Barriers" (in quotes), you get 13 results on this forum. 1 result is this topic. The other 12 are all about Avernum: Escape from the Pit, and 6 of them are topics specifically and exclusively about the Tower of Barriers. None of the results are from 2 or 3.

Okay. I think this is a point of misunderstanding which a lot of this disagreement stems from. In Avadon 1, the method of selecting a Keeper is not made entirely explicit. Several Keepers in the past disappeared or were assassinated, and it's implied that their successors may have had a hand in these happenings. At some point in the writing of Avadon 2 or 3, however, Jeff decided to change things, or at least make them more explicit, and retconned it so that Keeper is a lifetime position, and that succession to the position is determined by whoever manages to kill the sitting Keeper. (Presumably if the Keeper manages to die of natural causes, the Council can step in to appoint someone.) The Codex text does not reflect this, as the Codex texts in 2 and 3 are almost entirely grandfathered in from 1, where this rule was not explicitly established. However, it is a major plot point in 3. Redbeard refuses to accept the Council's right to depose him and appoint Protus Keeper, as nobody has managed to kill him. When Redbeard returns to Avadon at the end of 3, he Killing Redbeard is necessary to get the ending where you become Keeper. Redbeard has no plans of retiring, and it's not even clear if that's something a Keeper can do: if you let Redbeard live at the end of 3, he's Redbeard himself claims he doesn't remember whether he murdered his predecessor, but given that that's the normal means of succession, it seems almost certain that he did. The murder of a sitting Keeper of Avadon isn't just legal, it's the expected, necessary method by which succession to the position is determined. Is this moral? No, not by the standards of the real world. It seems unconscionably brutal and unstable. But that is, canonically, the way things are in Avadon. Part of the drama of the games is that, if you substantively disagree with Redbeard's ideas or actions, you're supposed to kill him- or, if you don't think you can manage it, meekly submit in the face of his greater prowess. ETA: This is only true of Avadon 2. In Avadon 1, and especially in Avadon 3, you absolutely have to suck up to become a Heart. This means never insulting Redbeard to his face, never telling him you think Avadon is corrupt or wrong or weak, and repeatedly agreeing with his decisions and ideology. Your other decisions (other, obviously, than whether or not you choose to try to kill Redbeard) have no bearing on whether you become a Heart in these games- it's entirely down to how hard you suck up to Redbeard. The game claims that it's the job of a Heart to give the Keeper honest advice, but game-mechanically, in 2 out of 3 of the games, Redbeard really does just want a yes man (or at least- and perhaps more valuably in terms of authority-delegation- someone who will reach the exact same conclusions as him independently). Unless you're meta-role-playing as a Miranda type who's consciously, constantly lying to Redbeard, you cannot become a dissenting voice in his decisions.

