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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,354
- 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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> @WildCard said: > It seems like you left out an important part of the story in your summary. Hike climbed back up into the rigging and loosened the plate of glass. > > And Hike doesn’t slam an imaginary door on the Mustachioed Man …
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Sounds fine to me
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I liked the short story (though agree with @NeilNjae that it would not work in isolation from context) and especially the way in which it led the reader away from the idea that Commis's death was murder (by someone, if not by the originally convicte…
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(Quote) Maybe... and maybe I just find stuff about origins because I look for it. But I don't think it's just for islanders - in our world, at least. If you go to the Isles of Scilly, it's hard to avoid seeing things about the inhabitants in ancient…
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> @Ray_Otus said: > "Without the internet I don’t know what I would do” > > Why did I think there was no Internet in the archipelago? It's one of the little incongruous points that nags at me... how can there be a global Inte…
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Thanks for this review link @Apocryphal - as you say, it was well written and informative. Speaking personally, I am keen to continue with the Christopher Priest collection as slow read. Several reasons, I think: first and foremost, I had been mean…
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Back with erotomanes, it is a term which clearly has some kind of specific meaning in that world - "two men and two women, known erotomanes... (early in the Spoiled Sand chapter). And there are laws about it. But is the term itself a legal one,…
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(Quote) As a UK reader I don't find much to identify with, and had assumed that Priest was trying to write something that would appeal to Americans! We do have some archipelagos at various places off the mainland coast, but they bear essentially no …
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I found the letter sequence interesting, though perhaps rather self-indulgent on Christopher Priest's part seeing that it was about an author? Ditto the whole "they must be suspicious because they wrote negative reviews" theme - other than…
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(Quote) Yes, I think you could well be right here. I guess what I am not seeing in this particular "guidebook" is any of 1) the tourist-attraction side of religion ("you surely must not miss the spectacularly-ornamented Grotto of Omni…
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> @clash_bowley said: ... Facts as sub-atomic particles. ... All you need is a grand unified theory...
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> @Apocryphal said: >... This has me wondering if these two entries are related. And if so, how? Was the Mime an immortal? > Or alternatively - this being a thought that occurred to me while painting today - perhaps the arrested and e…
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> @Apocryphal said: Many thanks for the name list :) > LAWS > > Importunation seems not to be a word. Importunate means 'troublesome : troublesomely urgent : overly persistent in request or demand'. The history or the word is a…
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(Quote) Agreed there are some good potential game settings here... but coming at it as a reader then (at least so far - we may return to it later) the ideas are kind of thrown away and not sufficiently developed. Haldeman did it much more thoroughly…
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I didn't find Derill as in Manifestation Derill very credible, I'm afraid. What is it's supposed history? One in which coal was mined and processed so heavily as to cause major pollution, but which retains large tracts of virgin forest? One would ha…
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And going back to @Apocryphal 's start points, I enjoyed the human drama set on Cheoner, partly because it was in fact drama rather than description. Collago and the athanasia treatment seemed bizarre and abrasive in this world insofar as I understa…
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(Quote) I have enjoyed the process of "the slow read" as we have practiced it, even when I didn't like the books i question (orogenes, anyone?). To me, this style of reading - deliberately containing one's frustration at stopping progress …
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(Quote) I know that one under its alternative title The Long Habit of Living and reckon it's a good one of Haldeman's, altogether more developed and rounded than the few brief pages we get here. This seemed curiously out of place in the contents so …
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> @BurnAfterRunning said: > 1) Whether it is or isn't scientifically organised, I keep worrying I'm going to forget what previous islands, people, or (for goodness sake) winds are called - Yes, totally. With what you might call a regular …
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> @clash_bowley said: > (Quote) > How about "Rhythms and Thrymes"? :D Until I read this I hadn't realised that thyrmes rhymes with rhymes as well as being an (almost) anagram of rhythms! You can put my inattention down to a l…
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> @Apocryphal said: > (Quote) > "Thrymes" > Good name for your next album. Almost an anagram of rhythms...
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(Quote) That's a really interesting thought!
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(Quote) I don't know if Christopher Priest had this in mind, but several islands around the British coastline (and quite likely other places I don't know about) have been working on a programme to rid them of rats originally brought in on ships. The…
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> @Apocryphal said: > Glorantha has always been presented in that way. It's not so much a 'This is how things are' message to the GM, but a 'This is what people will tell you' to the player. That reminds me of a habit of speech in northern…
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(Quote) Very well put :)
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There's an interesting focus (not so much on the Aubrac chain of islands, to be fair) on artistry. I guess this underpins some of what @BarnerCobblewood is saying about wondering who is the selector of material. We don't (again, until Aubrac) get mu…
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I am always envious of you organised guys who manage to do this regularly! Every year of late I have had a mad scramble in November or even December to get my year's reading into Goodreads and onto my blog, with the inevitable "what month did I…
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As an aside, it's surely impossible for a speculative fiction author to choose the name "Harkonnen" for a major character without evoking Dune. Does anyone have any thoughts as to this choice? Are the parents of Baby A being implicitly lab…
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I would have liked these issues explored in Sleep Donation to a greater degree than they were. I guess I have a lingering feeling that it's a lazy authorial choice to tackle an area bristling with ethical dilemmas, but not devote much narrative spac…
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I think there is also a qualitative change in the world since Asimov wrote his spoof story - we now live in a world of "fake news"... both actually fake but also authentic information branded as fake by folk who don't want to accept it. Wh…