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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,287
- 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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(Quote) I'd read Possession a few years back and thought it OK but overly long for what it was trying to do. I've enjoyed The Djinn etc much more
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All: I'm hoping to set up the discussion starters for Eversion this weekend, provided everyone has either finished or decided they're not going to?
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Another interesting quote from A S Byatt's The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (this time from the title story) (Quote) A lot of this particular story is exploring the world of the Arabian Nights but seen in a modern setting where the protagonist is…
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Oddly enough I came across some ideas that are loosely related to this while reading The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye by A.S Byatt (for the local book club) where one of Byatt's characters is discussing tales from The Arabian Nights (Quote) In pa…
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I'm about half way through the article just now - I'm enjoying it but haven't yet seen any acknowledgement that the novel (which is what most people mean by "a work of fiction that I'm going to read") has only really existed for a little o…
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Discussion area for Emphyrio now set up
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Hi all, looks like chatter about Murderbot is dying down, though please feel free to carry on! This is a reminder, if such were needed, that February's read is Eversion by Alastair Reynolds, with discussion starters to be posted by yours truly just …
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So the current version of the rota is: Feb Me (Eversion) Mar @clash_bowley (Emphyrio) Apr @kcaryths (TBD) May @Apocryphal (TBD) Jun @NeilNjae (TBD) Jul Me (TBD) and so on
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(Quote) Yes that's right
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Apologies all for not getting discussion areas sorted out - we are reopening to guests today which (oddly enough) should mean I have more time for sorting such things out as we can no longer leap into maintenance or last-minute preparation!
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I've had people call Far from the Spaceports libertarian, which kind of took me aback when I came across the comment. I guess it's not a word I use or think of using this side of The Pond.
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I suppose I reckon that "security's rubbish today so it'll always be so" isn't very convincing! I mean, space travel is kind of rubbish today but by the time of the book they've got it cracked quite nicely. And current medical science or r…
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(Quote) I guess that raises the very thorny issue of whether intelligence and sentience and sapience are different words for the same thing, or quite different kinds of things
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(Quote) Love this analogy!
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Yes, it's an odd one, no real sense of justice other than endless legal cases (and one has to wonder, to what body of laws are they appealing and what court has jurisdiction?). If each station/base/planet/asteroid has its own laws, how can a legal p…
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(Quote) That made for an interesting read, though I think I ended up in only partial agreement with it! Penned in 1981, it was before a lot of the transformation of SF to cover internal worlds and interpersonal relationships rather than external wor…
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Hard SF - no, not in my view, as there's no real attempt ever to present a coherent view of the state of the art. For example we have seen no glimpses into why SecUnits (and presumably ComfortUnits) are a mix of organic and synthetic material - no r…
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Worth noting too that mostly through the book, and so far in this discussion thread, we have construed "violence" as meaning something physical. But murderbot hardly gets a chapter without hacking some unfortunate device or other (and only…
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With my other half working as a psychotherapist I end up spending a decent amount of time talking around the whole autistic spectrum topic, so it wasn't so much off an introduction to the area as a revisitation! The preoccupation with trashy soap o…
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Within the world as presented, murderbots and sexbots, and ART, and a whole lot of other constructed things are considered sentient, but others are not. Our "hero" is quite dismissive about the abilities of lesser machinery, and tends to j…
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I've read a couple of Martha Wells books before but never any of her SF - I think of her as a competent writer who has good ideas, but her prose style leaves me kind of cold. I can't exactly articulate why this is, but something about the style just…
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(Quote) It's ages since I read any Vance
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All: some chatter continuing about Shardik which is great, but as we've now reached the 18th it's probably a good time to remind everyone that January's read is parts 1 and 2 of the Murderbot series, namely All Systems Red and Artificial Condition. …
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If there's enthusiasm I'll work out a schedule covering a roughly 6 month period (give or take) and see what that looks like.
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> @kcaryths said: > The descriptions of Shardik's ravaged and emaciated body, as well as the scene where he is being honoured in death, certainly felt like he was taking a bit of Aslan but rewriting him for his own story where the redemption …
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@BarnerCobblewood yes I tend to agree with a lot of what you said. I was trying to puzzle through the question "what did Adams think he was trying to achieve" given that collectively we've all decided that the book failed in various ways t…
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(Quote) That's a really nice summary, and got me thinking about other story arcs. The classic (and slightly simplistic) distinction between comedy and tragedy is that comedy follows an arc like \/ - it goes down first when everything's going wrong, …
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(Quote) That echoes something Ursula LeGuin wrote in the forward to Left Hand of Darkness: (Quote) Now, whilst I agree with that as a matter of principle, it doesn't IMHO address the practical problem that we face when reading a genre book... I hav…
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I downloaded the kindle sample and have just finished whatever fraction of the book that makes it - her writing style (like Piranesi) is clear and direct, and IMHO very enjoyable. As probably most of us know it's another look at Napoleonic Britain (…
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(Quote) Sorry to hear that, hope you're on the mend now (Quote) I partly agree with this - I still struggled with the writing and flicked rapidly through it... but I did appreciate the way Adams tried to tie start and end together, most notably wit…