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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,080
- 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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Yes from me
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On the literary fiction issue, there are lots of definitions out there, typically contrasting with "genre fiction". However, most are rather transparently favouring one "side", and so are quite negative about the other. I don'…
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(Quote) I remember something about a land-mass called Europe... didn't they have different colour passports or some such outrage? :) But more seriously, watching Eurovision would be above and beyond for the book club, as I have so far managed to ge…
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(Quote) If Alabaster's estimate of fifteen hundred miles is right, then on horseback this would take 2 or 3 months according to information I have seen online, depending on a whole bunch of factors like road surface, terrain etc. But we also know th…
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I've been pondering over the weekend what we do and don't know. As a group, our vague perceptions of ordinary-history-equivalent range from Medieval to Victorian, which is interesting simply in itself. So I wondered what we have and have not seen: …
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Ha! Curmudgeon hey! But yes, I agree with your don't shoot the messenger comment. And @NeilNjae we certainly do appreciate the effort you're putting in week by week. Oddly enough I saw a gushingly over the top homage to NK Jemisin's upcoming …
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As an aside, they seem to have been having nightly sex for a very long time. Presumably by now Syenite is either pregnant or has had at least one period? (For her sake, one could hope this to be while in the town rather than camped out along the roa…
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@clash_bowley Whilst I agree with most of your comments, to be strictly fair Chekhov would not expect the gun to be used straight away! It's ok for it to be left in the background for a while rather than snatched off the wall and fired... But thi…
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(Quote) Yes indeed there were medieval universities, but they didn't pursue single-study topics like a contemporary "school of mines" or "school of law" or whatever - they aimed to give a deep but general education into the world…
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(Quote) Maybe so, but I hadn't quite got that they had that level of sophistication. The sense I have been left with is of something like a medieval culture though with orogeny as a kind of magic element. However, we keep on having other stuff dropp…
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There seems to have been quite a jump between Syenite's last chapter and this one - long enough for loads of different people to have arrived and taken an interest. Regarding their prolonged stay at the port, I guess the economics of Fulcrum life s…
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Something I noticed in the Essun chapter is that all of a sudden we are meeting a lot of vocabulary about the Fulcrum which we have not before in her thread. (Which is a bit odd when you think that these chapters are ostensibly spoken _to_ her not _…
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Some cool description in Syenite's efforts to move the blockage... but at the same time it nagged at me. Surely in that situation she would have wanted to check with Alabaster? And surely the locals would have insisted on her doing that rather than …
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(Quote) Reading this the names collided in my mind and I realised that when joined together, Damaya and Syenite almost make dynamite...
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Just finished... looking forward to the discussion in a while :)
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> @Apocryphal said: > I forgot to mention: my current pet theory is that Damaya, Syenite, and Essun are all the same person - Damaya the youth, Syenite the young adult, and Essun the mature adult. Interesting. We don't yet know how (or eve…
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My thoughts: the pace moved on a bit better in these chapters, but I think overall my thoughts echo those of @Apocryphal in that there are lots of interesting ideas, but the world-building and language is kind of all over the place. Jemisin is obvio…
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(Quote) True enough, I'd forgotten that one :)
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(Quote) I have been puzzling over this one and so far as I can recall we don't have any other parallel use in British English, not even for the other military service branches. So for example there is no equivalent name for a representative Air Forc…
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The dad of my closest childhood friend had been in submarines: thinking about his age, I am pretty sure he would not have served in WW2 but in the early post-war years. He almost never talked about it with us kids... the only thing I remember is him…
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How exceptionally cool! I'd never heard of it either before this
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Pace @Apocryphal but I have to admit to seriously disliking the interlude :( It seemed to me weird on several levels - firstly it completely threw me out of the story / world, since suddenly the author was addressing me. Secondly, it had the weird …
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(Quote) Probably a trope of the genre. Douglas Reeman's navy books (set in or soon after WW2) usually have a shore-side romance which always feels to me extremely stylised and unconvincing.
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(Quote) Though less so (I think) than other branches of the military at that time. One striking episode is when Lt Grainger, the new navigator, has got rid of Mr partridge because "he was a warrant officer, non-commissioned. I didn't think he h…
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> @clash_bowley said: > 220 meters is far more than 500 feet, @Apocryphal. > @Michael_S_Miller - I believe that both US and British subs in service more or less routinely exceeded their designed depths, which were rather conservative. I …
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Acorns were often used to make a form of coffee, and don't need to be imported here!
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Will be interesting to read other responses to this - my initial impulse is that you'd have to role-play the vessel as a whole rather than an individual crew. But maybe not?
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It interested me (about which I rabbit on at some length in another question)
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Only some of them emerged for me as memorable characters, though I suspect some are being set up for a longer life in future books. The girlfriends were an exercise in contrast, and (I suspect like most of us) I hugely preferred Shirley to Janis. N…
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Mostly of value. I had never once thought about the problems of keeping a submarine level when firing torpedoes, let alone simply moving around. So for me this kind of stuff was a definite plus.