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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,361
- 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 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 …
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I thought this was an intriguing and credible facet of the book, and the means chosen for its disclosure worked for me.
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I liked the individuals, both human and bonobo, and hey worked for me. What didn't really work was the romance between Frankie and Stotts. I mean, it was obviously going to happen, and the most interesting part of the development was the jealousy of…
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I thought that the interconnectedness was a really strong point of the book, especially in two areas a) the positive one of doing the equivalent of Google searches and not really memorising anything (leading to problems when the system crashed) b) …
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I thought Setup and Sandstorm both worked very well. I wasn't so convinced by Aftermath. I don't know that area of the USA at all, but it didn't seem credible to me that they could travel all that distance and not even encounter a decent size town, …
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I'd say yes! It happens to be very-near-future, and there's much more of a focus on biology and behavioural science rather than physics or engineering, but I don't see why you wouldn't classify it as such.
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Yup I'm ready too
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Category for Come Looking for Me ( @Apocryphal 's choice for July) now set up, together with cover blurb and about the author entries. Time to set up notifications...