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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,074
- 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) wasn't that Worf?
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Re satire and humour - Jonathan Swift was forever writing satire, and although some parts are deliberately funny, large parts are not. Indeed A Modest Proposal is arguably his most bitingly satirical and his least funny. His style of satire - which …
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I think it;'s tricky trying to apply standard categories to a book which in many ways invented the categories in the first place! I kept thinking as I was reading just how many books and films owed a debt to HG Wells - pretty much the whole James Bo…
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(Quote) That's great thanks
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Hi all especially @Apocryphal , @Ray_Otus , @BarnerCobblewood and @WildCard . To take some of the load off @Apocryphal I'm very happy to coordinate the monthly reading choices at the moment. Our current forward list is: Book #102 - July 2021, wit…
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First of all, profound apologies for not spotting that the Dr Moreau discussion starters had been posted. I failed to keep to my own rules about adding on notifications for new areas. Now I've found them, I plan to tackle them in the next day or so.…
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> @NeilNjae said: > Religion appears! Not only do we have religion, we have Catholicism! I think it's the first time religion has been mentioned in either this book or the previous one. Priest doesn't particularly do anything with it, but it …
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I went back and reread the Seevl chapter in Islanders to see how much overlap there was, but in this case (contra some of the previous bits we have read) there is almost none, though the overall setting (mountainous, close to the mainland, with barr…
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Also I only just realised that the events happen on Piqay, out of which CP derives the adjective Piqayean. Which is remarkably similar to picayune: "of little value or significance; petty". Not a word I use very often as a Brit, but I'm wi…
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I just reread the third version in Islanders (in the chapter The Trace) and it seems very similar to me, especially in relation to the apparition in the room - same blue haze coalescing, same smoke, same kiss breaking up into the same spasm of cough…
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Yes, I thought I'd go back and check out the Islanders version, only to discover that this is the one where there are two (maybe more) conflicting versions of whether Chaster ever left the island in question (with his brother standing in for him whe…
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Uncomfortable, disturbing... yes, for sure. But oddly fascinating, largely because of the incorporation of synaesthesia. We learn considerably more about the weaponry deployed - hallucinogenic grenades and neural dissociation gasses, for example, an…
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It's an excellent review. Makes me wish we'd thought more about the Ancient Nariner while we were reading it! The whole business of capitalising particular words did come up, as I recall, but I'm not sure we got far with it
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I do like Kid vs Dik, a very nice touch :) I also meant to say that I am enjoying The Dream Archipelago rather more than I did Islanders - I think the more overt fictional presentation helps a lot (yes, I am aware that Islanders was also fiction, b…
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Interesting that you read it as "Just then, an enemy combatant appears and surrenders himself to Dik. Dik escorts him to a guard room in admiration and envy". I did something of a double take when I read it because to my eyes, CP is entire…
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(Quote) I think this has some mileage :) There's a crucial (to my mind) event at the Battle of Qadesh, fought between the New Kingdom Egyptian empire under Ramesses II, and the Hittite empire under Muwatallis, both essentially at the peak of their s…
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(Quote) Yes, it seemed an uncharacteristically flamboyant way to make her point that she at last understood what was happening :) Maybe best understood as that she had been driven beyond her ability to maintain the pretence?
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> @dr_mitch said: > I'm in. Sorry for my long absence - I was struggling to read much, but I think I have my mojo back. Good to see you back :)
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No problem! It might be a while before I get back to this series - my current next project (unless other things intervene) goes further back into the Neolithic, based around the Langdale Axe factory just down the road from me. But I've had no time …
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That's really interesting, thanks for telling us about this. I did like _Long Way etc_ although didn't like that the author felt unwilling to keep any tension going past a chapter boundary. The most striking example was probably the guy thrown in th…
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(Quote) Ha! Love it!! It's a circumlocution worthy of CP himself. There is, surely, no answer to this conundrum...
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Returning now to this... (Quote) I looked up my notes and such like and I had a slightly lengthy chain of reasoning as below. But also there was the rather prosaic thought that wanax doesn't sound (at least in UK English) a particularly impressive …
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(Quote) We never actually learn this. Catherine believes at the end in her own real timeline that Bevan there is a mole, and yet another betrayer, but she is under the influence of Aztec drugs at the time so as readers we don't know for sure. But fo…
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Something that always fascinates me is whether authors think that there is a kind of historical inertia (eg Asimov The End of Eternity ) so that events tend to revert to the same thing as you go into the future from the changed event, or whether thi…
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(Quote) I particularly liked the way it resolved the description in slightly unexpected way in the prologue "alone with my ruined sister... the same Welsh valley where our story truly began, and yet not the same valley... the local man who brin…
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(Quote) Your comment sparked a memory of The Great Library in the game Civilisation, where you automatically pick up advances that other factions develop!
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(Quote) Yes, I forgot to write earlier that the sheet of paper was like the panes of glass in Islanders. But also this whole portion reminded me of The Dispossessed with its focus on the ambivalence of walls. Dispossessed starts with a wall, keeps r…
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Yes, so far I have enjoyed the writing style of this book much more than most of Islanders. Which makes me wonder why CP decided on the style he did for that book. It can't be just to reinforce the notion that Islanders is a travelogue, since that i…
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Though the veracity of this was questioned in that both women had been given various drugs including hallucinogenic ones, partly as preparation for the travel to our world and partly to disorient them. So to some extent potentially they were seeing …
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Many thanks for this @Apocryphal and I'm glad you liked the book. To give some wider context for others, Flame is the third in a series of linked but separate books set at the cusp between Late Bronze and Iron ages, a time characterised by the disin…