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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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I agree about deference to authority: we visited Moscow and St Petersburg a few years ago and it was very striking how a younger person would automatically without hesitation stand up on the metro for an older one. You _might_ get that in London but…
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Given the book's premise, I agree that the characters were credible and well described. Agreed with @Apocryphal that the whole gold coin thing was a mystery - presumably it was metaphorically saying that successful completion of one task "pays …
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I do like the comparison with the Narnia children as they were as baffled as Sasha by some aspects of Narnia and its basic assumptions (though as the books were broadly aimed at a younger audience this was not so developed). But Narnia was (as I rea…
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I am finding this discussion very interesting but feel that I must have missed something. I don't remember it being explicitly made clear that the trainee adept (for want of a better word) had to have been the child of an adept, ie that it was expli…
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I'm not sure Sasha realised at the outset that she was going to learn anything really esoteric, whereas both Sparrowhawk and Harry Potter a) knew that was what they were going to learn, b) lived with a world view that was absolutely sure magic was r…
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I think it's partly coming of age (and the postscript indicates that it's partly inspired by their daughter's experiences... presumably without the magic and all). But it's also partly about how any three year course feels, at any age, surely - …
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Fine by me too
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(Quote) And presumably one is equally likely to go in both temporal directions - this happens with the Serquian to a minor degree, in these chapters. But if he can gain 23 months in one trip, no doubt others have lost 23 months and so arrived home b…
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I must be a gullible reader :) it never occurred to me that Sandro might be being scammed. But I tend to agree with @Apocryphal that CP seems to like other kinds of mystery to scams. Even The Prestige, which on the face of it would be great for all …
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Well, the escape from Glaund was alarmingly easy! All our expectations of the power and reach of The State were proved exaggerated... which may itself be part of what CP is saying. Ok, so the nature of time abnormalities is different from anythin…
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> @Apocryphal said: > @clash_bowley I think we can examine it metaphorically, but the logic being used is not the logic we're used to. We may all struggle to find what that logic is, by the end. You know how in the multiverse, physicists say …
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> @Apocryphal said: > Speaking of the next batch - it is scheduled to include chapters 36 to 40, but I'll ask you to include 41 as well, as the end of 41 is a better logical break. This adds about 5 pages. No problem... I haven't started t…
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(Quote) Both fair points - he's probably seen as uninteresting and low risk
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(Quote) She was hardly someone who stayed in the background and didn't want to be seen by the public :) On the other hand she apparently did have fantasies of being royalty rather than an appointed official put in place by an elected government, so …
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I can't quite get my head round the idea that The State could so effectively suppress all information about the whereabouts of military units for so many decades! I can't think of an analogy here in our world - and certainly not in a modern connecte…
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On thing I keep having to make myself remember is the very long timespan of this book. We have been used to stories that are over in a few days, possibly with flashbacks to an earlier time. This one is quite literally decades long - we are only abou…
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I wasn't at all expecting the "trip to faeryland" theme to suddenly emerge, ie the loss (or maybe gain) of so much time compared to those who had stayed behind. That said, I think it was a fine twist in the plot, and enhances the "arc…
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I hadn't realised until reading this thread that it wasn't stand alone! The ending feels like a self-contained story, though with the possibility of the characters having further development later on
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So let's make a decision together... should we a) keep to the original plan and have September: Vita Nostra, October: A Stranger in Olondria, November: Binti or b) change to September+October: Vita Nostra, November: Binti, December : A Stranger i…
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Out of interest I searched through my kindle version for "sextet" and turned up some interesting stuff. 1) The first mention of the Cloud Atlas Sextet is when the Lost Chord music store clerk repeats Luisa's enquiry for it and promises to…
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Something that the book made me wonder a lot about was music - and when he's joined us I'd appreciate any thoughts that @clash_bowley might have on this. Or that of any other musicians amongst us. A classical symphony or concerto consists of severa…
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Very nicely put @BarnerCobblewood
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Interestingly we had similar concerns about the use of the gazetteer form for the (obviously fictional) story Christopher Priest put together in The Dream Archipelago - is it appropriate to use one written form to deliver a quite different kind of c…
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Overnight I had a thought about this. It seems to me that one common theme is not so much exploitation, but being trapped in one of several ways. In the 1840s section, Ewing is trapped by the doctor, but also the Moriori are trapped by the Maori (o…
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I wonder if the feelings @Apocryphal and @NeilNjae are expressing are a consequence of the ring structure? Normally with a story we accept a fair amount of setup and then expect things to get going (cf the conversation about The Gradual). Here we ju…
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(Quote) I suppose (and thinking aloud here, so it may well not work on reflection) we see a variety of people who (barring Cavendish, who I'm currently struggling to fit into the picture) want to take a radical stand. In some cases that emerges in p…
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So for me this last / innermost ring nicely completed the overall storyline. The several attempts to stem the trend towards greed and oppression are close to failure - each time we think we are moving towards some sense of expansion and recovery, th…
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For me also, this was the most compelling individual story - well imagined and well executed. Foreshadowed in the second story, but in such an oblique way that on first reading one could easily miss the reference. A marvellously consistent yet distu…
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Funnily enough the (fictitious) book Knuckle Sandwich, with its thinly-veiled biographical elements, and links to rough life in Glasgow, has been sort-of echoed in real life with a recent novel called Shuggie Bain, which has enjoyed what (to my mind…
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(Quote) I agree - I just started it today and am finding it entirely compelling. Hard to stop... I'm currently a third of the way through...