Help offset server costs by donating. This is totally optional. Any overages will go to library fines or new books.
Apocryphal
About
- Username
- Apocryphal
- Joined
- Visits
- 11,633
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member, Administrator, Moderator
Comments
-
Could be.
-
> @RichardAbbott said: > I agree that point 5 "The Decisive Battle of the Elect, which is a fancy way of saying there's a final conflict between good and evil, in which the reader recognizes how much they have in common with the evil cha…
-
That game is still going? I have 2 editions already, but never hear anyone talk about it.
-
"This person doesn't belong here, so I'm going to deflate their tires so they can never leave." Doesn't seem very well thought out lol. Reminds me of when I was in university, a fellow student did a huge bike ride through Asia. He later d…
-
Survivors was by Terry Nation, if I recall (I think I have his novelization on my shelf) who also did work on early Dr Who - like invented the Daleks?
-
I thought I'd share Gary K. Wolfe's thesis on common structure for Apocalyptic Novels, from his essay titled The Remaking of Zero, which I read in his book Evaporating Genres * Experience or Discovery of the Cataclysm * Journey Through the Wastelan…
-
I'm not sure there's anything special about this book in regards to gaming. It's certainly the kind of scenario that might play out in an Apocalyptic Game. The theme of pushing the players to decide how brutal their character will become is well-tro…
-
I suppose each has their place. I would call this an Apocalyptic Novel - one that deals with the fall of society, wheras Riddley Walker was a Post-Apocalyptic Novel - one that deals with the reconstruction of society after the fall. Tom's-A-Cold is…
-
I thought it did feel credible, in the sense that any one group of might might certainly organize themselves this way. And since this descent into brutality is the theme, it makes sense to have an authoritarian organization. To what degree any of t…
-
A disdain of other countries except 'The Americans' who again are assumed will somehow once again come to the rescue. Unlike in Triffids, in this novel this heroic role is also extended to the Commonwealth. The Canadian attitude would be that we ca…
-
I think it was key to the theme Christopher wanted to explore, to contrast these individuals. I found it effective.
-
I personally didn't find this all that convincing. But although this is the title of the book, I don't think it's really the main concept, either. The mechanics of it is barely touched on, afterall - the actual death of grass takes place in the back…
-
(Quote) I'm done. Read it in a day. :D
-
I haven't read it, but I have it and would like to read it.
-
I thought it was - maybe is was Mischa Krilov.
-
I’ve never really been too excited about cyberpunk, either, though I did enjoy that Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams that Richard took us through several years ago. That book did kind of have a F-factor thing for me. The New Weird I …
-
Yes. I was for one thing confused by the onomastics. We seemed to have characters with French names, English names, Russian names and so on, but no real sense of being on Earth, or really anywhere. And no sense at all of local language, which would …
-
I quite at about 25% in, unable to fathom how most of what was being described related to the vermin extermination plot that was initially set up.
-
Same for me - there was a moment where we met the gang (many of whom had strange names making them hard to identify or mentally form an image of, like Three and Dawn) and I felt we were getting somewhere. But then it was all new characters who seeme…
-
I will probably give this one a miss. I rarely miss a book, so I think I've earned a bye. I just really chafe against books that are this cute.
-
Wow - that was a long wait!
-
@NeilNjae I don’t think you would have liked it, so probably the right call.
-
In a way there’s a similarity here with Watership Down. At the time we read Watership Down (in the very early G+ days, possibly before @RichardAbbott snd @NeilNjae joined, and before @BarnerCobblewood could be convinced to joint G+) the person who p…
-
We need @BarnerCobblewood for this one!
-
That’s true - I had the impression that both the matriarch and the schoolmaster remembered things from before the catastrophe, which means we have only one or two inbred generations. I don’t think that could explain the lack of limbs. But I also don…
-
Yes, nobody seemed to object to the choice. I see the author is being compared to Chine Mieville.
-
The set-up of the family and the characters like the Schoolmaster are things I could use for NPCs in a post apocalyptic game. I'd probably try to be less bleak, but maybe not. I do think that the headmaster alone would make for an interesting encoun…
-
The prose was the thing I liked the most. Not so much the long rambly quality of the paragraphs, but the actual way the words were strung together I found quite beautiful. I found that when I started reading, the pages would fairly fly by. But then …
-
That didn't occur to me, either, but I do think it's an interesting idea. Can we match the children to the likes of Cain and Abel? Who would the headmaster be in this comparison?
-
Yes, I felt the same as you. I suppose a better executed example of something like this might be the Punch and Judy show in Riddley Walker that kept intruding into the main story, but in this case I also had a hard time distinguishing the Aquinas bi…