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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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"sub-culture" has to be one of your more striking puns in this context :) It all made sense to me - in passing, I hadn't realised that Cribbage (often called "crib" for short here in the UK) was popular in American submarines! I…
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The only other books I have read set on a submarine are post WW2, eg Crimson Tide and Ice Station Zebra, and the films which are most similar have been shown from the surface ship's point of view, eg The Cruel Sea. As a setting it really worked for …
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Not really a strength or weakness, but a very characteristic narrative style was Black's habit of describing in considerable detail the run-up to a major encounter... which then for some reason fails or is called off before enactment... after which …
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Great news :)
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(Quote) I guess part of the problem is that even in this world, "I love you" can mean so very many different things, on a whole spectrum from sincere and selfless through to fake or controlling. I don't think we really have enough informat…
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(Quote) This resonates with me. The areas we have seen so far seem to be predominantly inhospitable in one or other ways, eg rocky desert areas. I can't quite see how the economics of this world work. How is food produced? Where does agriculture (ei…
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Sorry to hear that @clash_bowley - hope she recovers quickly from this
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Great!
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Several things caught my eye this week. First, I was relieved that we are (apparently) revisiting the same pair of back stories rather than getting endless new ones :) Secondly, a "Guardian" is apparently there primarily to guard the worl…
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Looks a great resource. It was Wellington's series of battles in the Iberian peninsula, as told in what is now a comparatively old book (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13610519-wellington-s-peninsular-victories), that first persuaded me that ma…
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(Quote) This is worthy of one of those glossary things that @Apocryphal did for The Book of the New Sun... I for one had never heard of gangue until just now.
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Of course, I am being foolish... my mineral name surely has to be Slate :)
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Lol @Apocryphal this is brilliant!! Love it. I have to confess that I had assumed that you'd invented this mineral, but Wiki soon proved me wrong and vindicated you! I shall have to do some mineral research of my own. More broadly, I like your ma…
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I'm having minor problems seeing how the even number chapters integrate with the whole. Last time I thought that #2 was a flashback to Essun's early life, but it seems we're just being treated to a quirky set of background pieces of the jigsaw. But …
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> @Apocryphal said: > You read some books in what... Hindu? Sanskrit? I knew you were a polymath, but still - that's impressive. No no... only in translation :)
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> @Michael_S_Miller said: > I'm enjoying the narrative style, but maybe I just have weird taste. The bit that @Apocryphal quotes is when Essun is so stressed that she loses control of her powers. The fact that the narrative voice loses contro…
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My personal favourite in the Culture books :)
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@clash_bowley aha... I realised on looking again that I had simply assumed that the two were the same... I don't think there has been anything explicit that tells us that
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I've just finished the Kindle version, great stuff
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The overall structure seems to be alternating 3rd person narrative flashback scenes to trace the history with 2nd person "now" scenes to move the story forward. Like the rest of us, I'm still struggling a bit with the 2nd person bits. T…
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Thanks... I thought I'd updated my notification settings but obviously then forgot to save them :(
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From the map / description I kept thinking "Gondwanaland" but clearly that's more like a beginning end than an end end. Then I decided that maybe the Earth (I am assuming it is on Earth) has been around sufficiently long that it has recapi…
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> @NeilNjae said: > Just in case people have missed it, I've posted the first thread about the book. Further threads will be in the Broken Earth category. Thanks! I had missed it on account of the default of no notifications for new catego…
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Out of curiosity, I compared the episodes near the start of book 1 and the end of book 4, where Severian goes through the series of tunnels. There are a lot of parallels, but to be honest it's hard to see which are deliberately made parallel for the…
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I suppose, being charitable, that Huxley might have meant for the society to have thought and spoken like this, without him personally holding such a view.
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(Quote) Though the regular BNW folk considered them fairly revolting, and their society a salutary example of how not to live.
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(Quote) Naturally this got me wondering what the correct plural for utopia should be :) utopiae, perhaps? But regardless of that rabbit hole, I agree with your point, and add the following. I think what you refer to as "maintaining a shadow en…
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Great, all sorted in my calendar... now I just have to buy the first book and read the first portion...
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There's an interesting and probably relevant row brewing at present in the Lake District National Park - it's not clear how it will develop, and there are both credible and incredible arguments bandied on both sides. Let me explain, while attempting…
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Incidentally, this also reminded me of a game mechanism in @clash_bowley 's new opus, The Great Game, in which colonisation of the solar system is triggered by problems happening on Earth. The basic assumption is that people need the impetus of diff…