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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,082
- 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) I find it interesting that in the TV series world, we have switched over almost entirely from monster-of-the-week style (I like that phrase) to overall story arc. Taking Star Trek alone, look at the evolution purely in terms of integration b…
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(Quote) Yes, totally agree.
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(Quote) Yes, that's a very cool classification, though later discussion shows we don't all agree on the nuances of each type
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(Quote) Yes he did, and there's good evidence that he altered some of the endings that he had originally planned based on audience reaction :)
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(Quote) This brings me on to Vance's use of language - I found it quite heavy going. He (deliberately, I assume) adopted a kind of consciously archaic form of words which bogged me down rather than helping me enter his world. I've already mentioned …
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(Quote) As a Brit, I very much liked his world-building and the geographical setting, though I found his use of language to be overdone (of which more in a minute). I'd probably say that I appreciate him rather than enjoy him.
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I read it a couple of years ago and quite liked it, though not enough to buy the sequel. Like @NeilNjae says, it was good to get a nonWestern perspective, though that also meant that I found some passages which the author obviously felt important to…
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On those lines, I was quite struck by - despite the book's name - Suldrun gets scarcely to half way, and the garden isn't that important for most of the book!
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(Quote) I wondered that as I read it, and especially when lots of the discussion comments say things like "ah, in book 3..."
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(Quote) I got well fed up with reading of "erotic conjunctions" and similar circumlocutions...
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If you go a few lines further on then the rhyming pattern emerges as ABCB: Eärendil was a mariner that tarried in Arvernien; he built a boat of timber felled in Nimbrethil to journey in; her sails he wove of silver fair, of silver were her l…
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> @Apocryphal said: > ... To call it the King's curse is not fakery - it's literal-mindedness. Yes, fair enough... I suppose what is missing is the ethical/moral dimension which would place the _real_ blame with the other fairy. Odd that…
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For Heaney, see for example http://www.pelister.org/courses/topics/beowulf/beowulf.pdf A couple of lines early on shows him adhering to the pattern quite strictly: There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes, A wrecker of mead-benches, rampagi…
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Well, Saxon ones (and Germanic in general) were not bothered about rhyme. The standard for there was for lines to consist of two clear halves, each with two main beats, separated by a caesura (=short pause, think comma or maybe semi-colon). Within …
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Like you, I slipped almost to nothing by way of actual reviews in 2018, settling instead for the cheap and easy alternative of just leaving a star rating on Goodreads. A bit lazy, really. It would be a definite step up for me to leave a paragraph he…
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I hadn't picked up that magicians were "harnessing the power of faerie", but thought rather that they were rather gadget driven. A bit more like Tekumel's Eyes than it's magic, if you don't mind the analogy. Casmir's magical lab (and the …
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(Quote) I get the strict hierarchy, but not the strict rules. Most of the interactions I remember consisted of cases where an apparently strict rule was (depending on your point of view) either broken or supplanted by some kind of uber-rule. LIke th…
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I actually thought (never having tried it) that Lyonesse ought to translate pretty well into a long-running game, and might even have started life that way. Hence the apparently rambling and disrupted journeys, and the sense of never being really li…
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(Quote) There's also the theme "I tell you to go to some specific place that's already some distance away, then displace you by magical means to a much more remote starting point that is also far more hazardous".
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I kind of struggled to remember who people were when they reappeared after a few chapters' gap. In the end I just decided to go with the flow and not try to tie things together.
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> @Bill_White said: > ... I'd argue that there is a "main bad guy" and it's King Casmir. He is responsible for the central tragedy that sets everything else in motion, and it is his machinations that drive events forward, right to t…
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Like @NeilNjae, I found the book a bit formless and plotless - sort of meandering here and there without (to me) any overall sense of getting somewhere. Even at the end of the book I felt something like "was that what we were waiting for?"…
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I thought that the world building was a really strong point of the book, and liked the idea of an island out in the Bay of Biscay - to contemporary folk in the UK, that area suggests an unsettled and stormy area hazardous to shipping going on the gr…
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(Quote) And in fact down much of the east coast, which was largely settled north to south by Norse, for example Orford Ness in Suffolk.
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So far as I can remember for sure, the only Jack Vance I have read is one of the Dying Earth series... but I am quite sure that I probably read much more years ago which I have subsequently forgotten. I liked Dying Earth (but haven't yet bought into…
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I hadn't seen that video before but it's a great and truly geeky analysis! Thanks for letting me know
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(Quote) Thanks!
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(Quote) I had a go but it doesn't seem to recognise any UK placenames, nor allow download without this. If we go for this I'll just find a second hand copy and recycle a tree :)
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(Quote) although closer inspection finds the message "This title is not currently available for purchase" :(
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UK Kindle at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mission-Gravity-Hal-Clement-ebook/dp/B017CJOWTG