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NeilNjae
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We never really see Kargish society, so I guess that says something about how religion fits in: most Kargish don't particularly worship, or at least done worship the Nameless Ones. That's apparent from both the lack of outsiders in the story and the…
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Oh, it's very much a coming of age story. Tenar starts as a child, accepting what she's been told and doing what she's told, such as never bringing a light into the labyrinth. She starts to explore what her position means even before Ged arrives, bu…
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I'm guessing you know about the Bang-oriented, protagonist-play style of GMing? As in, the one mentioned in Sorcerer and Sorcerer's Soul. I tend to run this sort of situation from an R-map (with each NPC annotated with their goal) and a list of Bang…
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Plenty of second-hand paperbacks available, especially the Fantasy Masterworks edition from 2000.
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Oh, it's very much a more dubious background than the rest of the djinn. To the extent that he's well-known and notorious among all the rest of the djinni.
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In the author's defence, the "overpowered enigmatic bad boy" is a mystery to the other characters too and a plot point. I trust the author to have a plan for why it's happening.
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I'd be tempted to go with the "3x3" scheme to bring this setup to life. (I think I got the idea from Chris Chinn, but I can't find it now.) The idea is to identify three factions, and three people in each one. You've got three factions alr…
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Finally finished the book! It was OK. Not so much a travelogue as a travel-inspired work of fiction. My copy has two quotes on the back cover: "Tahir Shah has a genius for surreal travelling, finding—or creating—situations and people" (Dor…
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Dune 3 New Sun 2 Moby Dick 1
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Related to "mental maps" and unrelated to the book, I read an article a while ago about the maps used by polynesian navigators. Europeans just couldn't understand the maps and how the polynesians managed to do their navigation. It took the…
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Yes, I liked the switch from Sara to Thora being the main protagonist, but both of them developed as people over the book.
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(Quote) I liked that too: I could at least see how there was a vaguely plausible connection from our current understanding to what happened in the book. I also liked that different approaches to science/knowing were represented, even if (like @Apocr…
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I felt that some of the worldbuilding was developing a rich universe that the characters lived in outside the novel. But I also felt there were several elements that seemed to be there to set up a theme or conflict in the novel, but weren't followed…
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I wondered about the happy coincidence between the lightless cave home of Torobe and the requirement that wending be unobserved. Which came first? Did the Torobes first move into a lightless environment, then discover how to wend, or did they first …
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Good points. I think Sara pretty much rejected her materialistic upbringing, perhaps finding a better home among the Wasters than the Plants and their predilection for money. I think Thora, at least at the start and end of the book, was trying to co…
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(Quote) This is something I noticed in the book, and it seems you picked up on the same thing. There are lots of interesting ideas in the book, but there are many more introduced than are developed and explored. Would the book have been better if th…
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There was a strong thread of different ways of knowing. Sara was a more analytical person, Thora was intuitive. The notion of the Torobes as being fairies and hence other-than-human isn't one that occurred to me, but it's obvious now you point it ou…
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She's using two bits of science. One is general relativity. Dark matter has mass and hence warps space-time; we see its effects in how galaxies move and interact, even if we can't see the matter itself. (Or we think we see dark matter: until we get …
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I think the traveller/settler split is something the author put in as being a possible theme for the book, but she ended up looking at different aspects instead. It's also perhaps another instance of the duality you mention: is a society defined by …
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Is there any science behind it? Nah, not really. I mean, you can wave your hands a lot and mutter about Schrödinger's Cat, but I don't think there's any real science there. Did the concept work for me? Yes, I could suspend disbelief enough to enjoy…
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I think we were supposed to infer that the Escher had been hit by a fold rain, explaining the twisted topology. (I think the name of the ship was taken from the strange architecture, not the name it was originally given when launched.) It untwisted …
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We got to know the three characters in very different ways: Sara was a viewpoint character in a standard third-person narration, Thora as mainly first-person reflection, and we didn't see Moth's viewpoint at all. I think they're quite different. Th…
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In gaming terms, nkida make for great Fate Aspects! It's a common-enough trope, I think: the flaw that ends up saving the day. I don't think the concept was emphasised enough in the novel. Thora talked about her nkida but didn't really identify nkid…
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I think there's two things going on here. One is our need to make mental models of things, using stories and metaphors to understand the world ("Oh, it's a forest"). That means our understanding of new things is based on what we relate it …
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It's my first Gilman book (I'd not heard of her before). I liked it! Yes, I'd read another of her books. The characters seemed pretty realistic, not doing things for purely plot reasons. There was a good senseawunda in the initial exploration, even …
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I got 100 pages into Arabian Nights and found it full of self-indulgent twaddle. Luckily, King Solomon's Mines arrived in the library, so I've swapped books. Hopefully King Solomon's Mines is better.
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I love her style. By the time I get half-way through one of her books, I end up sounding like her too, with her rhythms and word choices.
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Just finished it on a flight back home. It went in places that were different from what I thought was foreshadowed at the start of the book. A good read; I enjoyed it.
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(Quote) I've already read all of these and would be happy to read them again. I've put them in order of preference for a slow read. (Quote) Not read this, but would be willing to give it a go. (Quote) I've tried a couple of times to read these and…
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On the strength of this review, I decided to get the copy from my local library. Only to find it missing, perhaps for a couple of years. So another copy is on its way from the other end of the country, and I've borrowed Shah's book on Morocco, Arabi…