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Apocryphal
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We switched to online sometime after the pandemic started and since then we added one player. At first we were using Google Hangouts and I used my phone as a dummy, aimed down at my notepad, to share maps and roll dice. When Hangouts folded, we …
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PART 6 - THE COLD ROOM And we're back to Warne's Farm on Tealby Moor with Tibor Tarrent and his new friend, Lou (full name: Marie-Louise Pejman). They pass several days, enduring a severe wind storm. During these days, they seem to be the only peop…
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Priest seems to know a lot about planes, and I wonder if he’s an enthusiast, or just did research for this novel. It’s possible that the Anson and some of the Lancaster were made here in Ontario. From the Avro Canada page: “ National Steel Ca…
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PART 5 - TEALBY MOOR The action in this section mainly takes place at RAF Tealby Moor in 1943, where aircraft maintenance technician Mike 'Floody' Torrance is based. When the section opens, we first learn something of Lancasters, and a little more …
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I think it was mentioned in the previous chapter, but I can’t recall specifically. For some reason I was expecting it.
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I think think you are quite correct that this is an alternate reality, rather than something purely in the past. This Tibor will never forget the encounter. The other has (or never had it? Does that suggest that ‘Flo’ has learned facts from across r…
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PART 4 - EAST SUSSEX Not to be confused with south Essex. The year is sometime after 2023. Our main viewpoint character in this section is Jane Flockhart, a journalist. She's in East Sussex to interview a physicist named Thijs Rietveld, who is most…
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Good summary! No, indeed, Priest doesn't seem to like either the military or bureaucrats. He's forever describing how unimaginative people can make what ought to be simple exchanges a real bore as soon as one piece of their formula is missing. I ge…
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We’ll, it seems reasonable to assume she wrote this in English for a NA/UK audience, which is why all the Yoruba (etc.) words are italicized, and none of the English ones are. I’m pretty sure she knew that a need to spread soil on ones skin would se…
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Couldn’t it be more a function of the fact that it’s really four short stories combined in one book?
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I agree that’s the likely explanation. However if it’s dissatisfying when the Americans do it, it’s equally dissatisfying here.
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How do they make all those PAs without factories? This was the same issue with the Broken Earth trilogy. The world isn’t really developed beyond what’s needed for the story and theme, and so seems unexamined.
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Like Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker series, it's a "Trilogy in four parts".
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I wouldn't say it was YA (more like Bro Fiction, romancing the ultimate man-cave and solving problems with logic). It definitely had a huge wish fulfillment element and (as I said at the time) I thought the main character was a Mary Sue. None of whi…
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Speaking for myself, I had lots of ideas as an undergrad. Most of this ideas didn’t grad school (and neither did I, having dropped out once all the ideas were sucked dry :-))
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Or if the universe is an RPG? “Binti’s player started treeing:. _’Attribute plus skill plus passion, modified by advantage... 75% chance to succeed? Ok, I’ll go for it!’_
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I thought I read early on in the first or second story that the desert people were in the middle, or at least always suffered when the other two people fought.
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I liked this, and it gave Binti an unusual character and unusual perspective on the world. In this context, she really is a harmonizer, only a biological one rather than a communicative one. Mary Sue? I didn’t think so - though I agree with Richard …
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PART II - LA RUE DES BETES Might as well continue on in the same thread as we head into Part II. As I mentioned above, I really liked that this had a different writing style. There was a naivete to it, which served to capture the period, I felt. S…
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That was another element of the book I found hard to wrap my head around. It seemed like an astrolabe (which wasn't an astrolabe at all, but a smart phone) but better. There were so many setting-specific terms in this book I started to loose track, …
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It's not a world I would try to emulate in a game. There wasn't really a lot of world to interact with outside of Binti's homeland. But I did appreciate how Okorafor managed to bring the 'African-ness right to the front and make it once alien (to us…
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Yes and no. They certainly didn't all get the same development. The Bear is hardly developed at all. New Fish is a little more, but only really in the end of the last story did (she?) start to get interesting. Okwu is a tricky one - Okwu is with us …
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I certainly didn't feel shock. Nor did I feel relived that she survived (I kind of assumed shoe would, given all the stories are named after her). It was too early in the book for me to feel much connection to her, so I suppose the only thing I felt…
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Not really. It's a bit too Star-Trekie for me. At least the aliens WERE pretty alien, and not just humans with knobs on their heads. Intellectually, though, they kind of were mostly humans with knobs on their heads.
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It totally seemed YA to me, and consequently I found it a bit simplistic in terms of the dialogue and the way people spoke and reacted to one another. This was an aspect of the book I didn't enjoy. I liked the treeing, though, and my first thought …
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Handwavey, for sure. How is that different from Clarkian Magic-Science? Anyway, I don't mind. There was a collection of cool ideas in here, though some (like living ships) I've encountered before. It didn't really hang together enough for me to get …
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I did wonder why there were no other cultures seemingly on earth. She never spoke of an apocalypse. She did speak of the Himba being from Namibia at the beginning - at the end, I thought I must have misread that and that these people are from a plan…
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Sounds interesting. Can we just check it’s available formats? Newly released books are often limited in this way.
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I’m enjoying it a lot, so far, and more than The Gradual. This book so far doesn’t stretch disbelief quite so far. I like that the second part has a completely different writing style from the first. In the first section, he uses that clinical, mat…
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Same with me.