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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,145
- 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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Cover blurb and about-the-author now posted as a category for @Apocryphal 's choice for August, Planet of the Apes
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Part of Temeraire's outsider-ness is indeed his name. All the others have funky Latin names because their riders knew that this was the convention, but Laurence used his own naval conventions to give a decent ship name, which then immediately expose…
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(Quote) While I was writing that I suddenly had a little wave of nostalgia for those plasticard ships :) and poring over Jane's Fighting Ships and other similar sources in Godalming and Guildford libraries. I had a quick search online for the rules …
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It was a fun morph of the "I do not say, my Lords, that the French will not come. I say only they will not come by sea." quotation :)
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To repeat a thing I said on the Discord channel, "Back in the day, a bunch of us had some WW1 flying rules played with Airfix models (1:72 scale) on long bamboo poles so you were doing the manoeuvring and all for real, lateral and vertical, to …
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(Quote) Going back a few years to the Dragonriders of Pern series, Naomi Novak here avoids the topic that Anne McCaffrey tackles head-on, viz sex between two dragons triggering simultaneous sex between their riders. So here, although the closeness o…
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(Quote) I haven't read those books - I tried one of Robin Hobb's very early books and didn't really get on with it, so haven't gone back to her later ones (which may well be a mistake). I was also thinking of a book you chose a while ago, Red Schola…
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That's an interesting idea (maybe suggest it to Naomi Novak :) ) to do a prequel series of the "long species war". Maybe this word's equivalent of House of the Dragon?
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I hadn't come across that before but it's nice advice. Good point about the chronologically first Hornblower book.
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Discussion starters for Temeraire now in place...
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(Quote) How cool! I've never read it
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Harkfast category set up now
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@All: couple of things... 1) How are people getting on with Temeraire? If all good I'll post discussion starters in about a week 2) @clash_bowley you're up in July... you talked about Harkfast by Hugh Rae - still on for that? If so I'll set up the c…
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Some relentless searching finds that the first episode of season 1 is available on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2warRbMFOpk together with a whole host of short clips. Allegedly all four series are also available through Britbox streaming…
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Still plenty of time to comment on Mirrorshades but now is also a good time to remember that June's pick is Temeraire, also known as His Majesty's Dragon, by Naomi Novik. Discussion starters will be put out by yours truly around the end of the month.
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(Quote) What a tactful way of saying I'm older :) But also, that made me think, "wouldn't it be cool to watch Blake's 7 again", only to discover it's extremely hard to find on UK streaming sites
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On a vaguely related note, does anyone remember a near-future vaguely-dystopian TV series from the early 1970s called Doomwatch? BBC1 I think, and I don't know if it ever got shipped overseas, so maybe Neil is the only likely person of us all. The e…
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(Quote) And also the Stationer enclave who are a little bit like the Rebels (except more inclined to collaborate, and with less moral distinction between the two factions). Each group has some form of enhancement that the other lacks. But yes, I agr…
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So maybe early cyberpunk has evolved somewhat into the superhero genre?
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That was really helpful, not least because it highlighted the stories that made so little impression on me that I had forgotten them completely! To the point that I thought of a couple of them that you must have a different edition with different co…
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> @Apocryphal said: > Those seem like odd questions to ask. We all thought so too, and there was (as you'd expect) a certain amount of cynicism as to the motive for asking... should we all be checking our employment contracts? 😯 > …
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Sorry only just catching up with this - yes it's the first in the series, which does indeed have a slightly different title each side of the Atlantic
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I think it is interesting how differently the different authors in the collection perceived future politics (to the extent that they tackled such wide-scale matters in their short stories) - some had a great deal of corporate intervention, some posi…
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Yes, it feels like the endless cat videos or whatever of Tiktok, and the existence of vicious opinion silos on Twitter and the like, is kind of cyberpunk gone wrong! Although I said earlier (I mean yesterday) that I didn't find much in the collectio…
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Back in the sixth form at school, ie the second half of the 1970s when I was 16 or 17, our Applied Maths teacher taught us the basics of programming in FORTRAN - we carefully wrote out the instructions longhand on paper, then used a machine to gener…
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Hmmm, I don't think I'd agree with Sterling here. I don't remember any of the stories being ones that I enjoyed or would reread for the quality of writing style or prose. They seemed to me to focus more on ideas and settings than style. So there was…
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The stories seemed largely to deal with personal situations rather than "we're going to change society" ones. There didn't seem to be an angle suggesting that any of the protagonists were going to emerge as significant social forces. Compa…
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I was surprised by the prevalence of drug use in the stories, which seemed a more common feature than cyber stuff somehow. So I'd expected techno implants and the like, but hadn't really linked it in my mind to altered states of consciousness induce…
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Back home now and looking at these properly... Like @Apocryphal I found them mixed, and am never sure how well I get on with short stories (of course there are exceptions). I'm not sure I had a favourite as such - I thought there were interesting id…
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I finished a few days ago so any time is good - except I shall be away walking Sunday - Tuesday but will participate as I can :) (Quote) I'd be inclined to skip a story you're not getting on with and jump to the next one. I almost did that once but…