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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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Yes, Cheris was quite interesting but was progressively eclipsed. But I was neither sorry nor pleased that she vanished. Formation instinct (and I guess part of me baulked at the word instinct when it was apparently actually a culturally imposed be…
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Yes, again I agree with @clash_bowley - in most chapters a new utterly destructive weapon was wheeled out, and there wasn't (I think) any attempt to have a consistent body of military or physical theory behind any of them - they all seemed to target…
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I almost gave up about half way through because of my complete lack of understanding of what was happening and who I was supposed to think of as worth favouring, but persuaded myself to finish it. The ending kind of confirmed my feeling that we were…
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Yeah, I never really got it at all, even after @BarnerCobblewood sent me those links. If I had found the story in itself interesting I might have put in the effort to learn what was going on, but I didn't, so I didn't (if you see what I mean). A lot…
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I'm with Clash here - I kept wondering what on earth dating systems and festivals had to do with weaponry and transportation technology. And how in what (with @BarnerCobblewood 's help) I eventually worked out was a multi-solar-system hegemony, a si…
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I'd never heard of it before, so it didn't help before ( :) ) and doesn't really help now. I kind of floundered in this book and didn't understand much of what was going on. It felt like book 10 in a 25-volume series and I kept feeling that I ought …
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I don't ever remember seeing that but then I pretty much always use the same machine
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All done
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September selection The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde category posted so it's time to update notification preferences (though they're still not working for me)
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(Quote) The double letters? ff vs rr?
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I posted a few days ago... For September I'm thinking of a change of mood to a witty 2001 debut novel called The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (an English writer who now lives in Wales). It's in the British tradition of comedy thinly disguised as SF …
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All: discussion for Come Looking for Me seems to have finished so this is a reminder to read Ninefox Gambit, for which @NeilNjae wil be leading discussion at the end of August. For September I'm thinking of a change of mood to a witty 2001 debut no…
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It's nothing to do with the Napoleonic era, but touching on the subject of women in the armed forces I came across this article today... https://phys.org/news/2023-08-mystery-iron-age-warrior-small.html The island where the remains were found is Bry…
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@clash_bowley may have more sources but there's one list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_warfare_and_the_military_in_the_19th_century and another one at http://emperornapoleon.com/army/women-in-the-army.html One suspects that these are ju…
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(Quote) Maybe that's how she ended up with thee?
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(Quote) Yes, definitely
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(Quote) That's certainly true - despite having to jump out of one ship being shot at, and participating in several battles between ships (albeit unwillingly) I never got the sense that she felt herself in real personal peril
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That's an interesting question. I've only come across naval gaming, both Napoleonic and WW1, in a table-top sense (well, for WW1 it was actually a whole lot of floor area rather than a table), where the focus was on manoeuvring ships into advantageo…
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Agree with @NeilNjae here - the 1812 war is in my mind a very minor side-action compared with all the stuff going on with Napoleon in Europe. 1812 included the collapse of Napoleon's attempted invasion of Russia, and some of the initial decisive vic…
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(Quote) I agree with this - I still wasn't sure at the end why it had been such a big deal for her to disguise her identity, or why the Bad Guys were determined to capture and expose her.
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Inevitably there were very few women characters! Basically one "nice" and one "nasty". It's hard to see how it could have been otherwise, unless much more of the action had been at a port, but this did mean that we saw much more …
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I devoured pretty much everything CS Forester wrote back in my teens and have revisited some of his books a few times since then - they no longer have quite the same compelling power as they did all those years ago but are still an enjoyable read fo…
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Thanks @BarnerCobblewood those links were helpful in answering my initial query, though inevitably they have raised other questions and perplexitiest. There seems to be a prodigious amount of background material
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(Quote) :o
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(Quote) there's a whole thread in that one sentence alone :)
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(Quote) I mostly agree with this, especially the point about worthwhile ideas not being presentable in one-sentence paragraphs. One of the interesting things for me about this exercise with our local bookshop is what the guy there thinks of as SF/F …
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No, there's no local connection for most of them (and I'd mention if there was)
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(Quote) Sorted - pleas set up notification preferences (though mine haven't been working recently :( )
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Interestingly I'm currently listening to this on Audible - it works for me in that medium because it's kind of easy reading, the language and vocabulary is quite, well, prosaic rather than delightful, and it doesn't matter much if you zone out and m…
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> @clash_bowley said: > (Quote) > I would be! Likewise