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Apocryphal
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As we're reading (or thinking back on the read) I thought I'd post a few photos of some re-created historic settlements. This first batch is from Tsiionhiakwatha Archaeological Site near St. Anicet, Quebec, on the south side of the St Lawrence rive…
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I can order Five Decembers as a hardback, so I'm OK if you want to proceed for February.
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Hmmm. Good to know.
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I have no issue with quality musicianship, and I like that prog bands experimented and made long, variable songs. But even so, I like them to still be melodic and, you know, hummable. A lot of, for example, King Crimson’s driving metal work doesn’t …
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This is just to remind folks we'll be discussing The Orenda by Joseph Boyden at the end of the month.
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Could it get your name in The Guiness Book of World Records? I also had a major musical project, which was to listen to every obscure 70’s Progressive Rock album I could find. This amounted to over 1000 albums, not just from the 70’s and not just…
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Happy New Year to everyone, Here's a stock of what I what I read this year, and what I purchased for reading in future years. This year I managed to set a new record for both the number of books (85 books) which beats my old record by a whopping 13…
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Speaking of Lancasters, if you guys want to come and visit me we can organize a group ride in a Lancaster: https://www.warplane.com/aircraft/flights/buy.aspx
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Yes, I also enjoyed it very much. I thought it was a much more successful novel than The Gradual, with it’s nonsensical adepts. Sure, not much is explained in The Adjacent, but at least in a broad sense it is explainable as a million spheres type se…
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Makes sense! Though I'm not sure he's playing with us, so much as just giving us variations on Florence. I suppose they're all named after the city in their respective languages? It would be like using James, Diego, and Hamish. Not sure this can be …
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That reminds me - there's an H.G. Wells book The War In The Air I've been meaning to read.
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Yes, quite a long section - about a third of the book. And it'd divided into three parts. Each part is given a name, which corresponds to a patois meaning for Prachous. The first part is FENCE. You are quite correct about the schizophrenic nature o…
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Actually I was confusing it with Foundry. There’s also Fantasy Grounds, and some people use Discord for online gaming. But as it turns out the platform we’re going to use is Roll20. Lawrence tells me “ It’s easy to use, is a lot better for disp…
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We switched to online sometime after the pandemic started and since then we added one player. At first we were using Google Hangouts and I used my phone as a dummy, aimed down at my notepad, to share maps and roll dice. When Hangouts folded, we …
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PART 6 - THE COLD ROOM And we're back to Warne's Farm on Tealby Moor with Tibor Tarrent and his new friend, Lou (full name: Marie-Louise Pejman). They pass several days, enduring a severe wind storm. During these days, they seem to be the only peop…
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Priest seems to know a lot about planes, and I wonder if he’s an enthusiast, or just did research for this novel. It’s possible that the Anson and some of the Lancaster were made here in Ontario. From the Avro Canada page: “ National Steel Ca…
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PART 5 - TEALBY MOOR The action in this section mainly takes place at RAF Tealby Moor in 1943, where aircraft maintenance technician Mike 'Floody' Torrance is based. When the section opens, we first learn something of Lancasters, and a little more …
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I think it was mentioned in the previous chapter, but I can’t recall specifically. For some reason I was expecting it.
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I think think you are quite correct that this is an alternate reality, rather than something purely in the past. This Tibor will never forget the encounter. The other has (or never had it? Does that suggest that ‘Flo’ has learned facts from across r…
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PART 4 - EAST SUSSEX Not to be confused with south Essex. The year is sometime after 2023. Our main viewpoint character in this section is Jane Flockhart, a journalist. She's in East Sussex to interview a physicist named Thijs Rietveld, who is most…
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Good summary! No, indeed, Priest doesn't seem to like either the military or bureaucrats. He's forever describing how unimaginative people can make what ought to be simple exchanges a real bore as soon as one piece of their formula is missing. I ge…
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We’ll, it seems reasonable to assume she wrote this in English for a NA/UK audience, which is why all the Yoruba (etc.) words are italicized, and none of the English ones are. I’m pretty sure she knew that a need to spread soil on ones skin would se…
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Couldn’t it be more a function of the fact that it’s really four short stories combined in one book?
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I agree that’s the likely explanation. However if it’s dissatisfying when the Americans do it, it’s equally dissatisfying here.
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How do they make all those PAs without factories? This was the same issue with the Broken Earth trilogy. The world isn’t really developed beyond what’s needed for the story and theme, and so seems unexamined.
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Like Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker series, it's a "Trilogy in four parts".
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I wouldn't say it was YA (more like Bro Fiction, romancing the ultimate man-cave and solving problems with logic). It definitely had a huge wish fulfillment element and (as I said at the time) I thought the main character was a Mary Sue. None of whi…
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Speaking for myself, I had lots of ideas as an undergrad. Most of this ideas didn’t grad school (and neither did I, having dropped out once all the ideas were sucked dry :-))
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Or if the universe is an RPG? “Binti’s player started treeing:. _’Attribute plus skill plus passion, modified by advantage... 75% chance to succeed? Ok, I’ll go for it!’_
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I thought I read early on in the first or second story that the desert people were in the middle, or at least always suffered when the other two people fought.