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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,075
- 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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A friend of mine (mostly online but we have actually met once or twice) writes naval fiction set in the 1880s/90s and frequently comments how fast naval technology changed. You could easily have (and did have in reality) a character who first entere…
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A few things here, with negatives first. 1) I had hoped to get some insights into Brunel in terms of the sub refit, but in fact it was all handled with a quick "he had done all the work", as though Rodman couldn't be bothered to write tha…
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I liked Nemo's voice, but detested Ahab's - I have read Moby Dick much more recently than 20,000 Leagues and I am convinced that it's nothing much like Melville's writing. For sure Melville has his digressions into apparently superfluous exposition,…
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(Quote) I get caught every time by the notifications defaulting to "off"....
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Like others, I thought the use of historical detail was good, especially the idea that some folk would have vehemently (and aggressively) opposed the construction of the communication wires. Definitely some contemporary analogies there. The basic…
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(Quote) Sorry, missed them, will catch up later today or tomorrow!
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> @Apocryphal said: > The Pastel City must have been a comedy - doesn’t make sense any other way. Before my time, I think 🙂
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I'm happy whichever of those two is chosen. I don't think we've had a political thriller for ages, and I don't ever recall a comedy!
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> @NeilNjae said: > I gave up on it about half-way through. It'll be interesting to see the comments. I thought it could have finished well before it ended :)
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I'm finished now
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> @dr_mitch said: > Le Guin's Earthsea books are very different kettles of fish to Always Coming Home. I love Earthsea. Always Coming Home I'm pretty sure I didn't actually understand, let alone come to a decision whether I liked it or not. …
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> @clash_bowley said: > I will not be with you. I just can't deal with leGuin. You'll be missed :)
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CamelCaps are TheBest, as many of us know...
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I'm really enjoying the concept and the plot, though the (to my sensibilities) rather overdone archaisms of sentence structure are something of an irritation. "The captain did go down the street" and such like. But I can get past that. …
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> @clash_bowley said: > I can't imagine what I WOULD expect - except the Spanish Inquisition! ;) "Nobody expects..."
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Looking forward to this... it's quite a while since I read it!
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> @WildCard said: > I just finished a short story. I have no idea if it’s any good at all. Although I’ve done plenty of professional and academic writing, I really only started writing lyrics and poems a couple of years ago, and this is my fi…
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> @clash_bowley said: > And vice versa. In both stories, the viewpoint character - a woman - is trying to become part of another culture through sheer determination and inner conviction, and that liminality unfolds within them, transforming t…
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> @NeilNjae said: > Does this fit with a more general theme that "the world doesn't have to be this way"? People don't have to accept the contexts they're presented with, and can find their own places in the world. It is interest…
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Nicely put @clash_bowley !
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Well, who doesn't like liminality :) I think the author here was exploring how the edge of the psyche (for example Casiopeia and Michael's descent into and contest in Xibalba) and the edge of geography (Casiopeia moving away from home towards the o…
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Re @Apocryphal 's point, conceivably she was lamenting that people do tend, for many reasons good and bad, to embrace the dominant culture and in so doing lose their historical culture-specific roots. It's a bit like the Borg arriving, and everyone …
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I liked it a lot, and as has been said it was a welcome relief from The Broken Earth. Yes, it was simplistic, in vocabulary and formal rhetoric as well as setting and such like. I'm not sure I would re-read it very often, but this is not because I d…
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Worked for me too - though I'm not altogether sure that I agree with @Apocryphal that the protagonist is commonly the voice of order. I'm in the middle of listening to Dune (the best audio book I have heard, partly because I know the story so well i…
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I liked the whole twinning theme, which as has been said was brought out in many ways. At one stage (when I was looking for names of mythological twins) I read up a bit about the central American pairings, but I decided that for my needs the unusual…
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Sometime I must read American Gods, but I haven't had that pleasure yet. What I thought was done well here was Casiopeia's constant, and IMHO credible, vacillation between two poles: a) the constraints of her upbringing, poised uncomfortably betwee…
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(Quote) I think you're right - Deepmind was built (I suspect) using a set of assumptions that the situation on the playing area (and implicitly the gameplay until "Now") was sufficient to construct a strategy for going on. There was no fac…
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(Quote) I suppose that's to avoid the need to build some kind of parsing engine to infer what somebody else is offering as a deal? But you'd have thought that as a minimum they could have had a selection from a list of options - "make alliance&…
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(Quote) Sounds grim, glad it's behind you now
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I'm about 2/3 through, really enjoying it but juggling with all the tasks needed in the week running up to our first opening after lockdown (yay)