Help offset server costs by donating. This is totally optional. Any overages will go to library fines or new books.
BarnerCobblewood
About
- Username
- BarnerCobblewood
- Joined
- Visits
- 2,761
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member
Comments
-
I thought its setting could easily be used in most any game, but I'm not sure that I know players who would remain committed enough to their characters to make it worthwhile. I think it would quickly devolve into what the novel devolved into - this …
-
I thought the setting was one of the best aspects of the book. Its discussion of law provided a persuasive context within which we could understand how character's motivations produced the actions which did not produce the outcomes they desired. Th…
-
Well they were fighting puppets using marionettes as troops. Not necessarily the highest level monster. Apologies for being mostly absent. Have a couple of things to say, but quite busy this weekend. Should post this evening or Monday. BC
-
Pretty much the same as @RichardAbbott.
-
> @RichardAbbott said: > (Quote) > ... my impression from his fiction is that while he would accept that scientific advance can result in problems, the answer is better science and social change to accommodate this. So for example in Thre…
-
@RichardAbbott Like @Apocryphal I wondered if he had read much English language science fiction. Do you think he could consider 'science' to be the villain in hard sf, e.g. causing climate disaster, and so to be rejected by the reader?
-
Will be ready tomorrow.
-
> @RichardAbbott said: > > This is a fascinating thought, and of course you're right - any game tends to get stale, even if there are random elements within it (eg position of starting tiles or whatever). For me it also linked into curre…
-
So I don't quite know where to put this. Might go better in the Story question, or the Gaming one. Anyway, I'm not sure if Eversion can be "used" for gaming, but I did think about how the structure does in some way reflect the fact that a…
-
I'd be happy to read the Saint of Bright Doors. Radix would also be okay. Slightly worried about the length and serialization aspect of the book, but as long as it doesn't just leave everything in the middle so we are supposed to read the next book …
-
I didn't really see the eversion as performing any structural or mimetic function at all. If it was supposed to provide the basis for some kind of insight about identity, Reynolds needed to connect the dots (get it?) more explicitly for me. And for…
-
By the end I thought this was a weakness with the book as a novel. There weren't really characters. They were more place-holders to reveal the clever conceit. The difficulty is that conceits are like 0-calorie snacks. We're better off if we don't ea…
-
As I said, I recognised the computer game trope, and so knew that Silas was "beyond" the narrative. God-like in the Abrahamic sense. I think there's something here about navel-gazing and solipsism, and the dead-end of independent sovereign…
-
I thought it was an attempt to incorporate the kind of structures we find in repetitive computer rpg gaming. It didn't really work for me. It was especially a slog at the beginning.
-
@RichardAbbott I've only read the first story, and it was like being in a comfortable chair. The big difference was the quality of the authorial voice. Thanks for mentioning it.
-
Thanks @RichardAbbott I've looked up a copy of the book at the library. (Quote) I wanted to add that the "unreliable narrator" is a way to restore the ambiguity and uncertainty that I am talking about here without disrupting the social co…
-
Thanks to everyone for the replies. I guess I need to say that I don't think the article is of very high quality, or particularly original. But I think it deals with the issues that have resonated with me since we read the 1001 Nights in the slow re…
-
Here is the quote. I got it from https://biblioklept.org/2017/09/19/the-shock-of-dysrecognition-philip-k-dick-defines-science-fiction/ One of the interesting things about this is that it seems for Dick that SF depends on the reader as much as the t…
-
So I have some other comments, and don't know where to put them exactly. So I'll post them as kind of side notes. I own a robot which cleans my floors. Is my robot on the spectrum? Of course not. Is it a slave? No. Thus I think this book has nothin…
-
Like @clash_bowley and @Apocryphal I don't see much in the setting that makes it unique. As for playing with people trying to be murderbot, I think the games would look like a min-maxing railroad.
-
As @Apocryphal said somewhere, the world building makes it hard to understand what the world is, other than a cipher for events to occur in. Is this because it is about an autonomous and intrinsic individual, for whom the world and the people in it …
-
I think the key word here is stereotypical. It's a space opera. Technology is not what this story is about. I think I remember a quote from PKD about this. I'll try to dig it up.
-
I think that in the long term violence doesn't deliver the results that help motivate its performance. See my comment about eating desert in question 1. @Apocryphal has got it about right. Technology which extends human activity (see MacLuhan et al…
-
It's a book about first world problems. As for slavery, there are many kinds of being bound, and being bound is by itself not slavery. Also, what does intelligent mean? A better angle might be to speak about sentience and obligation, but that raises…
-
This is a tough question. I think they're good, the way a candy bar is good, or that extra piece of pie and ice cream with a little liquor. In other words, good but also not good. The longer it goes, the less good it is. Probably by the end it is ac…
-
@RichardAbbott On the other hand I would say that efforts to separate style from substance, while maybe justified in terms of analysis, should not be used to rescue the evaluation of the whole because it is the style which is the foundation for the …
-
Fair enough. I guess I think that in fantasy the magic is the food and not the icing. It nourishes us differently than journalism. Did you find any magic in Shardik? Or nourishment? I think it's interesting also that, judging by memories of it be…
-
> @Apocryphal said: > > In what way isn't it a fantasy? <snip> Usually, a 'fantasy' is a story with impossible elements - either the setting doesn't and couldn't exist, or things in the book (like dragons and magic spells) don't or…
-
So I've been trying to finish this, but haven't. So perhaps my comments are off the mark. Anyway, like many others here, I think this author needed an editor. I wasn't disturbed by the religion aspect of the imagined society, but I don't really …
-
Edited because same as earlier post