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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,366
- 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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If you'll indulge me, I'll copy in some thoughts from a session I led a few years ago on the difficulties of translating poetry. Here's a piece of English poetic doggerel... The boy stood on the burning deck His feet were covered in blisters: He…
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(Quote) I really liked this analogy - my reading of it is that in translating from one language to another there are different kinds of fidelity we can use "word for word [or] sense for sense" as Letty put it. Sometimes you come across the…
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(Quote) Or a lot of inter-university rivalry to set up alternative training centres
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* Will Robin go back to Griffin and the Rebel Cause? * Will one of the group Robin, Remy, Letty, and Victoire fail an exam and be ruthlessly turned out, and how will that affect the others? * Can folk with good knowledge of languages that have been …
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I'm with @Apocryphal on this one - it felt longer than it needed to be, but it didn't drag and I'd be hard pushed to outline particular things to delete. But at the same time it is a rich and complex world, and I do feel that we're skimming over thi…
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I think we have yet to see how she feels about systems of government other than colonial Britain - for example how will she describe (if she ever does) the Chinese government? And I suppose the question behind that is whether idyllic Oxford could …
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To some extent this is a loneliness that many undergraduates face as they move out from whatever family and friends they might have had in childhood, and move into an environment that can be fun but is also deeply challenging and at times highly com…
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Particularly with the tension introduced by Griffin, and the unease that Robin feels about him, especially as the demands for more direct action increase
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Hmmm, two quite different things here. First, did I like the world-building with silver? Yes, actually I did - I felt there was enough of a bridge between the techno-stuff (silver as a good conductor of electricity) and the more mystical (silver as …
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I am enjoying it - yes, the author clearly has some social and historical points she wants us all to get, and yes she's not always very subtle about how these are presented :) But she writes fluently and well IMHO, and I like the way she draws in ot…
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I finished book II this morning, and with an effort that might be considered no less than heroic, stopped myself reading further :)
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Have to say I'm hugely enjoying this one! I'm nearly at the end of book I already - seems to be a quick read even though long
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(Quote) All part of the fun of the group I guess :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_MacLeod and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Fraction#Series
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(Quote) That's a really interesting thought - so far as I recall, the humans in these stories had no form of computer assistance (and certainly no AI) which is a curious omission given the time of writing. Much earlier writers like EE Doc Smith wrot…
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(Quote) Found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Computer "The Ultimate Computer" is the twenty-fourth episode of the second season of the American science fiction television series Star Trek. Written by D.C. Fontana (based on…
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There's always the 1983 film War Games response - "the only way to win is not to play" :)
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Wasn't there a Star Trek ToS episode where a computer took over a starship and refused to comply with orders?
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Talking of Karlsen and faith, what (if anything) did people make of the prophecy about him? It felt to me like something that Saberhagen couldn't quite decide how to handle. So the Stone Place battle was obviously the high point, but what then? A…
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Your comments @Apocryphal made me consider the crucial difference between existential-threat type adversaries and tangible-and-killable type ones. Existential ones might be a spiritual enemy (Sauron maybe) or a force of nature (weather, glaciers, as…
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> @NeilNjae said: > Without A Thought was interesting because it obviously came about from Saberhagen reading about MENACE, a matchbox-based machine learning system (and, if you're interested, a description of a recent rebuild ). I spent a fe…
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I felt that the writing was the stand-out best bit of the book, and carried me along even when some parts felt very dated (the role of women and machine intelligence). He came over to me as an accomplished and confident writer who was well able to d…
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Actually I was never reminded of the Borg! They never forget their biological component, whilst clearly regarding it as incomplete, whereas the berserkers were implacably opposed to all life (well... in theory, though they did maintain some specific…
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For me there wasn't quite enough knowing how we had got to the situation in the first place. Have centuries or millennia passed since humankind moved outside the solar system? Did they learn by themselves how to use the c+ drive or were they taught …
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The role of women is, surely, very dated. They may well play important parts in the story, but they don't have important roles in society. So far as I recall not one woman was in the armed forces, or the various ruling groups of different planets - …
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It was quite refreshing to have centrally important characters who had faith which was considered and recognised doubt and difficulty rather than being blind fanaticism. Karlsen in particular exhibits this, and the dimension of the final story Face …
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Broadly speaking I preferred the longer stories to the shorter ones (hence Stone Place in particular) but that's largely because of a preference for more development than can possibly happen within a short story. Of the others, I particularly liked …
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On the whole yes, as they covered what appears to be a large fraction of the Earth-Berserker war (though omitting both the initial encounter and the final resolution). The different episodes included meshed well in terms of credible progress and dev…
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Whichever way we break it up, having an interim discussion at the end of November sounds good
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On the assumption that the second half of December might well be busy with other stuff, maybe option 3 is better (read the first three books)?
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(Quote) Ah yes you're quite right, I'd forgotten they started that early. Yes, I. Third Historian, have touched living minds, Earth minds, so deadly cool that for a while they could see war as a game. The first decades of the berserker war they wer…