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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,166
- 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) There are two places in England that come to mind - the Isle of Ely and the Isle of Purbeck. Ely, a bit north of Cambridge, was historically mostly surrounded by fenland and so you needed local knowledge to approach safely (long since draine…
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(Quote) That's fair. I guess even today we like ongoing stories with episodic clliffhanger endings - pretty much every streamed series follows this pattern.
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(Quote) Hm, that's an astute observation! I had assumed that he was included amongst the other slaves when Shahriyar "stormed every room of his palace", but on the other hand Masud is said to have "leapt over the [palace] wall and wen…
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(Quote) Judging by the comparison to The Handmaid's Tale this happy ending was probably a later accretion! (Quote) Indeed (Quote) Robin Hood is definitely a later set of stories with its deliberate ties to the reigns of Kings Richard and John. The…
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I made a few other notes as I went along. From the intro "Arabian Nights possesses a remarkable ability to mutate in the hands of the innumerable storytellers... who have reimagined it,,, The inherent fluidity of the collection seems to invite…
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Just checking how close people are to finishing The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. Not that I'm planning posting anything before the weekend but just finding out
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Great to have you back @Ray_Otus - let's hope your own sea voyage isn't as eventful as the one I am expecting in The Wager :)
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All: I have set up the new slow read discussion category for The Arabian Nights and moved the discussion @NeilNjae started with the link to the Google Doc plan into it
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Moved to new slow read category by Richard
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Sounds great to me [Edited} would you like me to set up a discussion area in the Slow Reads category?
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Also October area for The Wager (led by @Ray_Otus ) and November area for Tripoint ( @clash_bowley ) now set up
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Some thoughts about this, finally. Come Looking for Me, being a historical novel, has a certain set of historical events around and within which to establish a particular plot. Clearly different historical novelists stick to known (or at least broa…
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Sounds good to me
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(Quote) That was sort-of my thinking. Physical formations are invaluable - a wedge is good against a line, a square is good against cavalry, missile troops are better deployed behind melee troops and so on. EE (Doc) Smith was heavily into this with …
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That's really neatly put, @Apocryphal
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I lack much of the relevant experience to answer this properly, but yes, it felt like you just had to have the right magical device (=weapon with funky name) and you'd either annihilate your enemy or be annihilated next turn - kind of Russian Roulet…
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This European failed to understand it, I'm afraid. And I came away with no clear idea what the key themes were or what the book was trying to say
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Hm, an interesting idea which hadn't occurred to me before. I'll have a think about it.
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Yes, Cheris was quite interesting but was progressively eclipsed. But I was neither sorry nor pleased that she vanished. Formation instinct (and I guess part of me baulked at the word instinct when it was apparently actually a culturally imposed be…
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Yes, again I agree with @clash_bowley - in most chapters a new utterly destructive weapon was wheeled out, and there wasn't (I think) any attempt to have a consistent body of military or physical theory behind any of them - they all seemed to target…
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I almost gave up about half way through because of my complete lack of understanding of what was happening and who I was supposed to think of as worth favouring, but persuaded myself to finish it. The ending kind of confirmed my feeling that we were…
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Yeah, I never really got it at all, even after @BarnerCobblewood sent me those links. If I had found the story in itself interesting I might have put in the effort to learn what was going on, but I didn't, so I didn't (if you see what I mean). A lot…
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I'm with Clash here - I kept wondering what on earth dating systems and festivals had to do with weaponry and transportation technology. And how in what (with @BarnerCobblewood 's help) I eventually worked out was a multi-solar-system hegemony, a si…
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I'd never heard of it before, so it didn't help before ( :) ) and doesn't really help now. I kind of floundered in this book and didn't understand much of what was going on. It felt like book 10 in a 25-volume series and I kept feeling that I ought …
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I don't ever remember seeing that but then I pretty much always use the same machine
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All done
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September selection The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde category posted so it's time to update notification preferences (though they're still not working for me)
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(Quote) The double letters? ff vs rr?
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I posted a few days ago... For September I'm thinking of a change of mood to a witty 2001 debut novel called The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (an English writer who now lives in Wales). It's in the British tradition of comedy thinly disguised as SF …
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All: discussion for Come Looking for Me seems to have finished so this is a reminder to read Ninefox Gambit, for which @NeilNjae wil be leading discussion at the end of August. For September I'm thinking of a change of mood to a witty 2001 debut no…