Help offset server costs by donating. This is totally optional. Any overages will go to library fines or new books.
NeilNjae
About
- Username
- NeilNjae
- Joined
- Visits
- 1,821
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member
Comments
-
I didn't pick up any particular subtext or exploration of issues, beyond what's commonplace in Napoleonic fiction: the notion of duty and sacrifice, the British class system, the restricted role of women, that kind of thing. As for the Laurence-Tem…
-
Like @Apocryphal , I thought the worldbuilding of dragons was too contrived. I could believe that many weren't that intelligent, but... they were intelligent enough to become fluent in a human language by just eavesdropping on it from within the egg…
-
The characters all seemed to fit the standards of Napoleonic / Regency society, at least as far as I know them. The mix of class-based ranks and meritocracy is something I've seen in other fiction set in the time (it seems like a period of increasin…
-
I was reminded of the advice given to new authors on how to start a story: write the story as you would want to do it, then go back and remove the first chapter or two. Those are often the equivalent to throat-clearing and preparation for the actual…
-
I've finished Temeraire. I've not read either Harkfast or Planet of the Apes, so looking forward to them.
-
Sorry, Doomwatch was a bit before my time. But there is a tradition of the British taking a rather more cynical view of technological progress than our American cousins. My favourite example is Blake's 7 being the British version of Star Trek : afte…
-
I think you're right, in that a lot of the technology ideas were around (I was an avid watcher of Tomorrow's World back in the day). These writers did see the social trends and extrapolated them. I think the confluence of decentralisation and disint…
-
I think a key theme of these stories is how technology alienates us. Martine's books may have the same technology, but there it's to reinforce an imperial hegemony.
-
I think that cyberpunk now has transformed into yet another power fantasy genre. The protagonists of Cyberpunk Red (the game) and The Matrix (the film) are far from ordinary people. They've got special powers, whether through cool cyberwear or gnosi…
-
My thoughts on the stories: * Gernsback Continuum: a nice way of both pointing out how disorienting modern technology can be, and how dystopian the world really is, only we don't notice it most of the time because it's "normal" now. * Sna…
-
Nootropic drugs were all the rage in Silicon Valley circles for a while, along with microdosing pyschadelics I think. I agree that these stories don't fit the contemporary vision of cyberpunk (as influenced by Cyberpunk Red and Shadowrun ) of high-…
-
Wikipedia has > His Majesty's Dragon, published in the UK as Temeraire, and the blurb seems to fit.
-
(Quote) It was hard to come up with questions about a collection: a lot of the usual questions don't apply. Sterling seemed to have done a good job analysing the stories, so why not see if his analysis holds up?
-
I meant "deregulation" as part of the neoliberal project that started with Regan and Thatcher. Privatisation of previously-national assets and industries, scaling back of the state if favour of individual solutions, deregulation of corpora…
-
Questions are up for Mirrorshades.
-
How are people doing with Mirrorshades? Shall I put up some questions tomorrow?
-
(Quote) That's the rub! It's easy to get caught up with the minutae of a particular action, and to fixate on just one way of approaching an obstacle. It's the idea of "fail forward" and "no repeated actions". You can do a quick r…
-
(Quote) I like travelogues, but ... maybe I'm just shallow, but I think moving pictures are a better medium for it. We're visual creatures, and images typically have a stronger impact than words. And we still get the words to go along with it!
-
> @RichardAbbott said: > Another interesting area that Tim Severin (sensibly) glossed over was the return journey. His book was focused just on "lets get to Colchis and make some cool historico-archaeological discoveries along the way&qu…
-
This was the "story" of a chunk of experimental archaeology, the historical re-enactment of a possible journey from Greece to Georgia. The Jason story was there as source material to guide that experiment. As such, I think Severin's treatm…
-
I think this is a form of record that's best in a different medium! I found the book a bit dull: I wanted more immediacy than Severin's words could conjure. I was happy when I found the TV documentary on YouTube, as that gave a more vivid impression…
-
Severin's account isn't a "story" in any meaningful change: there's no personal, internal journey to reflect the external one in the boat. The Severin that arrives in Georgia is essentially the same Severin that commissioned the boat-build…
-
(Quote) I was thinking of going retro and reading Mirrorshades, the short story anthology that kickstarted the cyberpunk movement. It's online for free at https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/
-
I'm British, and I'd never heard the term "Gobbo" outside Warhammer. It was my first time reading the Burton translation, and it's definitely set up to make the region exotic to British readers. I'm not sure I could cope with reading much…
-
Sorry, I was away at the weekend and didn't read the chunk before I left. I'll catch up.
-
And another sign of the times: it didn't occur to anyone that the women may have been sterilized, or on hormonal contraception, or something else. It's a general issue. On the one hand, I like that Varley treats sex as something normal for adult…
-
Another change missed could have involved the environment in Gaia. If it were less earth-like, the crew could have been physically changed to adapt to it. Maybe it is much colder, and the characters communicate by bioluminescent flashes, or somethin…
-
We learnt about the reproduction of Gaia-things in one of the exposition monologues at the end. A seed grows into a ring around a moon, it puts down roots to extract matter to grow, and eventually pops off. This has been going on long enough that Sa…
-
Given that Varley nicked most of the book from Ringworld, I think it should be easy enough to build a game on it. The obstacle will be information flow, so that it's not a case of the GM spouting exposition as the PCs explore parts of the mystery. B…
-
It seemed rather contrived and there to set up the next book. Varley had done all that work into the mechanics of how Gaia worked, so he was going to get a return on it if he could! One thing that dated the book was the reliance on crewed explorati…