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Apocryphal
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- Apocryphal
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Comments
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Oh, and I'd definitely like to play in Baghdad, the setting - but I'd need way more info. That said, I think you could take some of what's in this book and import it into a 'Thief of Baghdad' campaign.
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Yeah, I really like the justice theme and I think it's well worth trying to build something around. A supers game would likely work. Characters play superheroes, but their actions keep pushing them further into murky moral territory. How far will th…
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So, one of the things that I got from the book was that justice was fleeting, and also individual. There was quite a lot of 'what goes around, comes around.' The state, which is the body nominally responsible for law and justice, certainly wasn't ha…
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I've been told the word 'allegory' refers specifically to biblical references, so I acknowledge its probably not the right word, but I figured it could stand colloquially. Often we read things and @RichardAbbott or @NeilNjae or @BarnerCobblewood po…
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I think there’s maybe a reason for how and where it ended, but let’s try to unpack that over discussion. It was not quite what I expected, but I wouldn’t say I was disappointed in it. I think I was expecting something more immediate and events fo…
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I’m reading Klara right now. Klara is an ‘artificial friend’ who is purchased for an affluent teen or pre teen. It reminds me of the Somni sections of Cloud Atlas.
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Ok, I’ll put up questions as soon as I can.
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How's everyone doing with this book?
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Nice - appetite whetted.
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😂
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@clash_bowley Did you have any opinions?
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By way of contrast, I’ve been reading the Tower of Babel series by Josiah Bancroft, which opens with the novel Senlin Ascends. I bought it mainly for what I thought would be dystopian themes and because I thought it would have interesting things to …
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For reasons similar to Neil, I've also never really tackled military stories. And I have no strong desire, too. Perhaps unlike Neil (I can't say), I'm also held back by my own need to try to 'get things right' in terms of military culture. I could p…
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Rote but well-written steampunk military fiction. Does the bare minimum to check off the genre boxes, but offers nothing more.
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Was there a story? I'm not sure there was much of a story to intrude upon, to be honest. I level the same criticism at the Sharpe series, where I'm convinced books 3-9 (nine is a far as I've read) are all the same story re-told. What really happened…
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I quite liked the writing overall. When I talk about writing, I'm thinking in terms of word choices and sentence structure, rather than how the plot was assembled or the kind of content present in the book. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it w…
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Nor I. Thanks for doing the heavy lifting, @NeilNjae lol.
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I think I mostly liked Bernat, not as a person but as a character for his variability. I guess his inconsistency felt real. The rest might as well have been cribbed from Blackadder.
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I was expecting more or less military fiction along the Sharpe lines, and that’s pretty much what I got. I don’t have high expectations from the steampunk genre, as they mostly seem to be unoriginal copycats in terms of setting trappings. There was …
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Yes, the Guardian review above says “The first book ends with Guo Jing embroiled in an incipient love triangle, and approaching the trial by combat that has been his destiny since birth, while the Song dynasty dangles by a thread.” So that definitel…
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There don’t seem to be any objections to my choice, so I think we can lock and load it. Which month is Elizabeth Bear?
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Judging by the review, it’s not a self contained novel and will end in a cliff-hanger. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read it, so long as we all know what to expect. Reading a different genre of fantasy would be interesting.
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I'm leaning toward Frankenstein in Baghdad by Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi. I expect it's more literary fiction than genre fiction, but it was nominated for both the Arthur C. Clarke award and the Man Booker. It won the International Prize for Arabic …
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I think there probably are, but quite often the stories were one-offs that could really be assembled in any order, and that's largely because there isn't an arc between the stories. Or not a strong one. That's not universally true, though - Moorcock…
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That's an interesting question, and again without knowing more about the author I wouldn't presume to guess. In once sense, these is perhaps a study of Lovecraft hidden within the book. On one level, you could read into into things that speculative …
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Oh, definitely less. With authors like Asimov and Clarke and Robinson, one feels like their works have shaped the future.
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I didn’t really think about it at the time. When I started reading the novel I was thinking we were in the pulp era, maybe 1920-30, so that wouldn’t have been all that unusual for all these academic adventurers to be white men. Later on, I lost trac…
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Again, pretty pulp.
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We’ll, neither the archaeology nor the science was convincing, but we’re talking about something that is trying to emulate pulp magazine fiction. The locations? I suppose so - didn’t really note them.
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Well, it was generally ok, but OMG ‘the rate of suicides in ancient Hattusa’ is just not something anyone is ever going to be able to study, so that was pretty ludicrous. I had to learn to let that go pretty quickly.