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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 5,615
- 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) Good point, I'd forgotten the reliability part of that equation
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As some of you know, I've been reading my way through a compendium work called The Battle of Dorking and Other Invasion Stories 1871-1914 which includes a variety of variations on a theme - the chief variation being whether the adversary was the Ger…
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(Quote) Which is not unlike how things panned out for the author over the next decade or so
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Discussion area for Arkhangelsk now set up
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Discussion starters for Riddle of the Sands now in place
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How are people getting on with Riddle of the Sands? I'm planning to post discussion starters next weekend if everyone's happy with that
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(Quote) I can see we're all going to get adept at small-boat nomenclature :) I did a quick search in the kindle version, and an onlooker refers to Davies' boat as "your yawl". Also, the galliots are explicitly said to be "ketch-rigge…
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I've not heard of her either but sounds fun. If there's general agreement I'll set up the discussion area later in the week
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(Quote) Motivated by all this I went back and reread The Girl with all the Gifts - just finished last night and what a cracking book it is :) Better, I think, reading it the second time through, as you then have a better understanding of some of the…
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(Quote) I wonder - and this is spur of the moment writing so is not fully thought through - if the business of not looking at the Wilderness should again be seen as a metaphor? In the story, there is an injunction in the guidebook not to look at it,…
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What a cool idea!
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(Quote) I think there was the alternative longer route available - wasn't that how some of the travellers (Grey? The Professor?) had arrived in China in order to board the train? If so, then I guess folk decide to travel on this train either for spe…
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(Quote) I suppose Weiwei's motives for not reporting Elena were a) it was another person of (seemingly) about her own age so there's an identification with the plight, and b) there are some hints that Weiwei's relationships with the crew had drifted…
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I didn't get very far with Snowpiercer but didn't the plot revolve heavily around conflict between the two ends of the train? A bit like Silo (though of course that was vertical rather than horizontal) but even more so? Whereas here there was some i…
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> @clash_bowley said: > (Quote) > A fun occupation to do while not reading? :D B)
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Still some chatter going on regarding The Curious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands which has stimulated a lot of good stuff. This is also a reminder that July's read is Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, chosen by me. @clash_bowley any th…
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(Quote) What a cool idea! You could probably do some good scenarios based on Mountain Rescue or Coastguard teams.
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That's a nice read, thanks for sending the link. I was intrigued by this statement: (Quote) Again this relates to a common theme in the article that it all depends what "kind" of human is being assumed as the basis for comparison. So for…
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On a different tack, maybe it's always true that wildernesses divide people by their response - or at very least our collective response to wilderness changes with time. So regarding our own mini-wilderness here in Cumbria, in 1724 Daniel Defoe cal…
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(Quote) Going back to my "meaning of names" theory, Artemis is a fascinating one as a pseudonym for the Professor - the original Artemis was female, a hunter, a virgin, a protector through childbirth, and was a goddess associated with the …
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(Quote) Isn't that perhaps because neither first not third class passengers had any power? Both were entirely dependent on the train and crew to get them to the other side, and the first class lot didn't appear to have authority over the thirds to g…
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(Quote) Another similarity with The Girl with all the Gifts is that both books grew on me as I thought about them over a span of time after finishing them. I remember not linking Gifts much for the first 1/2 or maybe 2/3, and then being somewhat tak…
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That's an interesting quote and thanks for copying it here. And (for me at least) it raises a lot of questions about writing form. I do certainly agree that a (short) story has to have a strong focus, whereas a novel does not need every part to have…
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(Quote) Of course there's a fun double meaning here - we use "name" to not only mean a tag for a person, but also to mean "reputation". There's a Father Brown story (I forget which) where the plot turns on one character saying so…
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I felt the writing was competent rather than classy or poetic, and like @BarnerCobblewood felt it fitted the intention of the book insofar as I knew what that was. I suppose Elena should have been the voice of the Wastelands, and maybe became that …
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I guess the train is the Juggernaut here - relentless progress that annihilates. Except that at the end of the book the Wasteland has (as it were) recruited the train which is now juggernauting for evolutionary change rather than planned conquest. A…
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I kind of got lost the first time I read it (which maybe was an intentional authorial ploy) and then decided that the journey was open ended, with a slowly changing crew (Weiwei becomes the Captain and no doubt others drop in and out). The mysteriou…
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I think one of the high points of the book was the realisation that the train was in fact triggering or maybe initiating the changes that were happening in the wastelands - the attempt to isolate from them was doomed to failure. I did like the empha…
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As a PS, I was kind of disappointed not to see more of the Captain, given the big build up when giving Weiwei's back story
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I think that these are the current stereotypes, but I'm not convinced they are accurate. I was going to say that in particular it's disappointing to see religion presented purely as denial and dogma, but then it's equally disappointing to see scienc…