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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,445
- 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) That's an interesting (and provocative :) ) meta-question... I wonder if there has been a rise in non-bleak super-optimistic fiction over the last 6 months? Or to people on balance like dystopia and bleakness more when they're surrounded by …
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@NeilNjae fair enough! I guess it's tribute to UlG that her books can give rise to differing interpretations. The political romantic in me wants to believe that Odonian society fundamentally works, and originally did work, and only slips away from …
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Hmmm, let me clarify what I meant. Not that the society was in a Utopian state at the beginning of the story (I'm going to limit myself to Tehanu and The Dispossessed for the time being, as I don't feel I know ACH well enough to comment). Rather, th…
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(Quote) My feeling is that it's a kind of shadow side to Ged's ability to turn up where and when needed. Both men display a kind of synchronicity, but exercised in opposite directions on the help-harm axis. We re explicitly told that Ged's ability h…
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We once grew figs very successfully in the Southampton area, but they struggle to fruit up here in Cumbria. Plenty of leaves though... Maybe I should find a south-facing spot and embark on peaches here :)
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> @Apocryphal said: > We grow peaches in Canada, if that helps. :-) Fair enough! Happy to be corrected here... I couldn't imagine them growing in Northern Europe without greenhouses and the like.
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Also on Scope (extending this to include Setting) I found the descriptions of Gont delightful, except that I kept stumbling over peach trees growing there! I couldn't square up peach trees with the rest of what I felt was quite a northerly climate. …
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Probably also worth mentioning the role of Spark, who presumably represents the male norm of much of the world of EarthSea.
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Open questions, definitely! It is very hard to imagine this as the end of the EarthSea series - and I write this, fully aware that the cover that @Apocryphal posted recently called this "The Last Book of EarthSea", and that my own copy is …
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Maybe this is the right place to comment on poetry as well. The EarthSea Creation Hymn is pivotal in this book, partly explicitly as Tehanu starts to learn it, and partly implicit when we learn that Kalessin is just another name for Segoy. The maki…
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I agree with @NeilNjae - true names seem quite removed from this book. We only actually encounter one taught word in the true language - tolk for stone - and that's a word which we already met several books ago (the very first one in the series, I t…
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I have the sense too that the book is deliberately exploring issues that UlG left unexplored in the earlier books, and particularly the role of women in various situations. Not only Tenar and Tehanu, but also the various witches we meet. So although…
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Commenting so I see replies
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It's probably worth also saying to new members that in order to get notifications of new discussions, they (and all of us) need to check their notification preferences: Go got your profile, Select Notification Preferences, Scroll to Category Notific…
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(Quote) "Titan's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen (about 95 percent) and methane (about 5 percent), with small amounts of other carbon-rich compounds. High in Titan’s atmosphere, methane and nitrogen molecules are split apart by the Sun's ultravio…
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Aha! @Apocryphal check out https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/15422/titans-kraken-mare/ (Image) "The Cassini spacecraft looks toward Saturn's largest moon, Titan, and spies the huge Kraken Mare in the moon's north... This view looks towa…
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(Quote) Geothermal maybe? Depending how much heat there is in the interior (probably generated by gravitational flexing from Saturn). Probable "titanothermal" would be a better word - I should probably register the trade name now and make …
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Some other thoughts: 1. the surface gravity is not that much less than our moon (1.35 ms-2 as opposed to 1.6) 2. the surface atmosphere pressure is about 1.5 times that of Earth at sea level 3. the air pressure and density compared to the surface g…
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I haven't been reading it but am commenting so I can follow anyone else's thoughts
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Great! Thanks all.
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> @NeilNjae said: > I'm happy to read a book that's been adapted. What book are you thinking of? Does it have a film that everyone would know? The short story is Ted Chiang's _Story of Your Life_ (to be found in the collection _Stories of …
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Hello everyone and especially @Apocryphal - I have a feeling that our standard rotation means that I'm up for another choice somewhere before the end of the year. Am I right? If so, I shall start thinking about a selection... and as a seed question,…
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(Quote) Likewise
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Just finished watching it, definitely worth a view. There's a fascinating section about Tehanu and how it was both a pivotal book in her own development as a writer, and also extremely hard to write (and invoked criticism from some of her earlier fo…
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(Quote) Thanks for the heads-up... I did a quick search and seems it's on BBC4 for exactly four more days, at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000bh0x, presuming it's the same one called "The Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin" Interviewed guest…
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(Quote) With surface temperatures so low, I'm guessing that some at least would have a liquid surface. But probably internal heat keeps messing it up.
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> @WildCard said: > Once you become as powerful as a god, particularly one who has been controlled out of fear and controlled by fear, lashing out and murdering more and more and more people might not be unanticipated. I’d say even it was ant…
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Just started Tehanu last night and am totally enjoying the reread. Thanks for choosing it :)
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> @BarnerCobblewood said: > ...I did spend some time asking myself how it got published - the decision tree I mean. The combinations of genre-maps with identity-branding by publishers suggest to me that there is a closer relation to publishin…
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(Quote) Vanity Press refers to a style of publishing rather than a particular genre or style of writing. It used to be used as a kind of insult word by the traditional publishing industry, to suggest that if you paid enough then someone would publis…