Help offset server costs by donating. This is totally optional. Any overages will go to library fines or new books.
RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,118
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member, Administrator, Moderator
- Games I like
- Sundry, mostly board
- Books I like
- Science fiction, fantasy, some historical fiction
Comments
-
Again, Asimov's Spacers (and especially Solarians) are a direct parallel. Again, from a rural perspective what we find is that the folk with the money want the opportunity to spend short periods of time away from built-up society, but don't actually…
-
It's a theme that a number of authors have explored before, notably Asimov when describing the Space societies in Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire (and probably a couple of others) - I'm particularly thinking of the planet Solaria here which was…
-
I felt that this was a rather different take on the whole "future of humanity" story - a rather gentle and sorrowful tale exchanging the optimistic stance one often reads for one which gradually fades into oblivion. I'm not sure that I wou…
-
September discussion questions to be posted by @kcaryths in a few days on his return. Then October's read is The House on the Borderland chosen by @Apocryphal . Beyond that, November will be a selection from @NeilNjae and December by yours truly...…
-
I haven't but it sounds like it could be a good read :) I just had a quick look at its Wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Eden_(novel)) and it seems overall to have bad better reception in the UK than the US, but is generally agreed to be…
-
Still plenty of time to comment on Arkhangelsk but this is a reminder that September's read is City by Clifford Simak, chosen by @kcaryths
-
(Quote) I think that can work really well if the struggle to communicate is what the author / screenwriter wants to make the main issue of the work. But if the main issue is not communication but reintegration of a splintered-off group, or the strug…
-
For me, the first Dashboard page has some tabs across the top, but nothing seems to display however I navigate around it. The Moderation page has a whole lot of options most of which I don't really understand, and many of which are empty. Only the S…
-
I've had a look around the dashboard - largish parts of it are apparently not functional (or maybe just not enabled) but I can't yet see anything like an error log.
-
(Quote) Totally agree
-
I agree about holding drafts in place, and also haven't personally encountered dropped posts. I'll see if the dashboard holds any logs or such like
-
I think there's always in a novel going to be some sleight of hand regarding language and mutual comprehensibility. Star Trek and other such series of course take this to the extreme where every planet speaks pretty good English (possibly sounding a…
-
It's not quite the same, maybe, but I recently came across this article https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ancient-dna-reveals-neanderthal-group-was-isolated-for-50000-years-180985068/ regarding a Neanderthal group in the Rhone valley who rem…
-
Yes we haven't really talked about Hina until now - I get that the plot required someone from the ship to disappear, and there probably wasn't anyone else that we felt invested enough in as readers to care. Also I guess she was a mirror to Irina so …
-
> @kcaryths said: > I liked the setting quite a bit. Enjoyed the constant battle against an enemy that will never give up (radiation or time). It reminded me a little bit of Seveneves in that sense, in that things just keep getting worse, but…
-
I'd probably add to that as an enhancement of your first bullet point "at what point do different people simply give up the struggle for survival"?
-
I was also doubtful that stuff could be successfully hidden / kept secret from the population for so long. Surely at very least there's have been conspiracy theories (which apparently thrived in at least one sub-community)
-
(Quote) Yup, they're all way better than the one I found :)
-
(Quote) I'd always said Hy-pay-sha in my head (so to speak) so I guess I must have read the same dictionary source as @NeilNjae
-
Interested to see what people write here!
-
Hmmm. Wasn't really convinced by this. The sheer difficulty of the planet meant that surely they had to be close by. Yet no effort to really look for them. I'm not sure I buy the "details of them were suppressed" argument, mainly because t…
-
I confess to not being very up on noir so can't comment. Interested to hear what others say.
-
The two main characters remain vivid for me but actually a week or so after finishing the book, I'm struggling to remember many of the other individuals. So I guess for me the overall setting and society was more memorable than the people inside it.…
-
Both cultures made sense, each in their own way. I kept wanting to know more of the back story but actually felt that just enough of it was revealed - had there been much more it would have become too much about that and not enough about the present…
-
I understood the conversion of the first ship (two habitat rings) into the colony. But then the revelation that the Exiles had what seems to be a third ring kind of threw me. How can they not of known everything about each other? The journey from on…
-
I felt it was reasonably clear that they had formed a couple by the end of the book, but I agree that one could read it as simply a close colleague relationship. Once or twice I tried to work out what the difference in age would have been if one cou…
-
They were so bleak I wondered how they'd managed to survive this long! I mean, I know that as has been said, in the long run we're all dead, but the planet was so inhospitable in so many ways that you wonder why they bothered. I guess there was an e…
-
If anything a bit too slow. I kind of wanted things to speed up more, but I appreciate that Elizabeth Bonesteel had a different agenda in mind :) Also on narration, I did like the way Maddie's "version" was presented mostly (entirely?)…
-
Fundamentally I liked this book, but never quite as much as I kept thinking I should! I felt that the concept was the strongest part of it, and very much appreciated the different layers being revealed at different times. That worked for me. I think…
-
Discussion area for The House on the Borderland sorted