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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,441
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member, Administrator, Moderator
- Games I like
- Sundry, mostly board
- Books I like
- Science fiction, fantasy, some historical fiction
Comments
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I'll set up the discussion area for Witch World in the next day or so.
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I also realised belatedly that David Brann is author of several other books, all of which seem to deal with the behaviours of people, usually explorers of one kind or another, in extremis. So for example The Lost City of Z, dealing with exploring th…
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(Quote) How splendid!
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(Quote) Yes, totally - British law as enacted in courts is almost entirely about precedent and analogy with previous cases, so I can easily imagine a court not wanting to set a precedent where they weren't sure about the rights and wrongs of the mat…
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(Quote) As in "fleet of foot" etc
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Yes there was a lot of additional material at the end of the kindle book, which I personally didn't find added much. Something I wondered was the choice of presentation of the material... I wondered if it would have been better presented in novel…
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There were a lot of characters - necessarily so because of the historical events, but I don't think a novelist would have nearly so many important and/or viewpoint characters. It's all too easy to kind of forget who's who and what allegiance they ha…
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@NeilNjae neatly sums up my own position on this.
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Other things I have read suggest that whilst the regulations were explicit about mutiny, and extremely wide in their interpretation of what constituted mutiny, in practice they were not enforced via often, and there is a fascinating contrast between…
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Like the others so far, I've read plenty of naval fiction set in the Age of Sail but almost all of that has been set later on, around the time of the Napoleonic Wars (eg Alexander Kent, CS Forester, Patrick O'Brian) and rather less survival stories.…
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I'll ask my bookseller friend in the village if he came across this last year and if so if he has any opinions about it
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(Quote) It certainly is available in kindle at least in the UK and probably elsewhere. I have regular Andre-Norton-reading-fests - she was so enormously prolific that I have still nowhere near exhausted her repertoire :) They hold a particular memo…
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A few thoughts, mostly disconnected from your comments ( :) ) When the prince is told about the infidelity and fakes drinking wine "When my wife returned, the feast was served, we had a bite and went to bed. I only pretended to drink from the …
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(Quote) hoho :#
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(Quote) I like Witch World - it won't be new to me but I'm happy to reread it. It obviously gripped her imagination as she went on to write a total of 18 books in a loose series (https://www.fictiondb.com/series/witch-world-andre-norton~10743.htm) o…
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I've read some Martha Wells but not that one. The Chakraborty one sounds fun - didn't she write City of Brass (which I've heard of but also never read)
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(Quote) I must admit to sharing this view in large measure. The local-to-Grasmere book club that I'm part of routinely chooses prize-winning books for its titles - not usually Hugo or Nebula as SFF is low on their priority list, but Booker or whatev…
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(Quote) I like this idea, which I take to mean that storytelling is intended to perform some kind of cohesive effect on society as a whole
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> @Apocryphal said: > Perhaps all the breaks are just where the storyteller needed a sip of tea. Which means the shorter sections were the thirstier nights, for whatever reason. I could go with the cups of tea explanation 😁
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(Quote) I don't have strong views on any of those, though I suppose if as a club we read The Windup Girl a while back that excludes it? (It was before my time, though I have read the book quite a few years ago now and don't remember it well)
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(Quote) And just developing this slightly (I thought about it a bit more while out doing grandparental duty during the school half term here)... The portion we read last week includes ten (I think) end-of-storytime-exchanges between Shahrazad and h…
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Re reading pace, I had a radical thought (which I haven't actually enacted) about reading in one evening only one portion according to how Shahrazad rationed the king! Of course that would mean some evenings reading hardly anything (and I don't know…
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(Quote) Yes, totally agree
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(Quote) I think there is a global fascination with these why questions - as well as "how did the leopard get his spots" type fables, there are all kinds of "why are there 7 stars in the Pleaides (with 6 brighter than the seventh)"…
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All: here's a monthly selection update! First, we are nearly at the end of October so looking forward to discussion on The Wager to be led by @Ray_Otus In November we then have Tripoint by CS Cherryh, to be led by @clash_bowley The schedule then …
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I have to confess that I am slightly getting lost in how many levels deep in the structure we are at any point! But that isn't affecting my enjoyment of the stories as we go along - there's more of a sense of surprised recognition along the lines of…
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A bit behind this week so will get to week 5 tomorrow (if you see what I mean) - but here's an additional thought on week 4 contributed by my other half. I was saying as how (unlike Disney Genie) the sealed bottled contained the disobedient and high…
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> @Apocryphal said:. > > (Quote) > Yes, I rather liked it. It was more like prose than poetry in any case, but it was used to speak to Allah, so in that sense it made an interesting tonal change between the mundane voice and the prof…
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I was thinking again overnight about the whole "source materials" thing, and suspect that with a long oral history of the tales (in whole or more likely in many parts) we are never going to get very close to listing out original sources. S…
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My thoughts from the intro notes: "Fernando Pessoa... musing... on the power of novelistic characters to acquire a presence stronger than that of friends or acquaintances in the real, visible world" This is something I could definitely re…