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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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Here's another wildly speculative and quasi-psychological interpretation - make of it what you will. The Dream Archipelago is the human mind. The cold arctic continent with disputing nations is the intellect. The tropical battleground is passion. T…
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> @Ray_Otus said: > When I hear Sark, I think of the evil dude from the 80s movie Tron. I'd quite forgotten about that Sark :)
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(Quote) Likewise - the Greek island connection seems obvious now but I had not thought of it. I was just the wrong age to take note of the whole Shirley Valentine "Greek islands as a place to escape a boring life and have some fun sex" thi…
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First, I thought that this short story did hold up as a thing in itself - obviously broader knowledge about other events adds to the comprehension, but the same is true of any short story which is part of a wider world, eg Chesterton's Father Brown …
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(Quote) Yes, I keep wondering this. I can't keep in my head even a rough sense of what is near what, and we are obviously encountering different places in what CP regards as a thematic order rather than geographical or anything else. Maybe we're sup…
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> @Ray_Otus said: > And finally didn’t you think the street stranger was going to end up being Lord? I did, until Lord actually showed up. Yes, definitely
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(Quote) Are we saying that the artists do more damage (on a personal level, at least) than the military?
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Also in the miscellaneous section, it struck me that the Discworld adopts a view that history has inertia and tends to revert to the inevitable, rather than diverging. So Mort's accidental intervention which in other books might be described as spli…
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> @WildCard said: > There’s also an interesting dynamic about the relationship between a story of someone’s life (in this case the story) and their actual life. ...We all live in some measure according to the dictates of (a) story; we create …
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I am so glad that you are reminding us of people who we have met before... I would be utterly lost otherwise. I suppose that "vortical altitudes" in relation to aircraft has something to do with the inability to map the world from high up…
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Love it!
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I've been meaning to read a Terry Pratchett book for years and never actually got round to it before ow (so many thanks for choosing this one). I devoured Douglas Adams a while back, so the omission is odd. Anyway, I was thinking how rare it is for …
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(Quote) And a demonstrated ability to fit in to an improbable situation and turn it to your advantage :)
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There are fascinating studies of character tropes in literature and how (and when) they should be subverted. I came across these studies in connection with ancient world / biblical literature, but they exist everywhere. Take the classical Western se…
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Interested to hear what others say - as mentioned in #1, it wasn't really the plot which got me engaged with Mort.
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I agree - laced through the story are little witty pokes at a whole variety of topics - vanity about work practice for one, as @Apocryphal says (and evidently going well beyond that to embrace work in general), but also religion, social structure, …
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> @clash_bowley said: > It wasn't Commis who required the purity of the glass, it was Lord, the illusionist. Oh yes, my mistake... another twist in the tail...
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Exceptionally clever miming to be able to distinguish between a solid door, a mirror, and a sheet of glass :) But pursuing the glass theme - especially as Commis had specified just very pure optical qualities in the sheet - I suppose a glass shee…
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Interesting, thanks, this has quite drawn me into reading the book. Many years ago I used to live in Dorset and know Maiden Castle well. It's the most famous and prominent hill fort in the area, and has splendid sea views on a good day, though I per…
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> @WildCard said: > It seems like you left out an important part of the story in your summary. Hike climbed back up into the rigging and loosened the plate of glass. > > And Hike doesn’t slam an imaginary door on the Mustachioed Man …
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Sounds fine to me
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I liked the short story (though agree with @NeilNjae that it would not work in isolation from context) and especially the way in which it led the reader away from the idea that Commis's death was murder (by someone, if not by the originally convicte…
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(Quote) Maybe... and maybe I just find stuff about origins because I look for it. But I don't think it's just for islanders - in our world, at least. If you go to the Isles of Scilly, it's hard to avoid seeing things about the inhabitants in ancient…
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> @Ray_Otus said: > "Without the internet I don’t know what I would do” > > Why did I think there was no Internet in the archipelago? It's one of the little incongruous points that nags at me... how can there be a global Inte…
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Thanks for this review link @Apocryphal - as you say, it was well written and informative. Speaking personally, I am keen to continue with the Christopher Priest collection as slow read. Several reasons, I think: first and foremost, I had been mean…
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Back with erotomanes, it is a term which clearly has some kind of specific meaning in that world - "two men and two women, known erotomanes... (early in the Spoiled Sand chapter). And there are laws about it. But is the term itself a legal one,…
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(Quote) As a UK reader I don't find much to identify with, and had assumed that Priest was trying to write something that would appeal to Americans! We do have some archipelagos at various places off the mainland coast, but they bear essentially no …
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I found the letter sequence interesting, though perhaps rather self-indulgent on Christopher Priest's part seeing that it was about an author? Ditto the whole "they must be suspicious because they wrote negative reviews" theme - other than…
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(Quote) Yes, I think you could well be right here. I guess what I am not seeing in this particular "guidebook" is any of 1) the tourist-attraction side of religion ("you surely must not miss the spectacularly-ornamented Grotto of Omni…
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> @clash_bowley said: ... Facts as sub-atomic particles. ... All you need is a grand unified theory...