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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,168
- 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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It's nothing to do with the Napoleonic era, but touching on the subject of women in the armed forces I came across this article today... https://phys.org/news/2023-08-mystery-iron-age-warrior-small.html The island where the remains were found is Bry…
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@clash_bowley may have more sources but there's one list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_warfare_and_the_military_in_the_19th_century and another one at http://emperornapoleon.com/army/women-in-the-army.html One suspects that these are ju…
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(Quote) Maybe that's how she ended up with thee?
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(Quote) Yes, definitely
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(Quote) That's certainly true - despite having to jump out of one ship being shot at, and participating in several battles between ships (albeit unwillingly) I never got the sense that she felt herself in real personal peril
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That's an interesting question. I've only come across naval gaming, both Napoleonic and WW1, in a table-top sense (well, for WW1 it was actually a whole lot of floor area rather than a table), where the focus was on manoeuvring ships into advantageo…
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Agree with @NeilNjae here - the 1812 war is in my mind a very minor side-action compared with all the stuff going on with Napoleon in Europe. 1812 included the collapse of Napoleon's attempted invasion of Russia, and some of the initial decisive vic…
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(Quote) I agree with this - I still wasn't sure at the end why it had been such a big deal for her to disguise her identity, or why the Bad Guys were determined to capture and expose her.
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Inevitably there were very few women characters! Basically one "nice" and one "nasty". It's hard to see how it could have been otherwise, unless much more of the action had been at a port, but this did mean that we saw much more …
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I devoured pretty much everything CS Forester wrote back in my teens and have revisited some of his books a few times since then - they no longer have quite the same compelling power as they did all those years ago but are still an enjoyable read fo…
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Thanks @BarnerCobblewood those links were helpful in answering my initial query, though inevitably they have raised other questions and perplexitiest. There seems to be a prodigious amount of background material
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(Quote) :o
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(Quote) there's a whole thread in that one sentence alone :)
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(Quote) I mostly agree with this, especially the point about worthwhile ideas not being presentable in one-sentence paragraphs. One of the interesting things for me about this exercise with our local bookshop is what the guy there thinks of as SF/F …
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No, there's no local connection for most of them (and I'd mention if there was)
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(Quote) Sorted - pleas set up notification preferences (though mine haven't been working recently :( )
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Interestingly I'm currently listening to this on Audible - it works for me in that medium because it's kind of easy reading, the language and vocabulary is quite, well, prosaic rather than delightful, and it doesn't matter much if you zone out and m…
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> @clash_bowley said: > (Quote) > I would be! Likewise
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> @NeilNjae said: > Let's be boring, and stick with Ninefox Gambit. We could so a slow read of Arabian Nights in parallel, if anyone's interested. I'll set that up soon
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There may still be some chatter about Theory of Bastards, but this is also a reminder of July's choice, Come Looking for Me, by Cheryl Cooper, chosen by @Apocryphal. @NeilNjae have you made a decision about August yet?
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(Quote) Yup. It was just over.
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(Quote) Maybe it's a US thing? I can't remember the last time any of my severally-aged family members went to a zoo (and the book didn't foreground any of the ethical questions of keeping animals like that, making, I think, the assumption that they …
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(Quote) Yes - I am sure that she (author she rather than character she) wanted to bring the interesting biology in, and she also wanted to write about the way an interconnected society could fail catastrophically all of a sudden... but I don't think…
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(Quote) I agree with this - it shaped the way Frankie looked at the world and her relationships (which were largely non-existent in the present, and largely failures in the past), so arguably she started looking at relationships from a detached biol…
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(Quote) Agreed - the proposed biological theory made sense and I could believe that it was based on an extrapolation of current research, but there didn't seem to be any parallels between that and other parts of the story.
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(Quote) Yes this is a very good way of putting it. The various ideas didn't seem to gel into an overall whole ut remained separate all the way through. (Quote) Again an interesting point. I recently read Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land which (a b…
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(Quote) Hm, maybe so, though the teens did (there's a comment about some young lad not realising that his hand moves to page through results were bashing into Frankie). And presumably the parents of young kids could simply have cast Bindi results on…
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As a story (except for the end) I thought it engaging, different, and credible, and was very glad o have read it. One typographic question I was left with... which @Apocryphal may not be aware of if as usual he listened to the book rather than read…
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Adding a comment so I get to see notifications
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Yah well I kind of rambled on about this in an earlier discussion starter. It didn't work for me - it felt too abrupt for one thing, and implausible for another, what with them not finding any significant place of human habitation. I felt as though …