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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,175
- 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) Yes, totally agree. You could interpret the rain thing as showing that Christophe is in fact (despite his best intentions) taking on something of the Indian tribes' closeness to nature. Bird (and, if I remember correctly, others) see him as …
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To me the Iroquois were "outsiders" rather than "villains" - we did not get a viewpoint character inside their society (I am not counting Snow Falls because she did not grow up there and so presumably represents a kind of displac…
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OK, so here are some thoughts. First, on a personal level. I don't think I have any specific heritage to celebrate or be ashamed of - like most people here I am a right mixture of all kinds of different groups who have come into the UK over the mil…
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(Quote) I think that's a really good way to express it, and it certainly resonates with me... although I'm trying to think exactly what features of a novel are lacking. There are character development arcs, there's an overall meta-crisis threatening…
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Another book you might think about as an alternate outcome is one we read together, Aztec Century, though of course that was dealing with Central America rather than North America. Lots of inversions in that, including Europe being swept by plagues …
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> @Apocryphal said: > In the second part, I'm wondering whether there might have been a different outcome from first contact. Or was it inevitable that disease and technological disadvantage were going to take their toll. As a reader and a ga…
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I suppose it's like Animal Farm... all characters are villainous, but some are more villainous than others! I don't think that anyone comes over as especially heroic, though some individuals are treated more sympathetically than others.
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(Quote) I have a feeling that this goes back to how much the story interacts with known (ie recorded) events. For example, it may be (I don't know) that Christophe is a historically attested individual. But Bird and Snow Falls surely are not. So alt…
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That's a really good question which I need more time to think about...
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Personally I don't mind some historical latitude in the interest of a better story, though I have good friends who take a much stricter view. So for example I can see good purpose in simplifying the complexities of real events in order to make them …
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I kept wanting the several Indian tribes to sort themselves out and make peace with each other, but I guess that was never gong to happen. In parallel I have been listening to Ursula LeGuin's The Word for World is Forest which in many ways tackles …
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Can't really speak about role-playing so I shall focus on writing. I think yes, Boyden did this very well. It generally took me no more than a paragraph, usually much less, to identify which of the three was narrating. I agree it is unusual to h…
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I had assumed Snow Falls, but then she died (I suppose there's nothing stopping narration by a dead person, but it seems out of character for the book). Then I assumed Gosling. Wiki thinks Bird, but to me it reads more as a female perspective than m…
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Certainly to Gosling (but that was what made her a more interesting character to me :) ). Not sure about the others - I think the point often was to make the spirituality of Christophe vs the Indian tribes largely incomprehensible to each other. For…
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Snow Falls left much more impression with me than the other two - I'm not sure if this is because she was younger, or got less narrative space, or what. She seemed also to make more changes of direction than the others (again perhaps because younger…
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My main impression at first was that I got lost! Geographically, most of all... I could not make sense of where people came from or were travelling to. (Hence my earlier questions about the area, the answers to which helped me a lot). In terms of…
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I can't really comment on the exact situation described (being not only UK based but also not currently part of an actual gaming group of people), but I did watch the whole thing and find the arguments very credible and persuasive. The thing which …
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All, in a burst of energy I have added monthly categories for February (Five Decembers, @NeilNjae ), March (The Mind Parasites, me) and April (The Guns Above, @clash_bowley ), and also added in the Amazon back cover blurb. If anyone changes their mi…
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I'm thinking Colin Wilson's The Mind Parasites for March - quite an old book (late 1960s) and dated in a number of ways, but still (I think) with enough to provoke discussion. Apparently he wrote it when challenged to write a novel in the lineage of…
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(Quote) Yes you're right about Hiero's origins - I was getting muddled with his people's allies, the Otwah League, which I assume was based around present-day Ottawa. PS thanks all for the geographical help, much appreciated
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(Quote) Yes that does help - and looking at the various portage routes that @Apocryphal described, I realised just how many lakes of all kinds of sizes there are in that area north of the Great Lakes. I think that this is the area called The Palood …
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I worked out (with the help of Google Maps) part of my geographical confusion. I realised that my mental map of the US was sort of like this: (Image) and my newly revised mental map looks more like this: which (however much still bizarre) makes …
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Yes, these photos are very helpful, not least because they highlight the qualitative difference between the Huron (and other similar tribal) palisades and the French ones. I confess to still being rather baffled by the geography and history of the …
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(Quote) Ooo good, it's a while since I read any
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Happy New Year everyone! Just in case anyone has forgotten, this is where we got to: January The Orenda, hosted by @Apocryphal (Neil has, I think, finished it, as have I now) February: @NeilNjae wanted Five Decembers but there was a move to delay…
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I'm about 1/4 the way through, realising that I know almost nothing about the history and geography of the book, so am looking forward to some Canadian input on this :) It's densely written - this is not a criticism but an observation - and so not a…
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(Quote) That's an extraordinary amount of playing and recording to sustain for so long!
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Like you, I had an unexpectedly high year for reading - 68 books, totalling 22261 pages (327pp average). A big jump up from last year - 44 books and 12893 pages (293pp average). I'm normally in the 40-50 books and 12-13k pages area. I couldn't brea…
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Seems there's only one place in Europe you can ride in a Lancaster, albeit only taxiing around the runway and sitting in the various stations rather than actually airborne... and it's in Lincolnshire... https://www.lincsaviation.co.uk/lancaster-taxy…
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> @Apocryphal said: > Speaking of Lancasters, if you guys want to come and visit me we can organize a group ride in a Lancaster: https://www.warplane.com/aircraft/flights/buy.aspx > Cool! Though I have to admit I'd rather go up in the…