beamingIbex

u/alb@reddthat.com
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Why do you think he is “another imposter”? I don’t remember either the book or the game talking about successful innocent imposters.

The glossary of the tauri translation of the book mentions that there have been 6 elected innocences but only 4 of them were legitimate. So I think it's possible for someone to claim to be an innocence but isn't. Maybe the word imposter isn't the right word to use here.

but the book very much makes it clear to the reader, that the world is going down

Yeah, Revachol being nuked, and the pale consuming Vaasa really made the world seem grim and hopeless. Also would have been interesting to see what the Saint Ambrosius would do, whether he's a real innocence or another imposter, and how far would Mesque go in their war. I read somewhere online that there's a shivers check in the game where Harry can sense that Revachol would be destroyed in 20 years, I never found it personally.
Other than the war, the book seemed to end by setting up Khan and Zigi's missions. Felt like the whole book was just a prologue to their respective quests. Now I'm not sure who controls the IP of Elysium and whether Kurvitz' next game is even set in the same world or if they're creating a new setting.

First, which English translation is considered better in your eyes?

I read the group tauri(?) one first, and like you I was confused and weirdly upset when I finished it. I guess I just really wanted closure. Then I discovered the team Ibex translation and read that immediately afterwards.
As to which one is better, I wanna say team Ibex, but it's hard to give an objective assessment seeing how I read it after already reading the first, and a second reading in general really helped me with this book, especially with its wildly non-linear structure.

What happened to the girls?

I saw a lot of fan theories online. I don't like headcannon and was trying to find specifically anything backed up by evidence or allusions in the book. I don't know what happened, but I think after their disappearances they've been becoming a non-entity.
You mentioned the image that the agent showed Tereesz near the end of book. The agent was very clear that he had the image developed several times, and the negatives forensically tested, to make sure they weren't tampered with, and yet the girls disappeared from them. Even their own mother didn't have pictures of them in her house, and when the boys visited her she was staring oddly at the pictures of the girls that Tereesz gave her like she was trying to remember them.
I think the girls are literally being wiped from history, as to how? Probably something tied to the Pale.
The book has a short chapter explaining the concept of a non-entity, how sometimes it's deliberately initiated by people, I think Rodionov and co were investigating it.
Ignus Nilsen seems to have been interested in the concept, he even has a model of the Harnankur placed in a museum where dozens of eyes are looking at it constantly 24 hours a day, because almost everything related to Harnankur has disappeared, including (at the end of the book) the only other remaining model which Khan had.
So whether they escaped or just vanished and got swallowed by the Pale isn't clear, but what is clear is that they're slowly becoming non-entities.

What happened with Jesper leaving Khan?

I think he just decided to finally forget the girls.
This part describes the self-chiller (awesome character btw) doing his thing when Khan and Tereesz met him, "The only sign of life in the lifeless tableau of the Lund children is the eerie, impossible memory of someone named Jesper.". I assume the self-chiller has some sort of ability to find things through the pale, and the only thing he could find about the Lund girls at that moment was the memories of Jesper who was surfing dozens of kilometers away.
The game (and the book I think) both describe the pale as being the memory of the world, which ties to the concept of non-entity.

why is the genocidal campaign of Ambrosius advancing the Pale?

I'm not sure I can answer this but there is a part in the book that might give us some insight here. When Zigi was talking to Ignus Nilsen in the Pale, and Ignus started describing comradery and cooperation in building a state, for a moment Zigi's chest lit up and the Pale receded around him. I'm not sure if this means Nihilism causes the Pale to advance and Communism is supposed to cause it to recede, or maybe this is just my naive and simplistic interpretation.

I also wouldn’t really recommend it to anybody but hardcore fans.

Honestly, I think I have very mixed feelings about the book. For one it's an enjoyable world with interesting characters, but the hard and depressing tones really put me down when reading it, maybe I'm just an overly empathetic creature.
The lack of closure was also disappointing, I know it was an introduction to a series of novels, but that doesn't change the fact that we don't have those novels and probably never will. So we're left with lack of closure.

Like I said I don't necessarily like headcannon and speculation so I tried to tie things from information found in the book itself. Some of these I definitely didn't notice myself and found them online. One particular source that I liked a lot -because they just tried to explain the book in simpler terms without speculation- was this 3 episode long podcast, this link is the first episode.

The book gave me very different vibes than the game to the point that I sometimes forgot they're related. The book was very depressing to the point that the author dedicated an entire chapter tying up secondary and tertiary characters and none of them seemed to have a happy ending.
If it ever continues I'd be most interested in seeing what both Khan and Zigi do.

I was very happy to see this thread tbh, since when I read the book most content I could find about it online was months if not years old, I was hoping for a lively discussion.
Sorry for the wall of text.
Also Khan is GOAT.
I keep adding things but here's a nice song.

on Recorde of Maths · c/historymemes · 15 pts · 114d

Sometimes the reasons are historical or due to the fact that certain mathematical objects weren't yet developed at the time, or just not known to the mathematician.

As an example take James Maxwell, when he worked on what are now called Maxwell's equations, he didn't use vector notation, and they were a bit less than 2 dozen equations, now they're more commonly taught with vector notation and are written more concisely as four equations, going even further using tensors you can group them into two equations only.