Redbeard almost certainly has more power than anyone else in the Pact- more than any Councilor individually, probably more than the Council collectively, and probably even more than the heads of state of the constituent nations of the Pact. He has the authority to conduct diplomacy with foreign powers with no real oversight from the Council. He has the authority to destabilize said foreign powers and even conduct de facto warfare with them. He has the power to run an effective and omnipresent spy network not only without, but within the borders of the Pact. He has the authority to basically disappear, torture, and sentence any Pact citizen, or even any Farlander citizen, at will. He can sentence any such person to having their mind and will broken, and probably also to death. He can overrule the justice systems of the Pact states- eg in protecting the Dharamite who framed Khalida. The only real legal check on these powers is that anyone has the right to kill him at any time- if they can. The Council at least theoretically controls Avadon's budget and recruiting quotas, but Redbeard has the ability to manipulate the makeup of the Council, and the Council is dependent enough on Avadon for counterintelligence and defense that they wouldn't be willing to cut funding to it too harshly. (And if they tried to, I imagine Redbeard would further manipulate the Council's makeup, and functionally arrogate more of its powers.) Redbeard has to divert funds to build Foresight- but a) he is in fact able to divert enough funds to build and staff a fort, and b) he's able to do so without the Council being any the wiser. Its existence is more proof of Redbeard's power than the circumstances of its funding are evidence of his weakness. Redbeard has, in practice, the ability to bend all the state power of the Pact to whatever end he chooses. The reason he isn't totally omnipotent isn't because he couldn't try to do so, but because trying to amass so much more power, or to do so openly, would almost certainly mean civil war between Avadon and the Council and nations of the Pact, and because Redbeard is deeply committed to preserving and advancing the Pact. There's a difference between getting a bunch of (what amount to) warlords on board with, functionally, a giant free-for-all loot/conquest expedition, and contracting a confederation or political union. The games don't go into a ton of detail about the governance of the Wyldrylm, but they must have some sort of centralized authority capable of acceding to the Pact and enforcing its laws. Khemeria is demonstrably a patchwork of petty monarchies, who are willing to work in concert when it means loot and land, but it'd take a lot of cat-herding to get them all to agree to surrender any of their powers or prerogatives to unite into a coherent nation-state, let alone accede to a supranational organization with its own laws. The same goes for the Titans, Ogres, and Wretches, and probably Svorgald. The dragons could maybe be bought off for a bit, but they are not remotely reliable as allies, and are too selfish and arrogant to engage in any sort of binding union. Redbeard goes to great expense to buy Zhethron's assistance in the war, and Zhethron basically does the bare minimum of what's expected of him, and begins looking for angles to advance his own interests even before the term of the alliance is up. Saying the argument "boils down to" the comparison, saying, basically, "you hold these opinions about the gameworld and its implications because of your personal/ideological/emotional investment in such and such topical real-world matters," and implying that this reading is therefore less-valid or correct, isn't right. Avadon isn't a 1:1 allegory, and explicitly dealing with the themes of power, hegemony, oppressor vs oppressed, etc in literature goes back at least to the Melian Dialogue. But by the same token, by engaging with these themes- and by having the protagonists of the games be tabula rasas with the freedom of action to approach these themes in differing ways- the games deliberately invite comparison to real-world happenings and principles, and engagement in those terms. The games let you play as a disloyal servant of the Pact for a reason. Becoming a Heart is possible in all three games, but you have to be a brown-noser who never actually contradicts or substantively disagrees with Redbeard to do so. He doesn't want you as a Heart who'll give him honest advice, he wants you as a Heart who will reliably carry out his will in your decisions without needing constant oversight. You could, I guess, try to pull a Miranda, and get to the position by lying constantly and doing his will even when you disagree with it personally- but that's an awful lot less reliable and riskier than simply becoming Keeper yourself. By this logic, Dheless could/should have legitimately tried to pay off somebody to kill Redbeard... which he does, but which you evidently think is immoral. Remember that killing Redbeard isn't actually "assassination" per se: not only is it not illegal, it is actually, apparently, the legally-provided-for means of succession to the position of Keeper (at least if another Avadon employee does it). Redbeard himself almost certainly murdered his predecessor. In the world of Avadon, that really is the legal route of last resort.

