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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,183
- 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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I normally respond to email notifications which take me straight to the relevant page, and do regular checks in the settings to make sure that I have flagged all of the discussion areas to notify me. If I go instead to the main home page ttrbc.com t…
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> @Ray_Otus said: > Hmmm. Yeah. Islanders needs more submarines! In fact, it's a mystery why more isn't made of them! (Yes, I am hijacking this part of the thread for Islanders). If you really wanted to make a map of the islands, and you h…
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I liked the Caurer entry and felt it dovetailed fairly neatly with earlier accounts. Except that she doesn't (to my reading) come over as at all manipulative or self-seeking in the relationship, whereas what Kammeston took away from it was that she …
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(Quote) Related to this was the (to me) unexpected diversity of religious perspective - not just the Jewish guy on the submarine, but also the wife with the kind-of second sight based on her traditional beliefs. The missionary who was rescued fitted…
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> @NeilNjae said: > Turning this to gaming: would it be fun to give PCs defective equipment? It may open up another avenue of conflict and give people a target to pursue on the home front. It may also be frustrating for players when their cha…
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(Quote) Infinite are the arguments of user-interface specialists, and most especially those marketing individuals responsible for defining the standard look and feel of interfaces on different hardware platforms...
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> @clash_bowley said: > Seniors! Can't live with 'em, can't... why CAN'T we just put them on ice floes and push them off? I guess there's your next game...
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Definitely a bonus.
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Not sure about feeling natural (I don't have much family contact with the military, only an uncle who was killed in a naval action very near the start of WW2) but it certainly feels normal for the genre. If anything, the breaks seemed rather tame in…
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Again the comparison with Douglas Reeman might be made - his 20th century naval fiction books do tell a composite story, but don't do so by following one group of characters, nor even one branch of the naval services (for example, one book is entire…
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I have to confess that I don't really know which of them were officers and which enlisted! My acquaintance with naval ranks either side of the Atlantic just isn't that good. But something that I have come across several times (particularly on this s…
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I kept wondering if Mealey's reputation was undeserved, as he didn't really do much within the pages of the book to live up to it. About the only thing was the crewman who was dismissed when (one would have thought) that disciplinary action was all …
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I have to admit that I thought while reading the book that the whole "torpedoes were crap" line was just made up for dramatic effect! I get that homeland war offices can be riddled with bureaucracy and politics, but I didn't find it credib…
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The specific contrast between war actions and homeland romance is, I think, fairly common. Douglas Reeman (who wrote WW2 and modern naval fiction under that name, and Napoleonic-era naval fiction under the name Alexander Kent) almost always included…
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Another book which ends in a similar way is HMS Ulysses by Alistair Maclean - indeed, it was his debut novel in 1955. Final Harbor reminded me a lot of that book except that it covered a much longer timespan. HMS Ulysses covers (so far as I recall, …
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(Quote) Mimesis is when a word (or construct or words) in some way reflects its meaning - the basic version is onomatopoeia where the sound of the word is like the sound of the thing, such as many of our words for animal sounds. But mimesis goes wel…
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(Quote) ...or in the case of Christopher Priest, one could simply say "I got confused" :)
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(Quote) I agree - on the assumption that the world is roughly the same diameter as ours (everything else seems to be exactly the same, so why not this?) then the islands should cover something like 3 or 400 million km^2. But the writing gives the se…
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I'm now thinking that the whole book is really about perspectives on the death of Commis! Murder, accidental death, conspiracy, fiction... loads of theories so far. I'm not so bothered about "How could Chaster Kammeston write the introduction …
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I'm ready whenever
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(Quote) I don't have the sense that CP is very interested in the economics of what goes on - as I understand the bits and pieces of what @Apocryphal and others have posted of his other works, they are more concerned with things like dream sates, dou…
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A propos of music from stones, there have been recurring attempts up here in Cumbria to create musical instruments from suitably shaped pieces of rock. Technically called lithophones, most people call then stone xylophones, showing a reckless attitu…
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I reckon that "shelterate laws" are actually intended to prevent refuge/sheltering in a place, rather than facilitate it. So Mesterline has no shelterate laws but that makes it desirable as a place to try to find sanctuary. Previously I ha…
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(Quote) Sounds a bit like the plot for Piranesi that we read last year :)
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(Quote) Yes, so it seems when I have looked at other people's attempts to interpret the geography. Until recently I had assumed this myself, but then read the Paul Kincaid review that @Apocryphal quoted "a cold northern continent whose technolo…
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Here's another wildly speculative and quasi-psychological interpretation - make of it what you will. The Dream Archipelago is the human mind. The cold arctic continent with disputing nations is the intellect. The tropical battleground is passion. T…
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> @Ray_Otus said: > When I hear Sark, I think of the evil dude from the 80s movie Tron. I'd quite forgotten about that Sark :)
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(Quote) Likewise - the Greek island connection seems obvious now but I had not thought of it. I was just the wrong age to take note of the whole Shirley Valentine "Greek islands as a place to escape a boring life and have some fun sex" thi…
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First, I thought that this short story did hold up as a thing in itself - obviously broader knowledge about other events adds to the comprehension, but the same is true of any short story which is part of a wider world, eg Chesterton's Father Brown …
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(Quote) Yes, I keep wondering this. I can't keep in my head even a rough sense of what is near what, and we are obviously encountering different places in what CP regards as a thematic order rather than geographical or anything else. Maybe we're sup…