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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,360
- 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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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…
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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.