I'd say the Codex is mostly reliable, but a) it only includes information which is public knowledge at the time of the games, and b) it's written from the perspective of an observer within the Pact. I'm not sure I'd say Redbeard recognizes the limits of his power in the sense of knowing what he can or cannot do, but that he recognizes that the Pact is only capable of withstanding so much internal meddling without flying apart- if he quashed ALL dissent, and ensured EVERY Councilmember was friendly to his causes, then the Pact would likely tear apart at the seams, with no other outlet for its competing nationalisms and regional interests. Further, one might argue that arranging the composition of the Council at all is intrinsically destabilizing, and likely contributes to the instability and indecisiveness of the body- especially if the other Councilmembers are aware of Redbeard's manipulations. Personally, I don't think I'd argue that Redbeard is primarily to blame for the Farlands' issues regarding the Pact. I think most of the issues are intrinsic to the hegemonic, exclusive nature of the Pact. I do also think, though, that Redbeard is sort of a keystone in the Pact's structure, and that he is personally/morally complicit in its injustices. He's the sternest public face of the Pact, even if its workings are mostly impersonal and systematic. Redbeard absolutely wouldn't allow the Farlands to get that far. Any counter-Pact would have to be a public alliance- and in the unipolar world of Avadon, any non-Pact association of that sort would be perceived, by Redbeard and by the Pact more broadly, as not just a non-Pact association, but necessarily an anti-Pact association. Avadon would deal with it thusly, regardless of its actual stated or implicit intentions. It's not possible to deal in good faith when one party holds hegemonic power over the other. Probably the only sort of Farlands association or alliance that the Pact would countenance would be one that the Pact itself is party to, as enforcer or observer. Further, I don't believe a Farlands Pact is really especially possible. The Tawon are the only Farland that seems to have anything like a centralized government capable of contracting such an alliance. Khemeria seems to be a patchwork of petty chiefdoms, who are capable of acting in concert in wartime, but don't seem especially interested in unifying into a nation-state. I don't recall what Svorgald's mode of governance is, but it doesn't seem particularly interested in being a part of anything on the mainland. The Titan Peaks seem to be another patchwork of competing warlords; the Wretch Lands are the same, on a smaller scale. The Corruption obviously can't be much a part of anything. The dragons are too selfish and aloof to be bound to anything for long. This is broadly true. However, the position of Keeper clearly has wide latitude in conducting both foreign and domestic operations- and can only be removed by being killed, limiting their accountability- and someone who wanted to undermine the Pact could reasonably want to take the position in order to exercise that power against the Pact's interests, or to work to change the political culture within the Pact. Just because the Pact was founded on an exclusive model doesn't mean it must always be so. In particular, I think it's plausible that someone living in Lynaeus might feel that it'd be reasonable to let the non-Pact human nations to join the Pact- not even necessarily on unduly favorable terms to them, but at all. A lot of speculation about alternatives is outside the text of the games, in that the particulars of the player character's reign as Keeper aren't really detailed in the endings of any of the games. But I think the endings are vague precisely to allow a player to imagine that they work to further whatever their ideals are in whichever way they see fit.

I think it's possible to come to certain conclusions (which are up to interpretation) that support alternate readings of events. I think some of the particulars are impossible to know with certainty, given the limited view the player is given of the gameworld, and I think this uncertainty is deliberate, to allow a player to plausibly interpret events in varying ways in order to justify the different options they're given. I'm not sure I agree that Hanvar's Council has meaningful leverage over Redbeard. Their underfunding of Avadon is definitely part of its lack of preparedness when the war breaks out, but they don't really have any way of holding Redbeard accountable- Redbeard would absolutely reject and probably try to disrupt any attempt to form another unified security/counterintelligence organization to take Avadon's place; underfunding Avadon too much would leave the Pact totally defenseless; and Avadon 2 retcons things so that a Keeper can only ever be unseated by assassination, with their assassin taking the position. It's only in 3 that (at least part of) the Council is willing to resort to the last option, and their ability to do so depends entirely on the capability and sympathies of a random Hand- the player character. While the Council is indecisive and fractious regarding Dheless's war, I think part of this, at least, can be attributed to a) Redbeard himself admittedly not seeing Dheless's preparations until too late, and b) not cooperating with the Council, which probably extends to withholding what information he did have from them. Redbeard didn't originate the "Stone Wall Beyond" ideology of the Pact, but he definitely interprets it in an especially hardline way- in particular his willingness to actively disrupt the affairs of the Farlands isn't necessarily implicit in said ideology. His willingness to meddle in internal Pact politics could also be seen as rather contrary to "Open Arms Within." I don't think one has to believe the Farlands are superior to the Midlands states to think the Pact should be destroyed- just that they aren't any worse. There are also nationalists of the Pact states who want to see the Pact disbanded. All the Farlands united probably wouldn't be able to withstand the Pact if it chose to become aggressive or expansionist. They're geographically dispersed and just as fractious as the Pact states, while the Pact states are bunched together, meaning the Pact could pick them off one by one at will, even united, which is indeed what happens in 3. Dheless I think knew this, and thus he counted on destroying the Pact in a swift war while the Pact was weak, and before his allies fell to infighting. Further, from Dheless's perspective, there's really no other way for his country to escape the hegemony of the Pact. If the Farlands tried to unify politically or economically to counterbalance the Pact, Redbeard would absolutely disrupt this. The war is an act of desperation on the part of the Farlands, rather than a considered act of malice.

