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Apocryphal
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Comments
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Ok, I’ll put up questions as soon as I can.
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How's everyone doing with this book?
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Nice - appetite whetted.
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😂
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@clash_bowley Did you have any opinions?
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By way of contrast, I’ve been reading the Tower of Babel series by Josiah Bancroft, which opens with the novel Senlin Ascends. I bought it mainly for what I thought would be dystopian themes and because I thought it would have interesting things to …
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For reasons similar to Neil, I've also never really tackled military stories. And I have no strong desire, too. Perhaps unlike Neil (I can't say), I'm also held back by my own need to try to 'get things right' in terms of military culture. I could p…
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Rote but well-written steampunk military fiction. Does the bare minimum to check off the genre boxes, but offers nothing more.
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Was there a story? I'm not sure there was much of a story to intrude upon, to be honest. I level the same criticism at the Sharpe series, where I'm convinced books 3-9 (nine is a far as I've read) are all the same story re-told. What really happened…
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I quite liked the writing overall. When I talk about writing, I'm thinking in terms of word choices and sentence structure, rather than how the plot was assembled or the kind of content present in the book. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it w…
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Nor I. Thanks for doing the heavy lifting, @NeilNjae lol.
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I think I mostly liked Bernat, not as a person but as a character for his variability. I guess his inconsistency felt real. The rest might as well have been cribbed from Blackadder.
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I was expecting more or less military fiction along the Sharpe lines, and that’s pretty much what I got. I don’t have high expectations from the steampunk genre, as they mostly seem to be unoriginal copycats in terms of setting trappings. There was …
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Yes, the Guardian review above says “The first book ends with Guo Jing embroiled in an incipient love triangle, and approaching the trial by combat that has been his destiny since birth, while the Song dynasty dangles by a thread.” So that definitel…
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There don’t seem to be any objections to my choice, so I think we can lock and load it. Which month is Elizabeth Bear?
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Judging by the review, it’s not a self contained novel and will end in a cliff-hanger. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read it, so long as we all know what to expect. Reading a different genre of fantasy would be interesting.
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I'm leaning toward Frankenstein in Baghdad by Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi. I expect it's more literary fiction than genre fiction, but it was nominated for both the Arthur C. Clarke award and the Man Booker. It won the International Prize for Arabic …
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I think there probably are, but quite often the stories were one-offs that could really be assembled in any order, and that's largely because there isn't an arc between the stories. Or not a strong one. That's not universally true, though - Moorcock…
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That's an interesting question, and again without knowing more about the author I wouldn't presume to guess. In once sense, these is perhaps a study of Lovecraft hidden within the book. On one level, you could read into into things that speculative …
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Oh, definitely less. With authors like Asimov and Clarke and Robinson, one feels like their works have shaped the future.
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I didn’t really think about it at the time. When I started reading the novel I was thinking we were in the pulp era, maybe 1920-30, so that wouldn’t have been all that unusual for all these academic adventurers to be white men. Later on, I lost trac…
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Again, pretty pulp.
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We’ll, neither the archaeology nor the science was convincing, but we’re talking about something that is trying to emulate pulp magazine fiction. The locations? I suppose so - didn’t really note them.
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Well, it was generally ok, but OMG ‘the rate of suicides in ancient Hattusa’ is just not something anyone is ever going to be able to study, so that was pretty ludicrous. I had to learn to let that go pretty quickly.
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I rather enjoyed it up to the midway point, but after that I found it started to drag on a bit and I have to admit I didn’t follow it was well through the third quarter. It was interesting to me how it started off exactly as billed - very Lovecrafti…
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I'm finished as well.
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No, that's my job :-D
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Also, it seems rare to me that we all like a book, and still find lots to discuss. Often with this kind of agreement, the discussion dies off quickly in a murder of mmm-hmmms.
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I quite enjoyed this book, I have to say, and it was a nice addition to the TTRPBC canon. Thanks for recommending it.
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I agree, a lot of it is genre conceit. When push comes to shove, most of us prefer that our institutions deal with things rather than well-meaning mavericks. But as someone who has to work with (often unreasonable) civic bureaucracies, it's always n…