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NeilNjae
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- NeilNjae
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Comments
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The timing makes no difference to me.
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(Quote) Wells is great. I've read a few of his books, but not yet Moreau. I'm looking forward to it! (I think I read Aldiss's reworking of it when I was much younger, but can't really remember much about it.) As for the June selection, I'm torn bet…
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I've not read this either. But celebrating with a book about people in a small community that study monstrous creations? Are you trying to tell us something?
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A couple of other things. Kammeston makes a big thing about never leaving Rathersway, yet there he is in Winho. The dates in the Siff entry suggest that Kammeston, Bathurst et al. were active about 300 years before the entry was written. An entry in…
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A question. Does this book get going at any point? I've just finished as Part 2 Chapter 5 and so far the book is "woman sits in room." The most exciting even was the recent occurrence of "something exciting might happen in a different…
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(Quote) I read that as a fairly mercenary move on her part. Torm was about to leave her stranded, so she traded sex for him staying. That's not to say she wasn't attracted to him anyway, but I thought there was some calculation in it too. (Quote) T…
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Yes, I was expecting the story to connect to the Commis murder. It's at about the same time, though: Torm's journey to Seevl was delayed by a ferry accident, presumably the same one that got Sington fired. There are other similarities, such as the c…
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If The Islanders is a deconstruction, what is it deconstructing? The novel? The idea of consistent worldbuiding?
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(Quote) Threads don't show as having unread items until you've posted in them. You have to keep an eye on the subjects and dates to see if any brand-new threads have appeared.
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I typically go into the general main discussion list, and pick up the new threads from there. I also have an RSS reader that finds the threads after a day or so.
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The "oriental" part of "orientalism" is the least-defining element of the trope. Orientalism is about defining non-Europeans as being everything opposed to how Europeans want to see themselves. The original "Orient" was…
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(Quote) The two authors / two tones point is a good one. I was thinking of it more as a split between characters and world: simple, square-jawed, heroic characters, but placed in a messy and dangerous world.
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The links above are broken (they start http://https://...). Should be fixed below. (Quote)
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I liked the juxtaposition of the two Rawthesay chapters. We've seen Caurer built up as a mythical figure, and it was a good contrast to see the human feet-of-clay side of her. I find it somewhat hard to believe that both Caurer and Kammeston had suc…
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(Quote) There was also the intrusiveness of the military into officers' marriages. I forget the names, but there was the officer with the unhappy marriage; the military types thought it reasonable that they interfere with it, the merchant navy perso…
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(Quote) I think I got part-way through the book, started rolling my eyes at that author going on about the torpedoes again, and decided to check what the history of the weapons actually was. I was surprised when I discovered that the events in the b…
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(Quote) The UK had it's fair share of fascists and supporters (Mosely and the blackshirts). Some are still with us (the Daily Mail newspaper, the royal family).
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(Quote) Look in the general "Discussion" view of the forum.
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One other thing about characters and tropes. When I were a lad, I read war comics like "Commando" and "Warlord", full of butch soldiers who spoke in a way that fitted into speech bubbles: Short phrases! With exclamation marks, Gi…
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I think it's a bonus. The detail comes through. Something like the incident with the toilet would only have come from first-hand experience, or talking to someone with that experience. He is clearly still angry about the torpedoes, and that almost d…
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I think the different settings helped enliven the story. I could have been quite monotonous if the action had been just events on the submarine on patrol, or just events ashore. Bringing it back to gaming, it's something I've struggled with to make…
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Back in the dim, distant past of the 1980s, a friend lent me a series of novels about WWIII. IIRC, the books as a whole covered the progression of the war between NATO and Warsaw Pact, with different books covering different theatres. In that way, t…
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Given my mistake over timing, I can't remember much about the enlisted characters. That probably says all you need about how memorable they were. The enlisted characters weren't protagonists in the story. I think they were to provide a different vi…
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I liked how the author played with the tropes. The trope is that Hinman was the friendly commander who inspired his men, while Mealey was the rigid disciplinarian who would be ineffective in combat. Mealey remained the disciplinarian, but he was an …
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It's an element of the war I knew nothing about, before this book. Then again, I know next to nothing about most of the US/Japan war in WWII; my scant knowledge is more about India, Burma, and Malay. The conflation of several boats? That's fine as …
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It was an unusual choice in a war story. As a piece of fiction, I think it mostly worked, even if the romance part was treated superficially. What I found interesting was the different civilian attitudes towards war between what was portrayed in th…
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Without having seen the other questions, I think "tropes" is something we'll come back to several times in the discussion. The trope in most of these war stories is that the viewpoint characters will struggle through many dangerous and da…
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I just stumbled across this video about the history of the torpedo that features so prominently in this book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ5Ru7Zu_1I
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"I got confused and finished reading it next month."
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I agree with you that Helliconia Winter is the weakest of the trilogy. I need some more Sabatini in my life. Thanks for the reminder. I'm currently reading bits of The Elephant and Macaw Banner, the short story collection that accompanied the recen…