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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,073
- 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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What an interesting theory. We read one of Herbert's books in the club a while back - I can't remember the title, and can't find it listed in the Monthly Book Selections, but it was about a hive culture establishing itself in Oregon somewhere. I rem…
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Call me out of line, but I'd be up for reading The Adjacent together when we've done The Gradual (but maybe as a group we've had enough of CP just now). I reread some Anne McCaffrey recently and was mildly disappointed compared to my reaction sever…
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(Quote) Also interesting that on one occasion Kan appears not to know him, yet his detriment is only a matter of hours still, not weeks or months. Maybe instead of going up and down the timeline at a non-standard rate, the gradual shifts you into an…
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Still enjoying the twists in the tale. I'm sure most of us are contemplating how one would game the system on Hakerline - at least, I certainly am! If I go the right way over the plaza, can I regenerate a meal I have already eaten? If I then eat it …
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I've been thinking about the comments suggesting that Sandro is not changing here, and I'm not convinced they're quite fair! He has disposed of many of his possessions, which he tells us is difficult for him because in Glaundian society that's al…
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Just to be different, I am enjoying the book now and am looking forward to how it concludes - it hardly seems possible there are only three more sessions to it! Yes, I agree that Sandro's lack of curiosity is bizarre and frustrating to us - I suspe…
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(Quote) No problem
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Well, it's been a great couple of months with Cloud Atlas and then Vita Nostra - both of which generated a lot of chatter. Plus of course the ongoing slow read through The Gradual. This month I have chosen A Stranger in Olondria and in November we …
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(Quote) In this version of the Archipelago we have not encountered air travel at all... so far as I remember, though maybe the denouement of the book is the retrospective discovery of aerial flight using a closed timelike loop that Sandro discovers …
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(Quote) But in the broadest sense surely absolutely anything is a password! It has lost any function as a part of speech and is simply a specific sequence of symbols. It might happen to look like a verb of some kind, or a noun, or whatever, or it mi…
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I'm enjoying the unfolding mystery here, though feel acutely the issues @clash_bowley and @Apocryphal have talked about, namely how come such large and easily observed temporal effects are not general knowledge, and why on earth does Sandro not ask …
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(Quote) This brought to mind the passage from The Magician's Nephew when Aslan activates Narnia “Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.”
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(Quote) Yes indeed, and indeed a password could be entirely unpronounceable or consist totally of non-letters. But I still have a nagging feeling I am reading too much into it (but then, it is the climax of the book in lots of ways, so maybe I shoul…
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Would gamers put up with "your character keeps blacking out and waling into doors for the next six months"? :)
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(Quote) In a weird bit of tangential association, your comment reminded me of Arthur Clarke's Nine Billion Names of God (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God), although the stories don't seem to me to have any actual connectio…
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(Quote) I think you've hit on the source of my confusion here. I haven't been able to work out if Sasha (and by extension the others) is 1) A particular verb in the imperative, so if you like she is "Live!" or "Die!" or "Be…
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(Quote) Agreed, and I don't think it necessarily suffered for that. Also, perhaps A Memory Called Empire which we read recently?
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(Quote) Yes, that totally echoes my own thoughts - a password does not create anything or generate anything original, it just allows access to something that has already been produced. It seems to me less effectual than a verb in the imperative, as …
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Out of interest, I looked up the meaning of Sasha in Russian, which derives from Alexandra (as we know from her full form, used first by the man who at that stage she doesn't know but who is following her, and echoed by her mother in introduction...…
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It's a small point in comparison with many others we're talking about, but did any of us have a lecturer or supervisor indicate that we ought to get laid purely to achieve academic advancement? When I came across Sasha getting this advice I kind of …
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(Quote) Yes, totally agree. It must have been one of the biggest problems of translation, to go from a language where case, tense, aspect etc is obvious from the form of the verb / noun / whatever, into one where these things are far less explicit, …
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(Quote) Yes, I see what you mean. In Vita Nostra, it also allows the teachers to act far more in loco parentis than I can ever remember anyone doing in my university days. Again, maybe this is cultural, and maybe Russian or Ukrainian lecturers do, b…
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(Quote) Not wishing to quibble, but surely if Frodo represents anyone biblical, it's the New Testament Jesus, who really does have an absent father and discovers a doom laid upon him that leads to death and estrangement from the world? When YHWH ac…
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Oddly enough, this made me think of the Swallows and Amazons series, which again has the theme of absent parents - the Swallows' father is in the Royal Navy and often posted abroad, and their mother basically lets them do whatever they please. The A…
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If you take the line that a coming of age book is basically posing the question "what do you want to be when you grow up?" then we see Sasha not having a clue at first - she feels drawn to the challenge of the school, especially when her f…
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(Quote) Agreed, but that invitation could go to anyone regardless of parentage. Eustace wasn't exactly promising Narnia material at first, and certainly not by parentage.
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I have to confess I found the ending the least convincing part of the whole. "Oh, she's not a verb in the imperative after all... she's Password" and that apparently means she is the creator - which, and this may well be a fault of the tra…
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For me this was a negative point of the book. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I don't feel that constant fear and anxiety is a good way to learn or integrate into something (either in academia or in the workplace). If fear is used as a tool, then (…
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The writing was appropriate for what I believe to be its primary target audience, viz teenagers or maybe early 20s. As such, the (to my much older eyes) lack of literary structure was not a hang-up, and I was happy to take it on its own terms. Engag…
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Re Vita Nostra, I guess you could say that some words have power and others don't, perhaps analogous to how some characters are able to actualise their innate power and others are not. In EarthSea, of course, the words have to be spoken in the right…