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NeilNjae
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- NeilNjae
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Wilderness travel can be difficult to game, because it's mostly reactive ("situation X appears, can you handle it?") and there's often little player decision-making that goes into it (you either successfully find a good campsite or you don…
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Yes, I don't think the story ended so much as stopped. There was next to no closure there. And if the pop science angle was about women actively choosing their mates from a selection, there was no real competition of mate choice. Enjoyable enough, b…
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The experience of pain seemed plausible (it resonates with other chronic pain suffers have told me). On the one hand, it was good to have the representation in the book, and raised awareness of the condition. On the other hand, I'm not sure how it c…
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(Quote) It seemed to be a research institute and sanctuary for the apes. There were mentions of low numbers of apes in the wild. In that case, the visitors are a source of supplementary income and an audience to educate about apes. And I did like t…
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I think the Aftermath was there to show how the bonobos and humans formed a single community. After all, Schulman is trying to say that Frankie takes the place of Mama as the group's matriarch. As a story, I don't think it makes a great deal of sen…
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Maybe, but I think a better description of it would be "dramatised pop-science." Is there anything about the behavioural or medical aspects that's fictional? There are a couple of bits of technological extrapolation, such as the AR devices…
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For information, the Lyons translation of Arabian Nights is about 2600 pages, and my Fagles translation of The Odyssey is about 400 pages (but those are two-third length lines of "spoken lines"), plus introduction and notes. And there are …
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Actually, a couple of alternative suggestions, if we want to get away from the standard of reading "SFF novels of the last fifty years." One is the current Humble Bundle of RPG guide books, which features a bunch of books to supplement RP…
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Nothing leaps out at me as being an urgent read. One book I may suggest is Ninefox Gambit, which re-appeared on my radar because it has an RPG coming out. The downside is it's the first of a trilogy, but I don't know how stand-alone it is.
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(Quote) I agree that in this case, I wasn't in the right frame of mind to enjoy the book. Perhaps if I'd read it at some other time, I'd have enjoyed it. On the other hand, the general opinion of this book isn't effusive, so I don't think I'm missi…
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This is my only comment on the book. I barely started it because I found the pace far too slow. There were pages and pages of description and padding that I just skimmed over, before abandoning the book. This probably had a lot to do with my state o…
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(Quote) As I understand it, in this setting, ship minds aren't human and were never human, and will always become ship minds. They're not (I think) humans that are chopped up and trapped in a ship. That shuts down a bunch of questions about "h…
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Ah, "what is SF" and "what is genre". I think this book could be an exploration of ideas. What does a non-WEIRD spacefaring culture look like? How can you have personal relationships across "species" boundaries? (This c…
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Like @Apocryphal , I found the characters thin and the romance perfunctory. Like @RichardAbbott , I thought the romance wasn't a meeting of minds and a growing affection, but an instance of lust at first sight.
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I'm in agreement with everyone here. I've read a couple of de Bodard's novellas in the same setting, and enjoyed them. I've also enjoyed a couple of here full-length novels. I think this book was another decent novella, but there wasn't enough to su…
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(Quote) I believe you're incorrect here, but I only know that because I asked de Bodard directly! The mindships in the Xuya universe (this book) aren't trapped disabled humans, they're a separate class of being that are only ever going to be in a sh…
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Yes, Riddley's worldview is one of symbols upon symbols. He's an "unreliable" narrator, I think, in that what he narrates isn't direct physical reality, but what it should be like in a neat folktale. For instance, when Granser mixes the gu…
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My interpretations: I thought the painting was inspiration for Hoban, more than something directly in the book. I didn't make the connection to the WW2 bombs: I thought 1 Big 1 was the nuclear war ("the big one") and Little Syning Man was…
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I think the misinterpretation of St Eustace is just one element of the book. And I've seen a few examples of people basing RPG campaigns on prog rock albums.
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Bits of it reminded me of Heroquesting in Glorantha, where the questers enter they mythic world to recreate the stories of the gods, and gain some benefit from it. Riddley's journeys came across in the same way, of him following a set script (or int…
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Yes, I got caught in the lack of commas too. "Greevus" I took as coming from the offence of assault causing Grevious Bodily Harm (GBH), a particular charge in the UK, and more sever than Actual Bodily Harm (ABH). A cock pheasant's squawks…
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One thing I think is that Riddley is someone who sees the symbolic meaning in everything. Everything that happened to him was, in his mind, connected to and an echo of something from a story or tradition. His whole world is suffused in symbolism. A…
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I found most of them pretty clear. It may help that the book seems well-situated in the South East England of the 1970s, which were my formative years. The anticipation of nuclear holocaust, and the ongoing effects of it, were just part of the every…
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It was believably Kent, and it was pretty clear to me that the 1 Big 1 was a nuclear war. Split the Addom, particles in the hart of the stone, and all that. I thought the setting was pretty Kent-like. The country is tame and mild, with a few rollin…
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I found the writing hard going. I normally don't sound out words when I'm reading (and therefore get bemused by people talking about "the rhythm of the writing", as I don't hear the words at all). But for this book, I had to slow down and …
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Here's a clip of a Kentish accent. It starts a bit "Standard English" but the accent gets more pronounced as he goes on. https://youtu.be/5S8JR4eJAXA?t=592
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I think you mean "Kent and Sussex are south of the Thames." Riddley Walker is set n Kent the far south-east of England ("Do It Over" on the map is Dover, as in White Cliffs of). Sussex is the next county west of Kent, also on th…
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It seems the choice has been taken from me. I've been ambushed by the arrival of my pre-ordered The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi;I'll have finished it long before we get to April. So, April will be The Red Scholar's Wake!
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For April, it's a toss-up between The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (review) and The Red Scholar's Wake (review), both of which are on my "to be read without a moment's hesitation" list. Any preferences?
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Things would get more interesting if there was a world with equivalent people and technology, and repeated visits there. There could be trade of ideas between the two (you have 36 hours to memorise these blueprints, so we can build McGuffins on Eart…