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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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> @Apocryphal said: >... This has me wondering if these two entries are related. And if so, how? Was the Mime an immortal? > Or alternatively - this being a thought that occurred to me while painting today - perhaps the arrested and e…
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> @Apocryphal said: Many thanks for the name list :) > LAWS > > Importunation seems not to be a word. Importunate means 'troublesome : troublesomely urgent : overly persistent in request or demand'. The history or the word is a…
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(Quote) Agreed there are some good potential game settings here... but coming at it as a reader then (at least so far - we may return to it later) the ideas are kind of thrown away and not sufficiently developed. Haldeman did it much more thoroughly…
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I didn't find Derill as in Manifestation Derill very credible, I'm afraid. What is it's supposed history? One in which coal was mined and processed so heavily as to cause major pollution, but which retains large tracts of virgin forest? One would ha…
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And going back to @Apocryphal 's start points, I enjoyed the human drama set on Cheoner, partly because it was in fact drama rather than description. Collago and the athanasia treatment seemed bizarre and abrasive in this world insofar as I understa…
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(Quote) I have enjoyed the process of "the slow read" as we have practiced it, even when I didn't like the books i question (orogenes, anyone?). To me, this style of reading - deliberately containing one's frustration at stopping progress …
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(Quote) I know that one under its alternative title The Long Habit of Living and reckon it's a good one of Haldeman's, altogether more developed and rounded than the few brief pages we get here. This seemed curiously out of place in the contents so …
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> @BurnAfterRunning said: > 1) Whether it is or isn't scientifically organised, I keep worrying I'm going to forget what previous islands, people, or (for goodness sake) winds are called - Yes, totally. With what you might call a regular …
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> @clash_bowley said: > (Quote) > How about "Rhythms and Thrymes"? :D Until I read this I hadn't realised that thyrmes rhymes with rhymes as well as being an (almost) anagram of rhythms! You can put my inattention down to a l…
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> @Apocryphal said: > (Quote) > "Thrymes" > Good name for your next album. Almost an anagram of rhythms...
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(Quote) That's a really interesting thought!
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(Quote) I don't know if Christopher Priest had this in mind, but several islands around the British coastline (and quite likely other places I don't know about) have been working on a programme to rid them of rats originally brought in on ships. The…
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> @Apocryphal said: > Glorantha has always been presented in that way. It's not so much a 'This is how things are' message to the GM, but a 'This is what people will tell you' to the player. That reminds me of a habit of speech in northern…
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(Quote) Very well put :)
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There's an interesting focus (not so much on the Aubrac chain of islands, to be fair) on artistry. I guess this underpins some of what @BarnerCobblewood is saying about wondering who is the selector of material. We don't (again, until Aubrac) get mu…
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I am always envious of you organised guys who manage to do this regularly! Every year of late I have had a mad scramble in November or even December to get my year's reading into Goodreads and onto my blog, with the inevitable "what month did I…
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As an aside, it's surely impossible for a speculative fiction author to choose the name "Harkonnen" for a major character without evoking Dune. Does anyone have any thoughts as to this choice? Are the parents of Baby A being implicitly lab…
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I would have liked these issues explored in Sleep Donation to a greater degree than they were. I guess I have a lingering feeling that it's a lazy authorial choice to tackle an area bristling with ethical dilemmas, but not devote much narrative spac…
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I think there is also a qualitative change in the world since Asimov wrote his spoof story - we now live in a world of "fake news"... both actually fake but also authentic information branded as fake by folk who don't want to accept it. Wh…
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> @BarnerCobblewood said:. > ... > As for your point, I'm talking about the adoption of a scientific form as a novel, not the inclusion of science within a novel. The disguising of narrative as occurring in a science, which perhaps harms …
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Not relevant to gaming, but to the horror aspect you raised... it baffles me that Stephen King would so warmly endorse it, except that Karen Russell specifically thanks him for his support, so part of me wonders cynically if she was a student on a w…
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Good questions, but I don't have answers, and I suppose I don't feel that the story tried to promote or demote any of those positions.
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As mentioned before, I'm not sure I go with the "bad dreams = undesirable" equation which the story seems to posit. But I appreciate that isn't really the question you are raising here.
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Well, I've commented elsewhere about what I thought about the language. Florid, maybe... full of adjectives and riddled with similes certainly... but I found it dull rather than lyrical, I'm afraid. I don't know if there's a more suitable discus…
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I could never quite work out if the basic idea was that people wanted "pure sleep" ie ideally in the book's world without any dreams at all, or else "sleep with only nice dreams not nightmares". In case (1) then any dreams at all…
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"Donation" feels in this book very much like a politicised word, much like "education" or "rehabilitation" might be. As such, it can be used to slide at will between a voluntary gift to a cause, and a social duty that c…
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(Quote) These are some really interesting points that I will have to think a bit more about. But my initial impression is that I couldn't be sure about some of them. For example, Melville in Moby Dick quite often introduces scientific (or at least q…
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(Quote) Sure, one can pick earlier isolated instances - I could make a case for the Middle Kingdom Egyptian Tale of Sinuhe, and considerable amounts of academic ink has been spilled over to what extent this should be classed as pure invention, pure …
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> @BarnerCobblewood said: > Priest is pretty confident in the reader's motivation. Why do we continue reading these books? And I wonder about calling this a novel. Novel seems to mean nothing more than a certain number of pages contianing a f…
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> @Ray_Otus said: > XVIII: The Return Journey > ... > For me, Tolkien hits a bunch of awesome notes in these final chapters. I LIKE the long-drawn journey home and all the closures. I feel like more modern fantasy are in a sprint to w…