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Apocryphal
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- Apocryphal
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Comments
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I thought it was - maybe is was Mischa Krilov.
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I’ve never really been too excited about cyberpunk, either, though I did enjoy that Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams that Richard took us through several years ago. That book did kind of have a F-factor thing for me. The New Weird I …
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Yes. I was for one thing confused by the onomastics. We seemed to have characters with French names, English names, Russian names and so on, but no real sense of being on Earth, or really anywhere. And no sense at all of local language, which would …
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I quite at about 25% in, unable to fathom how most of what was being described related to the vermin extermination plot that was initially set up.
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Same for me - there was a moment where we met the gang (many of whom had strange names making them hard to identify or mentally form an image of, like Three and Dawn) and I felt we were getting somewhere. But then it was all new characters who seeme…
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I will probably give this one a miss. I rarely miss a book, so I think I've earned a bye. I just really chafe against books that are this cute.
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Wow - that was a long wait!
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@NeilNjae I don’t think you would have liked it, so probably the right call.
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In a way there’s a similarity here with Watership Down. At the time we read Watership Down (in the very early G+ days, possibly before @RichardAbbott snd @NeilNjae joined, and before @BarnerCobblewood could be convinced to joint G+) the person who p…
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We need @BarnerCobblewood for this one!
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That’s true - I had the impression that both the matriarch and the schoolmaster remembered things from before the catastrophe, which means we have only one or two inbred generations. I don’t think that could explain the lack of limbs. But I also don…
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Yes, nobody seemed to object to the choice. I see the author is being compared to Chine Mieville.
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The set-up of the family and the characters like the Schoolmaster are things I could use for NPCs in a post apocalyptic game. I'd probably try to be less bleak, but maybe not. I do think that the headmaster alone would make for an interesting encoun…
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The prose was the thing I liked the most. Not so much the long rambly quality of the paragraphs, but the actual way the words were strung together I found quite beautiful. I found that when I started reading, the pages would fairly fly by. But then …
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That didn't occur to me, either, but I do think it's an interesting idea. Can we match the children to the likes of Cain and Abel? Who would the headmaster be in this comparison?
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Yes, I felt the same as you. I suppose a better executed example of something like this might be the Punch and Judy show in Riddley Walker that kept intruding into the main story, but in this case I also had a hard time distinguishing the Aquinas bi…
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Dolores as the main character reminded me very much of Sarah Canary as the main character of her novel - in so many ways. I thought Sarah Canary was the much better novel by a longshot, and much less bleak. But in both cases, the main character is m…
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I think it was saying that political power is conferred, and once the people stop conferring that power, it evaporates. It's also about generational change. It seemed obvious to me how the matriarch came to power - she gave birth to it and held it b…
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I wasn't aware of the book. I did like the prose quite a bit, so that propelled me along. I would consider reading more by the author - I like to think future books would build on her strengths while leaving behind the things that didn't work so wel…
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Googling 'Nada The Lily From An African Perspective' I don't see many hits from Africans critiquing the novel, so I'm working on the assumption that it didn't offend people, at least.
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I might use the plot set-up or the setting, but if I used the latter I'd do some independent research. I already discovered that there are no wolves in South Africa, so the wolves in question are actually Jackals (which in places can be called 'wolv…
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I'm not wise enough in the ways of African society to know if there's latent or inherent racism here (stereotypes etc.), but the people of the story certainly don't come of any worse than the Boers do - if anything, they come across as better/more i…
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I will definitely read more Haggard - I've collected a bunch of his books, some of which sound very intriguing, and I like Victorian fiction in general. Eric Brighteyes is supposed to be very good. The People of the Mist and Morning Star both intrig…
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I felt there was a certain distance between the author and the audience, here, and this is in part because of the narrator and his framing device which added even another layer. The Orenda, which is a good comparison novel I think, felt much more im…
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It made me uncomfortable in the sense that the author and probably his white audience considered it normal. I'm really unsure as to whether a native South African would consider it normal. The main critique of the Orenda (from the wider world) was t…
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The main characters all resonated with me (except the name Umblopogaas itself, which doesn't sound authentic, and a little too much like Snuffleupagus.) but I don't think there were especially deep. The women didn't have a lot of character at all, I…
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I didn't really care for this. I'm not against frame stories in general, but this seemed like an unnessesary complication, that resulted in clumsy sentences where he seemed to be calling other people his father. To paraphrase as example, he might sa…
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I'll need another week, but don't let me hold things up.
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Sounds ok to me.
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@RichardAbbott said: >I have no objection at all to people using online media to create content - Wattpad has done this for some time, for example - and again it democratises the process of sharing creative content from author(s) to readers, m…