I can think of two basic angles of attack to justify removing/killing Redbeard ideologically. First, the internal one: I think it's possible to decide, from the perspective of a Pact loyalist, that Redbeard is a danger to the long-term health and stability of the Pact. He willfully arrogates a ton of power from the constituent states of the Pact, and isn't meaningfully answerable to the Council or the states individually. A Pact loyalist might decide that it's wrong for anyone to have as much unaccountable power as Redbeard has amassed. Prior Keepers evidently didn't have as much power as Redbeard has managed to gain, and a player might decide that they (or Protus) might, as Keeper, better play by the rules. I think it's also possible to conclude that Dheless's rebellion, and many other troubles the Pact has with the Farlands, are the results of Redbeard's harshness and cruelty to the Farlands- refusing to deal with them as equals, constantly reaffirming, in diplomacy, his and the Pact's superiority and right and ability to destroy them, refusing to even consider allowing anyone else to join the Pact ever. One might also draw the conclusion that the Council's instability is perhaps at least partly due to Redbeard's deliberate destabilization of and lack of cooperation with it. Second- a more external argument. Going further than the above criticisms, I think it is entirely possible for a player to conclude that the Pact is wrong and unjustifiable in toto. Its military and economic dominance over the Farlands, its rigid exclusivity, its racism against outsiders and nonhumans. Going forward from this, one might conclude that Redbeard is integral to holding the Pact together, and desire to remove him in order to weaken the Pact. Alternately, even if one doesn't think he's crucial in that way, a player might desire to take his place in order to exercise the powers of Keeper to undermine the Pact. From a role-playing perspective... the player character doesn't really have any sort of internal life or existence independent from the player. Any option the player is given (loyalty to Redbeard, disloyalty but declining to challenge him, siding with Protus, killing him oneself, etc) can be plausibly explained in in-universe roleplaying terms.

They're mostly just grandfathered in from the prior iterations of the games. In Exile/Avernum (not the Avernum re-remakes at hand), some areas are pitch-black to the extent that you cannot see more than a few tiles in any direction without lighting. In the re-remakes, lighting objects are just kind of an unnecessary novelty. You can still see pretty well without them, and having a light source doesn't eg let you see interactable objects you wouldn't otherwise. (The older games also had a "light" spell that rendered light sources mostly irrelevant, too.) The pylon syllables are, I believe, ostensibly mystical coordinates describing the location of the pylons. We don't get any substantial samples of Vahnatai text, mostly just names and honorifics and a smattering of random words. There's no underlying constructed language to either, though Vahnatai honorifics (-Bok, -Ihrno, etc) are an internally-consistent indicator of an individual Vahnatai's social status.

Recently read: Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges. Uneven. When a given story contains a solid alignment of idea and style (eg, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, The Library of Babel) it's spectacular. When they aren't quite aligned (Funes the Memorious, The South) the coy, oblique, allusive style feels like a tiresome smokescreen to cover for Borges's unwillingness to really develop an idea. Tales of Pirx the Pilot, by Stanisław Lem. Okay. Blunt, low-stakes stories in a setting where interplanetary travel, and all it implies, is common, and even boring. They work fine as escapist thrillers, but mostly lack the more cerebral appeal of Lem's better/mature work. Fiasco, also by Stanisław Lem. Lem's last and probably most pessimistic novel, and ostensibly the last Pirx story, this is almost exactly the opposite: almost all of the appeal is intellectual, especially since there is no happy or even emotionally-satisfying ending. Also Lem's last and most thorough treatment of the first contact scenario he returned to through his career. An extremely good book.