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clash_bowley
About
- Username
- clash_bowley
- Joined
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- Member, Moderator
Comments
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Oh! Well, I will look for something else then! Bad timing!
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(Quote) Anyone interested in "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed"? I bought it to read, but haven't read it yet.
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(Quote) I was psyched for this book too! It looked like it might be fascinating! The only thing that might have been a problem was the length, and you took care of that with the two-month read! If only all books lived up to our initial expectations!…
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10 minutes to transfer a message that would take hours otherwise - I think the post chaise made it in about 8 hours or so, riders in 5-6 - would be amazing!
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(Quote) In re: 'Telegraph'; the word was extensively use for the networks of signalling towers built in sight of each other, in first France, then England during the Napoleonic period. This allowed almost instantaneous news of raids or invasions fr…
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(Quote) Which would have been an interesting slant to take!
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(Quote) Yes, apparently the plot shifted into a higher gear after the section I read! I have no idea if I would have felt the same after reading the later part!
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Religion certainly didn't surface one for breath in the first part of the book...
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"Telegraph, any device or system that allows the transmission of information by coded signal over distance." I meant I knew much of what was coming before it happened, at least as far as I read.
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Even though I couldn't finish the book, my thoughts on the world building are essentially those of Richard, above. There was no effort to build a magic system that was internally consistent or limited in any way. The politics were simplistic and not…
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After reading all your comments, I think you and I are seeing this synoptically. The whole silver/word magic system is as rootless as "Royal Navy", and thus becomes subject to fiat magic. There is no real structure underlying the magic - n…
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Pretty much echo everyone here. The writing is not a problem.
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I find it impossible to care. This is like reading about someone's daddy issues.
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It has to be like this to set up the colonizer/colonized hammer target. Everything in this book is in service to that message.
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I thought the Cantonese immigrant/colonizer thing was far more important than the language thing, to the point that the language thing was a concept built for the sole purpose of mirroring the immigrant/colonizer thing as a device. it had no being o…
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The idea of words as magic was compelling, one of the reasons I was really interested in this book, but the execution was poor. Why was only Oxford able to educate word magicians? Why so few languages? Why couldn't other lands also do this? What, Ch…
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Since I couldn't get past this first section I will answer the A series discussion and not the other. There were things I liked about the book - the writing style being one big plus, and the depiction of Oxford was wonderfully intimate. On the other…
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(Quote) Sounds great to me!
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Who is up?
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It's both. I used to really like Saberhagen, and still own several of his books, but have not had any urge to pick them up for decades now, but I never was drawn to the Berserker series, and that remains true.
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I also thought that, but the one dimensional characters bothered me more.
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As I said in answer to the previous question, I used to be a fan of Saberhagen. He is a more than competent writer whose main difficulty was characterization. He would at times use simplistic one dimensional characters where he should have used more…
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I was a fan of Saberhagen as a young man, but avoided the Berserker books. I am no longer a fan of Saberhagen, but I wouldn't read any more Berserker stories.
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The worlds actually described seemed to be close-Earth-analogs, rather than anything different. No constructed worlds, no strange and marvelous worlds, not harsh and unforgiving worlds. His Federation to defeat the Berserkers made sense as a tempora…
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Very dated! As people point out above, it's SF by a cis white man about cis white men, for cis white men. The women were defined by their relationship to men. It's like "What were all the other people doing?" It was a product of his times,…
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Karlson's faith is indeed mentioned in narrative - in the Stone Place story. I thought he was far too Christ-like. Nogara was a boring simplistic EVIL man - evil in one way, evil in all ways. I didn't believe either was real, and I am a man of consi…
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Conversely I didn't care for the series of stories that start with Stone Place. I didn't care for those characters. I also didn't like Goodlife much either. The others I liked better.
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This was definitely an assemblage of short stories for me. There was no uniformity of tone and person that a novel would provide. It's short stories with a frame story, like 1001 Nights, not a novel.
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(Quote) Sleep? Sleep is for weaklings! :D
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I game on Discord twice a week - once in text and once via voice. I also game over IRC and face to face.