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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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> @BarnerCobblewood said: > (Quote) > I have some trouble with this - not the characterisation of the genre, but with the idea that emotional motivations (for which we have few words and poor definitions) remain the same across great expa…
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> @Apocryphal said: >According to Wikipedia, Boyden claims Ojibwe and Nipmuc heritage (and previously Mi'kmak and Metis.) > As I recall, the Metis were the remote ancestors of the protagonist in Hiero's Journey, the name having worn …
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I think historical fiction does have some different conventions to some other genres. For example, I think there is a greater emphasis on "what would it be like to live in that place/time". There tends to be less world-building, on the ass…
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PS he also covers as a tangential point another matter we have talked about, viz the need for popular and influential historical fantasy (and by extension historical fiction) to be accurate so as not to establish incorrect stereotypes in the minds o…
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(Quote) That is an excellent article, with a lot of other points of some connection with other discussions we have been having around The Orenda (the article discusses Plains Indian groups rather than the Great Lakes area ones of our book, but never…
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PS I meant to add that another good example is the occurrence of severe illness mong the Indian tribes. From our modern medical perspective we readily accept explanations like "the north American tribes had no resistance to European diseases&qu…
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(Quote) Yes, totally agree. You could interpret the rain thing as showing that Christophe is in fact (despite his best intentions) taking on something of the Indian tribes' closeness to nature. Bird (and, if I remember correctly, others) see him as …
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To me the Iroquois were "outsiders" rather than "villains" - we did not get a viewpoint character inside their society (I am not counting Snow Falls because she did not grow up there and so presumably represents a kind of displac…
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OK, so here are some thoughts. First, on a personal level. I don't think I have any specific heritage to celebrate or be ashamed of - like most people here I am a right mixture of all kinds of different groups who have come into the UK over the mil…
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(Quote) I think that's a really good way to express it, and it certainly resonates with me... although I'm trying to think exactly what features of a novel are lacking. There are character development arcs, there's an overall meta-crisis threatening…
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Another book you might think about as an alternate outcome is one we read together, Aztec Century, though of course that was dealing with Central America rather than North America. Lots of inversions in that, including Europe being swept by plagues …
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> @Apocryphal said: > In the second part, I'm wondering whether there might have been a different outcome from first contact. Or was it inevitable that disease and technological disadvantage were going to take their toll. As a reader and a ga…
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I suppose it's like Animal Farm... all characters are villainous, but some are more villainous than others! I don't think that anyone comes over as especially heroic, though some individuals are treated more sympathetically than others.
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(Quote) I have a feeling that this goes back to how much the story interacts with known (ie recorded) events. For example, it may be (I don't know) that Christophe is a historically attested individual. But Bird and Snow Falls surely are not. So alt…
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That's a really good question which I need more time to think about...
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Personally I don't mind some historical latitude in the interest of a better story, though I have good friends who take a much stricter view. So for example I can see good purpose in simplifying the complexities of real events in order to make them …
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I kept wanting the several Indian tribes to sort themselves out and make peace with each other, but I guess that was never gong to happen. In parallel I have been listening to Ursula LeGuin's The Word for World is Forest which in many ways tackles …
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Can't really speak about role-playing so I shall focus on writing. I think yes, Boyden did this very well. It generally took me no more than a paragraph, usually much less, to identify which of the three was narrating. I agree it is unusual to h…
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I had assumed Snow Falls, but then she died (I suppose there's nothing stopping narration by a dead person, but it seems out of character for the book). Then I assumed Gosling. Wiki thinks Bird, but to me it reads more as a female perspective than m…
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Certainly to Gosling (but that was what made her a more interesting character to me :) ). Not sure about the others - I think the point often was to make the spirituality of Christophe vs the Indian tribes largely incomprehensible to each other. For…
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Snow Falls left much more impression with me than the other two - I'm not sure if this is because she was younger, or got less narrative space, or what. She seemed also to make more changes of direction than the others (again perhaps because younger…
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My main impression at first was that I got lost! Geographically, most of all... I could not make sense of where people came from or were travelling to. (Hence my earlier questions about the area, the answers to which helped me a lot). In terms of…
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I can't really comment on the exact situation described (being not only UK based but also not currently part of an actual gaming group of people), but I did watch the whole thing and find the arguments very credible and persuasive. The thing which …
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All, in a burst of energy I have added monthly categories for February (Five Decembers, @NeilNjae ), March (The Mind Parasites, me) and April (The Guns Above, @clash_bowley ), and also added in the Amazon back cover blurb. If anyone changes their mi…
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I'm thinking Colin Wilson's The Mind Parasites for March - quite an old book (late 1960s) and dated in a number of ways, but still (I think) with enough to provoke discussion. Apparently he wrote it when challenged to write a novel in the lineage of…
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(Quote) Yes you're right about Hiero's origins - I was getting muddled with his people's allies, the Otwah League, which I assume was based around present-day Ottawa. PS thanks all for the geographical help, much appreciated
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(Quote) Yes that does help - and looking at the various portage routes that @Apocryphal described, I realised just how many lakes of all kinds of sizes there are in that area north of the Great Lakes. I think that this is the area called The Palood …
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I worked out (with the help of Google Maps) part of my geographical confusion. I realised that my mental map of the US was sort of like this: (Image) and my newly revised mental map looks more like this: which (however much still bizarre) makes …
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Yes, these photos are very helpful, not least because they highlight the qualitative difference between the Huron (and other similar tribal) palisades and the French ones. I confess to still being rather baffled by the geography and history of the …
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(Quote) Ooo good, it's a while since I read any