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NeilNjae
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If most of us have read it, there's plenty else to read. Perhaps _Nettle and Bone_ by T. Kingfisher? I've wanted to read some of her serious adult fiction for a while (she's very good at the lighthearted stuff).
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> @RichardAbbott said: > Discussion still ongoing about Harkfast but this is a quick reminder that August is Planet of the Apes selected by @Apocryphal . Also, @NeilNjae do you have a title chosen for September yet? Given that I'm in Trans…
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> @RichardAbbott said: > Discussion still ongoing about Harkfast but this is a quick reminder that August is Planet of the Apes selected by @Apocryphal . Also, @NeilNjae do you have a title chosen for September yet? Given that I'm in Trans…
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> @clash_bowley said: > The sudden ending bothered me in an 'I was left hanging, now we'll never know..." sense, but far stronger was the relief that I didn't have to read more of this story. Thank God this was written before fantasy nov…
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A good point about the violence. The setting is is very much one where lives are nasty, brutal, and short. The closest we get to compassion is the lacklustre camaraderie between Ruan and his band. It's all very downbeat. And if this is Arthur retold…
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I liked how Harkfast is portrayed, the wise and manipulative druid. I liked the alternative take on the Arthur myth, making it a very small and personal story with the mythic element applied by the narrator and reader.
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Yes, the book was obviously intended as the first of a series. One or two more would have finished off the story. As the the Arthur connection, the book seemed like a "gritty" retelling of the Arthur story, with Harkfast as Merlin.
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The book gave me the impression of a competent author with a decent range (no one writes like this all the time). But I'm not in any rush to read more, even a sequel to this.
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The characters didn't seem like well rounded people. Ruan was arrogant, Harkfast even more so. The others were there to be servants, and that's all they were.
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Agreed. I think it was a novel of it's time of writing.
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I'd guess the first book didn't make enough money to justify writing another. A shame, but that's the life of a professional author.
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It's racism. Compare to how the Roman is described as tall and noble. A more interesting question is whether Rae shared these views. I see no evidence either way.
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I'm with @Apocryphal here: Harkfast is the controller of events, at least at the beginning. Ruan is starting to assert his independence by the end of the book, but only just.
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I disliked the style. It wasn't so much the archaic words as the sheer volume of words, giving the impression that every little thing was of great symbolic import that needed to be described in excessive detail lest any reader be in the slightest do…
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(Quote) Insightful comment! Yes, Temeraire is the outsider to the Regency culture. How many of the other dragons are also outsiders, or are they part of the established order? Alternatively, if you read the dragons as anthropomorphised wooden saili…
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I was thinking about all the times Laurence calls Temeraire "dear" and other such terms of endearment. I think the relationship is meant to be more than just platonic friendship. I'm not sure what to make of the fact that both Laurence and…
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One world-building miss I stumbled across... had no-one ever thought of using dragons as troop transporters before? We had plenty of hints of the dragons' abilities to carry loads over distance (with the aerial rescue of the wounded dragon), so sure…
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It could make a decent enough RPG setting, using something like Beat to Quarters as a system and having the dragon being one character among the ensemble. Also, the idea of the dragons being strategically important assets means that there will alway…
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It's interesting that the series doesn't stick with the military exploits plots that it seemed to be driving towards. I would expect the book series to follow the same overall trajectory as the Sharpe and Hornblower books. In any case, I'm not in a…
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Genre labels are flexible things with porous boundaries, so I'm not bothered by confusion with attempts to categorise this book. It's a book, it's nerd-troped Napoleonic naval, it'll attract people who like dragons in their stories. Someone along th…
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I didn't pick up any particular subtext or exploration of issues, beyond what's commonplace in Napoleonic fiction: the notion of duty and sacrifice, the British class system, the restricted role of women, that kind of thing. As for the Laurence-Tem…
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Like @Apocryphal , I thought the worldbuilding of dragons was too contrived. I could believe that many weren't that intelligent, but... they were intelligent enough to become fluent in a human language by just eavesdropping on it from within the egg…
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The characters all seemed to fit the standards of Napoleonic / Regency society, at least as far as I know them. The mix of class-based ranks and meritocracy is something I've seen in other fiction set in the time (it seems like a period of increasin…
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I was reminded of the advice given to new authors on how to start a story: write the story as you would want to do it, then go back and remove the first chapter or two. Those are often the equivalent to throat-clearing and preparation for the actual…
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I've finished Temeraire. I've not read either Harkfast or Planet of the Apes, so looking forward to them.
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Sorry, Doomwatch was a bit before my time. But there is a tradition of the British taking a rather more cynical view of technological progress than our American cousins. My favourite example is Blake's 7 being the British version of Star Trek : afte…
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I think you're right, in that a lot of the technology ideas were around (I was an avid watcher of Tomorrow's World back in the day). These writers did see the social trends and extrapolated them. I think the confluence of decentralisation and disint…
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I think a key theme of these stories is how technology alienates us. Martine's books may have the same technology, but there it's to reinforce an imperial hegemony.
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I think that cyberpunk now has transformed into yet another power fantasy genre. The protagonists of Cyberpunk Red (the game) and The Matrix (the film) are far from ordinary people. They've got special powers, whether through cool cyberwear or gnosi…
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My thoughts on the stories: * Gernsback Continuum: a nice way of both pointing out how disorienting modern technology can be, and how dystopian the world really is, only we don't notice it most of the time because it's "normal" now. * Sna…