No worries! I can take over for the rest of the book if you want. The only thing is I can’t add the links to the main post.
Out of curiosity, where are you in the book btw? You haven’t been commenting at all so I assume you’re quite a bit behind ^^’
Thank you for the offer!
Things should become more calm going forward so I should be able to manage the rest myself. Will shout when it still doesn’t work out!
I did not get too far in the book tbh… I was in too many book clubs and whatnot on top of being too busy all along. I‘m still planning to catch up soon as most of the other clubs are now under control
GODS this chapter was too long. YES IT’S VR I GET IT. This scene was painfully slow/long, and then we got it all over again from another point of view which really didn’t bring much?? And then again when they tell Saikawa about it. Is Mori getting paid by the page or something?
Currently read through part 6: It’s so weird to think this book is from 2001 while Sword Art Online is just 8 years later (2009). Completely different perception of VR. The thing Moe is wearing seems so clunky. Like cables? And a weird suit and gloves/boots? For real? What did that guy Hanawa(?) say: “it’s going to take another 10-20 years to be able to do this without the awkward suit thingie” or something like that.
Yeah, it is interesting seeing this kinda stuff now that we have hindsight. Obviously Mori was a bit off, but he was probably a lot closer than most people in ~2000.
Now we know the answer to the latter, at least. And the first theory is what I’m also starting to believe. If Fujiwara can be killed through VR, then why not Shinjou as well, right? It’s very spooky tho. How can a person through virtual reality wound and kill a person in the real world? ありえないでしょう、普通に
I ended up skimming some parts “Yes, yes, I know that’s how VR works. And you don’t have to explain the same scene thrice, thank you.” Did people back then have no common reference point of what VR is or how it works?
Btw, @miwuc could you add the link to the next thread in the OP for us, please?
I’m very sure that woman with the long hair, thick glasses and huge mask is Shiki in a weird disguise that really shouldn’t work outside of manga. She helped Fujiwara into the suit and she operated the computer. I’m sure she could have fitted that knife somewhere on the suit contraption and made sure the thing moved just right to kill Fujiwara. She moved behind him quickly, causing him to also turn around and move in a certain direction (possibly tangling he cables? Creating force on some point? Not sure on the details here)
And then when all is over she flees the scene. That’s pretty suspicious behavior.
I’m any case, I’m not sure why no one even raises the possibility of
there being a trick to it, rather than talking of dreams and illusions
.
Same could be said for Shinjou. For all we know Shiki manipulated the roomba (or the toaster) or something.
Even then you don’t need to have the same explanation three times in such quick succession.
This chapter was needlessly long. At least there were a lot of not even half filled pages.
Yeah, the last we see of her is in that scene from Saikawa’s POV just before he decides to go investigate on his own. She goes ‘into the elevator Moe had mentioned’ or something like that. After that she’s not mentioned again
.
I’m probably wrong on some or all accounts, haha. I usually am really bad with theories on mysteries. But that
woman seems suspicious to me!
I’m still not used to how the spoiler tags work now. Is it possible to only hide part of a paragraph without it changing the formatting?
I was just about to go to sleep when I had another wild idea.
So, let’s say the woman with the glasses is Shiki. (Or at least the perpetrator). What if, instead of setting up some sort of trick to knife Fujiwara at a certain point… She killed him there and then, and then the rest of his actions in VR and his voice were all input by her? The AI she created does very convincing voices after all…
This was a loooong description of this virtual world… and the more I read about it, the more I wondered why it was necessary to describe it to such extent. Did Mori just want to show off? But then I remembered book 2 (I think) with this ice testing thingie, and suddenly I thought that probably the vice president will soon be no more - that prediction hit pretty accurately
According to the author’s wikipedia page, the original publication is from 1998:
有限と微小のパン The Perfect Outsider（1998年10月 講談社ノベルス / 2001年11月 講談社文庫）
but that doesn’t really matter much, I guess.
True! The first kinda similar thing that I remember was the Wii console which was released in late 2006 (but I’m not a gamer so others probably know much more.). Of course it could be used without a suit and stuff, and you could play tennis with either hand (!), but it didn’t have much force feedback either.
Oh wow, well observed! I wouldn’t have come up with that one either.
Probably because Saikawa keeps his mouth shut until the last moment, as usual, and Moe is still in this dream state? Or maybe because Mori likes to confuse his readers?
Indeed, that was really quite boring to read. Especially his “technical explanation” in the third version… smh
I wondered about this too, and came across this device, which was developed in 1995, a few years before the book was published. It didn’t sell too well, and so probably not everybody knew about it (nor about the concept of virtual reality, which has appeared as a term in scifi novels in the 50s already): バーチャルボーイ - Wikipedia
It seems to use exactly the same method for the 3D effect that Mori also describes in the book so I wouldn’t be surprised if he was inspired by this or similar endeavors.
Yes, I was surprised about that as well. But of course it is missing the rest of what Mori describes (which would make it very impractical to use at home, so that makes sense )
so I should be able to manage the rest myself. Will shout when it still doesn’t work out!
Will probably start a bit later this week!
She helped Fujiwara into the suit and she operated the computer. I’m sure she could have fitted that knife somewhere on the suit contraption and made sure the thing moved just right to kill Fujiwara. She moved behind him quickly, causing him to also turn around and move in a certain direction (possibly tangling he cables? Creating force on some point? Not sure on the details here)
