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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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> @WildCard said: > I have my notifications turned on, but I have to manually select it when new discussions get set up. Am I going about it wrong? The notification system here is not intuitive to me. When a new area is set up, notificatio…
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(Quote) And after all that, neither one of them is actually dead at all...
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(Quote) There's an interesting resonance with Ged summoning Elfarran in Wizard of Earthsea - she's a semi-legendary figure being called into the real world. But of course at the end of the day Ged is also a character in the story, and there is no at…
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I don't feel this is the same as fan fiction - to me that suggests a work which is built around essentially the same world and presuppositions. So (for example) a novel which claimed to be Star Trek TNG fan fiction, but didn't in any way involve the…
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(Quote) Yes, I thought that was what this thread was about, and got confused by the straight historical fiction titles being quoted :) I suppose you could class most fan fiction in this category - there are lots of Star Trek and Stargate books out …
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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…