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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,119
- 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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> @clash_bowley said: > (Quote) > A fun occupation to do while not reading? :D B)
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Still some chatter going on regarding The Curious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands which has stimulated a lot of good stuff. This is also a reminder that July's read is Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, chosen by me. @clash_bowley any th…
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(Quote) What a cool idea! You could probably do some good scenarios based on Mountain Rescue or Coastguard teams.
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That's a nice read, thanks for sending the link. I was intrigued by this statement: (Quote) Again this relates to a common theme in the article that it all depends what "kind" of human is being assumed as the basis for comparison. So for…
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On a different tack, maybe it's always true that wildernesses divide people by their response - or at very least our collective response to wilderness changes with time. So regarding our own mini-wilderness here in Cumbria, in 1724 Daniel Defoe cal…
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(Quote) Going back to my "meaning of names" theory, Artemis is a fascinating one as a pseudonym for the Professor - the original Artemis was female, a hunter, a virgin, a protector through childbirth, and was a goddess associated with the …
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(Quote) Isn't that perhaps because neither first not third class passengers had any power? Both were entirely dependent on the train and crew to get them to the other side, and the first class lot didn't appear to have authority over the thirds to g…
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(Quote) Another similarity with The Girl with all the Gifts is that both books grew on me as I thought about them over a span of time after finishing them. I remember not linking Gifts much for the first 1/2 or maybe 2/3, and then being somewhat tak…
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That's an interesting quote and thanks for copying it here. And (for me at least) it raises a lot of questions about writing form. I do certainly agree that a (short) story has to have a strong focus, whereas a novel does not need every part to have…
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(Quote) Of course there's a fun double meaning here - we use "name" to not only mean a tag for a person, but also to mean "reputation". There's a Father Brown story (I forget which) where the plot turns on one character saying so…
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I felt the writing was competent rather than classy or poetic, and like @BarnerCobblewood felt it fitted the intention of the book insofar as I knew what that was. I suppose Elena should have been the voice of the Wastelands, and maybe became that …
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I guess the train is the Juggernaut here - relentless progress that annihilates. Except that at the end of the book the Wasteland has (as it were) recruited the train which is now juggernauting for evolutionary change rather than planned conquest. A…
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I kind of got lost the first time I read it (which maybe was an intentional authorial ploy) and then decided that the journey was open ended, with a slowly changing crew (Weiwei becomes the Captain and no doubt others drop in and out). The mysteriou…
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I think one of the high points of the book was the realisation that the train was in fact triggering or maybe initiating the changes that were happening in the wastelands - the attempt to isolate from them was doomed to failure. I did like the empha…
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As a PS, I was kind of disappointed not to see more of the Captain, given the big build up when giving Weiwei's back story
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I think that these are the current stereotypes, but I'm not convinced they are accurate. I was going to say that in particular it's disappointing to see religion presented purely as denial and dogma, but then it's equally disappointing to see scienc…
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(Quote) Yes - I was thinking about the author choosing the name rather than the characters. Does Sarah Brooks do this consistently? I'm not sure and haven't yet checked it out. Apparently Weiwei is a unisex name, meaning "gentle" or "…
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Russia and China as two very different kinds of train terminus?
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It seemed to me that most of the plot was driven by people making decisions that they believed to be right regardless of what others might think - Marya for example pursuing the quest to find out about her father, or Henry Grey going after his sampl…
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Hm, you're right, it's an astonishingly small number of people... one wonders if it ever made commercial sense?!
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(Quote) PS the name Elena means "shining light" so is particularly suited to some of her later actions and how she comes to be perceived.
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It's very Russian though :) Is Marya to be considered the daughter of Petrov or Anton? And yes, in familial terms and her status in First Class I'm sure that it would indeed make a difference (though admittedly a difficult one for some of us readers…
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Yes, I wondered why there was so little attention on Third Class, and why the occupants thereof were sketched only in very generic rather than unique ways (with the excpetion, as you say, of The Professor). I also wondered why the Third Class occupa…
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I felt (not during reading, but on reflection afterwards) that the wastelands were The Future, and in particular the future state of life as a hybrid of the known/familiar and the unknown/wild. It seemed to me that there was a parallel with a book …
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Shazaam! :o
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Right, I'll swap it over... prepare to see it mysteriously change before your very eyes...
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So... overall consensus... shall I do a quick swap to Riddle of the Sands? Was going to add a poll but I can't work out how
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> @kcaryths said: > Plutoshine looks quite good. I am surprised it's not more readily available! Me too, especially as it did well in the Arthur Clarke awards
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It's not a long book (under 300 pages) - I've noticed a few times recently with audio books that some publishers pad the thing out with extracts of other work. Or (more charitably) it could easily have some introductory thoughts by Someone Important…
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PS I think Projekt Pluto is in fact a translation of the same book but that may not be especially helpful. That aside, I can quickly swap in The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, a 1903 spy novel which is widely regarded as having influenced…