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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,055
- 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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One of the interesting things to me is the shift in AAI from lots of separate algorithms, all easily surfaced for individual use, to more generic models where the actual mechanism is submerged from the user. So back in the day (and we're talking som…
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All this suddenly reminded me of a trilogy I read years ago - Omnivore, Orn, and 0X, from the late 60's - early 70s, by Piers Anthony and sometimes collected into a single volume Of Man and Manta. Like a lot of Piers Anthony, hiss male-female relati…
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(Quote) In that case he does a pretty good job of writing decently about religious persuasion!
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(Quote) I don't really have the practical experience to comment much, but this section intrigued me. I think you are saying here that as characters improve (however measured) a good chunk of that improvement should focus on who knows them and by imp…
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(Quote) :o
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All, looks like the extensive discussion about The Terminal Experiment is dying down so it's a good time to remind everyone that June's read is The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands, selected by @NeilNjae . I haven't yet picked a July ch…
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I read that as just extremely dated - I don't know how many authors were writing about therapists at all in 1994/5, so it probably needed to be quite simplistic in outline
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I think it was a kind of stand-in for "the humans concerned only thought of a few things but the virtual ones had plenty of time to work out their own agenda".
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For everyone who's been wanting a flying car... https://www.msn.com/en-gb/cars/news/flying-car-that-can-reach-over-155mph-in-the-air-could-come-to-market-in-2026/ar-AA1EYdhq One minor drawback "However, AirCar 2 is not affordable with estimates…
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There's an interesting and vaguely parallel technique used in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell where a lot of this material is provided in footnotes. These range in size from a sentence to over a page, and are typically written from an encyclopaedic …
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Oh that's excellent, thanks for filling in detail :) nothing like local references to round out a book
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(Quote) Yes, it's a way of getting additional voices into the narrative without trying to head-hop too much in the main narrative.
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Interested to hear what others think
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I hadn't spotted that! Thanks for highlighting it. I guess Sally was in that position?
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Oh yes, totally! Not wishing to advertise and all that, but one of the subplots in The Liminal Zone was exactly this idea, where Scribe class personas feel superior to the older Sapling class, and both are rather disdainful of the original Stele cla…
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Yes I agree - completely different from generative AI which basically (this is a simplistic view which @NeilNjae may well prefer to correct) learns language skills and facts from a vast compendium of existing knowledge. My own feeling about the stat…
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I liked it (though inevitably some specific items were annoying rather than illuminating). He uses a similar technique in Hominids so it's evidently a way he likes for imparting peripheral information to the reader.
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Didn't guess right - I was favouring the 'bodiless' one as prime suspect. I did like the plot rationale for it being that one, and thought that Sawyer did a good job of making it obvious in retrospect.
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That's a really good question. Being in the process of reading Hominids my guess is that he has Catholic sympathies, but is acutely aware of problems within said faith (as indeed, many Catholics are). But one of the refreshing things about his books…
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I thought the idea that so much stuff would be cloud-based, with local machines being essentially like prisons to the three virtual individuals, was surprisingly prescient. Most older SF writers continued to assume that computers would largely remai…
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It was refreshing to have a non-US city setting (somewhat like Hiero's Journey being a refreshing non-USA post-apocalyptic tale). It was clear that Sawyer knew the place well himself and so could toss in random details - so avoiding ,for me at least…
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Loved it! Sufficiently so that I've started reading other books by Sawyer, in particular the Hominids series (which, briefly, concerns the interaction between our world and a quantum-parallel one in which Neanderthals emerged as the dominant hominid…
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(Quote) Personally I find that only some books work for me in audio format. That's partly because I tend to listen while doing household stuff like cooking or washing up, or if I'm in the car on my own, whereas with ebook/paperback I am more focused…
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@Apocryphal - super-enjoyed this book and can't understand why I hadn't come across Robert Sawyer before. Seeing as how I devoured it way before the end of the month I downloaded another of his (Hominids) to see what some of his other work is like
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Discussion area for The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands now set up. Current state of rota play is: Apr @kcaryths The Saint of Bright Doors - ongoing discussion still welcome! May @Apocryphal The Terminal Experiment Jun @NeilNjae The Ca…
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Thanks all especially @BarnerCobblewood for this discussion!
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(Quote) Are they just genderless because they're not following the gender conventions we expect for Romance languages? Or are they deliberately intended to be genderless following Asian conventions? We had an interesting conversation along these li…
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(Quote) @BarnerCobblewood if you would like to do this I can slot you in at whatever month is best for you?
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Something I wondered about after finishing - which I think connects with what @NeilNjae is saying - was the series of Five Unforgiveables mentioned right at the start. For the first maybe 1/4 of the book it feels like Fetter is going to systematical…
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It would be a serious heap of detail for a GM to keep track of :) The identity cards alone were fearfully complex...