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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,070
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member, Administrator, Moderator
- Games I like
- Sundry, mostly board
- Books I like
- Science fiction, fantasy, some historical fiction
Comments
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(Quote) Great!
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Starters for Daughter of Redwinter posted...
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Great, I'll post starters later today
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All: how are we getting on with _Daughter of Redwinter_? If we're on track I'll post starters in the middle of next week but can wait a bit if people prefer
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Category now added, with book and author descriptions therein. Time to update notification preferences!
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(Quote) I'll set up the discussion area tomorrow
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(Quote) So... final choice?
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Who'd have thought the judges might come to a different conclusion than TTRPBC!!!
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(Quote) They both look interesting but Caribbean is a monumental length (898 pages according to Amazon, but some of that is an extract from another book). Maybe too long for a single month?
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There may well be some more chatter about Red Scholar's Wake now that the excitement of the weekend is past (we've had a major cycling event here in Cumbria on the same weekend as the coronation) but this is also to remind everyone that May's read w…
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Going back to the aspect of this question which addresses AR, I actually thought that this was well done and provided an interesting extra dimension to the story. Not just "what does it look like compared to what it actually is" but also &…
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(Quote) Which itself raises another bunch of interesting questions and potential book topics! For example when Rice Fish and Xich Si have sex, do we understand this as a lesbian human relationship, or as sex between different species? Not unlike Lar…
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To add to that list of questions - is a shipmind - human relationship normal or unusual (whether same sex or different). Or do shipminds normally hook up with other shipminds?
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(Quote) Totally agree - is being turned into a ship mind a reward or a punishment? Does the individual and/or their parents (adopted, biological?) have any say in it or is it simply something imposed - a bit like being a eunuch in former days. How d…
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(Quote) I guess that's another area where details were scanty :)
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That's a good point - we manage pretty well with Roadside Picnic or the one we all read about the magic school (the name escapes me) by Russian / Soviet authors, presumably as there's still enough points of contact that we get the drift. And we did …
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I suspect that a gaming group would find themselves creatively enhancing some of the very scanty descriptions and making something much more immersive.
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I think this is an interesting point. (Which also bears upon the Discord conversation about good SF books to potentially recommend to people). Back in the days of my youth, SF was a fairly marginal genre which was looked down on by serious writers, …
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Dealing with an entirely minor point in your discussion starter, I'm not at all sure that people were poor - there were several passages which stated that they were, but nobody seemed to have any difficulty finding resources when they needed them. P…
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(Quote) Though I had reservations, I'm glad to have read the book and was never at any risk of not finishing it :)
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I think I've probably tackled most of these points elsewhere. In brief, I didn't know enough about the world to get immersed, but felt that there were far too many unrevealed features. And the romance felt like teenage fixation rather than adult re…
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I finished the book a while ago and sadly it hasn't really stayed with me, except for the residual feeling that it could have been so much more. I agree that the romance was weak - the dynamic between the two parties came over to me more as adolesce…
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It took me quite a while to realise it was Vietnam (oddly, the use of Viet didn't alert me :) ) and until that point I was assuming Chinese, which has similar structuring of language and appropriate respect built in very deeply into the culture. But…
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As discussion about Riddley Walker seems to have slowed down this is a good time to remind us all about April's read, The Red Scholar's Wake, by Aliette de Bodard, chosen by @NeilNjae - it's already in the monthly discussions area
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Back with speed of movement, I had an interesting contrast earlier this week when we did a long walk along the Helvellyn ridge, north to south. Basically we got a bus to the starting point and walked home - about 19 miles which we did in about 9 hou…
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Having read a few of Hoban's books now, my impression is that his first step in writing a novel is to find what becomes the conceptual core. In a few cases this is a piece of artwork (the St Eustace mural here), in others it is a place or building. …
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Riddley's society is, I think, driven strongly by symbol and multiple meanings in words (as presumably is Russell Hoban). So most of the RW-speak coined words are puns blending several possible meanings. We learn (as readers rather than characters, …
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We've had three days in a row of glorious sunshine here (albeit cold) so I am behind with commenting... but will catch up tomorrow hopefully :)
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All: here is a picture of the St Eustace mural... (Image) There's also some detailed images at https://castlesandcoffeehouses.com/2016/04/29/st-eustace-in-canterbury-cathedral/
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Could one (as a GM) successfully build a world by misinterpreting an old piece of artwork? That's basically what Hoban has done in fiction, but I don't know if it would work in a game?