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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,072
- 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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I have posted a selection of discussion starters in the appropriate monthly area... take part as you see fit :)
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Looking a little further ahead, for April we have @clash_bowley with the steampunk book The Guns Above by Robyn Bennis. @BarnerCobblewood May would be your month if you're keen on selecting a book this time around? please let us know either way.
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Hi all: just wondering how people are getting on with Colin Wilson's The Mind Parasites? If folk are nearly ready I'm happy to post discussion starters next weekend, which will be at the start of April
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Something else that just occurred to me today as an interesting subversion of tropes was the choice of Takahashi as a pacifist Japanese man. I don't think I have ever read before that there was such a group, but it's reasonable that they existed. Bu…
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I reckon my own choice for this month - Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson - is certainly a worse book :) I'm not convinced that I enjoyed re-reading it. It reads somewhat dated to me. However, I do think it has the potential to spark some interesting d…
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Agreed: for me it worked very well as a detective story - a genre I hardly ever read and even more rarely enjoy. I seem to remember we read another hard-boiled (or maybe noir) crime book some while ago and this one made a much greater impression on …
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Continuing these thoughts, this is one reason why I don't see this as a war novel.... the events of the war and the conditions of life for most of the population are largely absent. We only find out about the Kentepai (spelling?) at the point where …
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I have to confess that I was unaware of this convoy issue, and have just now read up about it.
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A lot of it is a genre conceit, I think! By some strange piece of synchronicity I saw one of those internet joke posts just yesterday about "how to succeed as a screenplay writer" which included the sage advice "a detective is incapa…
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(Quote) Yes, it's a classic problem in lots of media - I have read all kinds of agonised blog articles by both women and men authors as to how far to include "modern" attitudes to race, gender, sexuality etc in a historical book, tackling …
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(Quote) Is he naïve and hesitant? Or is he simply inexperienced except (presumably) with prostitutes? I agree that he doesn't seem to want to make advances to a woman he respects and potentially) loves, but routinely waits for them to make an explic…
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(Quote) In fact those three years were kind of glossed over in almost every way, which I found probably the most surprising and disappointing aspect of the book
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(Quote) I agree to the extent that he had become unable to successfully reintegrate into either standard American or Hawaiian society, and so went back to the only place he knew that he might find respite. Perhaps not unlike Frodo, his success at ri…
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(Quote) Yes, fair point. I guess what I meant to write was that "I'm not sure that any individuals here are either simplistic heroes or villains". All of the main ones have both likeable and unlikable qualities, so that their heroic or vil…
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(Quote) Quite a different level of detail from The Orenda, for example
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It's a challenging question for our age, I think. Over many millennia we have expanded the group of individuals to which we feel allegiance family -> village or clan -> tribe -> region -> nation. Lots of speculative fiction assumes that …
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I guess there are at least two levels to this very difficult question: first the existential one as to whether killing is ever morally justified in real life, and secondly the literary one of whether a killing as described in the book is gratuitous.…
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I think I'm sort of repeating @Apocryphal 's point, but I'm not sure that any individuals here are either heroes or villains. The protagonists have flaws (in some cases, serious ones) alongside their more noble qualities, and the villains are given …
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So far as I recall, all the major characters (good guys and bad) were duty-driven - probably the main exception is Fred Ball who apparently gets far too much pleasure in working over suspects. Conversely, Takahashi (father, not daughter) acts much m…
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I tend to agree with @Apocryphal though (as I have said elsewhere) I have little experience with some of these genres so can't comment with much confidence. Almost all authors I know (who are mostly indie, and mostly self-published, just to clarify…
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It's a long time since I did any gaming, but I remember one long-running game (two regular players, sometimes three, plus the GM) where we had to try to solve a problem not of crime but of insurrection - a vague and rather intangible group who would…
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It worked for me - but then I've read so little hardboiled books that the choice didn't strike me as unusual. Lots o books follow this particular narrative style, often switching viewpoint character between chapters or sections to give some varying …
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A question loosely connected to that. You say "It's that decision and action that I'm interested in" which I totally get. Now in a book narrative it is very common for a character to think they understand the situation and pursue a particu…
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I thought I'd start with an easy discussion starter :) Yes, I was surprised, not so much with the legwork part, which seemed to me to go along nicely with the type of story, but more with the gaps. It was really a story of Two Decembers, with an in…
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(Quote) Well worth catching up on sometime, but you're right it is not a quick couple-of-days read
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I've been thinking a lot about @BarnerCobblewood 's points, and how they actually apply to contemporary fiction as much as historical (by means of incorrectly representing professional conduct, or whatever). But rather than that, I wonder if I migh…
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I've finished it so good to go whenever suits
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Building on the fiction side in parallel with gaming, I think historical fiction in particular faces this problem. If you're writing contemporary fiction then your readership will judge you on how well you present contemporary life in whatever count…
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(Quote) But it was also (again trying to not give stuff away) about exploring different ways of going beyond individuality and isolation, and it seemed to me that a same-sex relationship provided a better and more focused parallel to some of the oth…
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(Quote) My impression was that a major target of Boyden's was to relate in fictional form how the downfall of the several Indian tribes (ie not just the Wendat-affiliated ones but the Iroquois-affiliated as well) was an inevitable consequence of the…