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NeilNjae
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(Quote) Yes, I liked this bit of worldbuilding, that the roads are forbidden in order to make rebellions harder. It implies that the state military can use the roads, and that when a rebellion gets large and organised, the rebels will use them becau…
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Chapters 13 to 16? Anyway, I'm with Clash: it looks like something's happening! OK, it's happening rather slowly, but there are events. There's also a lot of description which seems to be a combination of padding and Wolfe flouting his erudition, a…
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I read this a couple of years ago. As you say, short on characters but long, very long, on the big ideas. Well worth the read.
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(Quote) That's a very good point. The torturers see themselves as reasonable agents in the system, but with no responsibility for what they do. The language of "client" adds to that: the guild is just providing a service to the people in i…
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Oh, just to point out: in a contrast to the previous chapters, something actually happened in this week! Long may it continue!
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Paul, I think your notion about a lack of empathy is spot on. There's just about none in any of the torturers. They have no empathy for their "clients", none for the armiger, and precious little for each other. But at the same time, none o…
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(Quote) "Second year of eligibility": you can get this award in the two years since your first published work.
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We got some worldbuilding in these chapters, both about the long history of Urth (such as the paining of the astronaut on the moon, contrasted with its contemporary terraformed state) and the current political situation (the connections between Thec…
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...and finished book 2. That was a lot of fun! The pacing is even better in this book than the first. The author does a lot of placing Chekov guns above metaphorical fireplaces, which really builds the anticipation. You know the gun's going to be po…
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(Quote) I recall reading something recently that this is a perfectly sensible observation. Newborn bears do look like pretty shapeless lumps, covered in gunk, and the mothers spend a lot of time licking all that off to reveal something bear-like. Fr…
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There's also the reference that the first underground chamber in the torturer's tower used to be the tower's propulsion system. So are these towers, or are they parked rockets? I hadn't realised that the main character in these books was a torturer…
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(Quote) Yes! If nothing else, it connects to games like A Taste for Murder.
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I've played it a few times. It's a fun little game. We tend to play with some conventions to help things along, such as having a fixed ordering of cards in the hand so that people know what I'll play or discard next, explaining my reasoning out lou…
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(Quote) In another thread, you say the Nameless Ones have an appetite, not a desire. That's unthinking action, all about immediate gratification and endless feeding. Whereas, Ged mentions that wizards may have great power but are constantly thinking…
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I've just started book 2, The Kingdom of Copper. That creeping power level was a foreshadowing of a Major Plot Point in book 2, so that's fine. Let's see what she does with it!
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The difficulty in translating it into a game (and perhaps translating the story to other media, such as TV/film) is that much of the meat of this story is internal to the character of Tenar. It's really a story of her growth and realisation of the w…
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I don't think of them as "characters" at all, but rather a force of nature that needs appeasing. It could be that the gods are actual gods, or it could be a human projection of personification onto a natural phenomenon. And that's fine: wh…
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I think the lack of visual description helped with the sense of place. Instead of knowing what the tombs were like, we got an insight into what they meant to the characters. And they meant something forbidding and unknowable, where human desires did…
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OK, I see what you mean. The relationship between Ged and Tenar isn't something that grows naturally, it's something that's deliberately developed by Ged, in the same way that a man wooing a woman will set out to deliberately create a relationship. …
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I think it's more interesting to look at Arha/Tenar's mentors. The priestesses are all about telling the girl what to do, how to behave, even denying her identity and forcing her into the role they've decided for her. Ged, on the other hand, is all …
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(Quote) Except. When we first see Ged in this book, his life is incredibly circumscribed and controlled by others, as well as representing the outside world for Arha. I think it's that combination that allowed Arha to be curious: Ged was different, …
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We never really see Kargish society, so I guess that says something about how religion fits in: most Kargish don't particularly worship, or at least done worship the Nameless Ones. That's apparent from both the lack of outsiders in the story and the…
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Oh, it's very much a coming of age story. Tenar starts as a child, accepting what she's been told and doing what she's told, such as never bringing a light into the labyrinth. She starts to explore what her position means even before Ged arrives, bu…
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I'm guessing you know about the Bang-oriented, protagonist-play style of GMing? As in, the one mentioned in Sorcerer and Sorcerer's Soul. I tend to run this sort of situation from an R-map (with each NPC annotated with their goal) and a list of Bang…
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Plenty of second-hand paperbacks available, especially the Fantasy Masterworks edition from 2000.
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Oh, it's very much a more dubious background than the rest of the djinn. To the extent that he's well-known and notorious among all the rest of the djinni.
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In the author's defence, the "overpowered enigmatic bad boy" is a mystery to the other characters too and a plot point. I trust the author to have a plan for why it's happening.
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I'd be tempted to go with the "3x3" scheme to bring this setup to life. (I think I got the idea from Chris Chinn, but I can't find it now.) The idea is to identify three factions, and three people in each one. You've got three factions alr…
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Finally finished the book! It was OK. Not so much a travelogue as a travel-inspired work of fiction. My copy has two quotes on the back cover: "Tahir Shah has a genius for surreal travelling, finding—or creating—situations and people" (Dor…
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Dune 3 New Sun 2 Moby Dick 1