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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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Talking of Karlsen and faith, what (if anything) did people make of the prophecy about him? It felt to me like something that Saberhagen couldn't quite decide how to handle. So the Stone Place battle was obviously the high point, but what then? A…
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Your comments @Apocryphal made me consider the crucial difference between existential-threat type adversaries and tangible-and-killable type ones. Existential ones might be a spiritual enemy (Sauron maybe) or a force of nature (weather, glaciers, as…
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> @NeilNjae said: > Without A Thought was interesting because it obviously came about from Saberhagen reading about MENACE, a matchbox-based machine learning system (and, if you're interested, a description of a recent rebuild ). I spent a fe…
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I felt that the writing was the stand-out best bit of the book, and carried me along even when some parts felt very dated (the role of women and machine intelligence). He came over to me as an accomplished and confident writer who was well able to d…
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Actually I was never reminded of the Borg! They never forget their biological component, whilst clearly regarding it as incomplete, whereas the berserkers were implacably opposed to all life (well... in theory, though they did maintain some specific…
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For me there wasn't quite enough knowing how we had got to the situation in the first place. Have centuries or millennia passed since humankind moved outside the solar system? Did they learn by themselves how to use the c+ drive or were they taught …
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The role of women is, surely, very dated. They may well play important parts in the story, but they don't have important roles in society. So far as I recall not one woman was in the armed forces, or the various ruling groups of different planets - …
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It was quite refreshing to have centrally important characters who had faith which was considered and recognised doubt and difficulty rather than being blind fanaticism. Karlsen in particular exhibits this, and the dimension of the final story Face …
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Broadly speaking I preferred the longer stories to the shorter ones (hence Stone Place in particular) but that's largely because of a preference for more development than can possibly happen within a short story. Of the others, I particularly liked …
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On the whole yes, as they covered what appears to be a large fraction of the Earth-Berserker war (though omitting both the initial encounter and the final resolution). The different episodes included meshed well in terms of credible progress and dev…
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Whichever way we break it up, having an interim discussion at the end of November sounds good
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On the assumption that the second half of December might well be busy with other stuff, maybe option 3 is better (read the first three books)?
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(Quote) Ah yes you're quite right, I'd forgotten they started that early. Yes, I. Third Historian, have touched living minds, Earth minds, so deadly cool that for a while they could see war as a game. The first decades of the berserker war they wer…
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(Quote) Most of them no, but a few (eg Sign of the Wolf) have a short italicised paragraph written by The Third Historian of the Carmpan Race which basically sets the scene and if necessary fills in some background omitted between stories where the …
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Seems great to me - I very rapidly drop any participation in FB when time presses, and have long since stopped using Twitter for anything discursive. But this looks at first sight like a Good Thing and so thanks for setting it up.
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(Quote) From first impressions it seems easy and fun nattering with others though I'm sure I'm not really getting the proper purpose of it - currently it feels a bit like Twitter of (dare I say it) FB, though without the nastiness one encounters so …
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(Quote) I agree, this discussion has been very stimulating, not least because of your own addition. I don't think - for the purposes of this novel, at least - that the authenticity of the painting matters. Being perhaps more radical, I don't think i…
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Very cool, thanks for posting those
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(Quote) My Kindle version doesn't have that, but goes straight into Without a Thought after the standard list of where and when the stories were first published
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Hi all, as discussion continues for The Man who Fell to Earth, here's a quick reminder that October's read is Berserker, by Fred Saberhagen, selected by @Apocryphal who wil be setting out discussion starters around the end of the month.
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(Quote) I'm sold :)
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All this brings us back to another theme we have touched on already, namely what the novel is about on a metaphorical level. It's easy with today's eyes to see it as an ecological crisis story, with the central disaster of Icarus being ignored as ev…
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(Quote) That's why I liked him :)
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(Quote) That's really helpful, thanks. So if I'm reading this right, it's not really Icarus who is in focus, but the widespread disinterest in Icarus. Rather sobering, really... for him it was not an important failure
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> @BarnerCobblewood said: > Hi, Sorry to be late. Was away visiting my mother. > > I thought the story and all three characters were compelling. Thought it was a critical novel. It was interesting to for to think about how the story …
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That's an aspect of the book that has a lot of contemporary resonance - several notable recent politicians have sort to appeal to these unpublicised parts of society, claiming that they are the "real" America / UK / wherever, in contrast t…
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> @Apocryphal said: > I think the reaction of various people on earth to this alien is interesting. Some guess he’s an alien, but are willing to go along with him because he’s a nice guy (and can make them rich?) Even the government is conten…
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Could you invert the plot and have PCs working for an organisation in which they have to uncover the identity of the head? It's probably been done a gazillion times with Facebook and all
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I can't remember many details of the film, but I do remember Bowie in it as captivating the scenes that he was in. Like @clash_bowley I saw the film first, but on reading the novel I think Bowie has exactly the right blend of charisma and other-worl…
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It made me wonder, if Newton is Icarus (and he surely is) then who is Daedalus? That's an area that gets explored a little more in the recent streamed series, but not so much (I think) here in the original novel. And - perhaps pushing the analogy to…