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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,355
- 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 guess in a novel I'm not all that fond of blatant anything - I prefer writing to be allusive rather than obvious (unless it's transparently space-opera type writing which is clearly not intended to be a serious reflection of any real world). So bl…
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For my part, I wasn't part of the club in those far-off days so a prior reading is not an issue. Looking at that list, I'm pretty sure I joined in the early 40s... I remember Tanith Lee's book but not The Man in the High Castle! And Sleep Donation s…
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@Apocryphal 's comment made me wonder whether the natural place to set a game is not in the "now" of the book, with just Piranesi and The Other for most of it, but in the earlier times when there were more like 10 or so people around. Why …
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> @BurnAfterRunning said: >... It's not a game I'd like to run, or play - "Another bloody statue?" I suppose in a game you'd have to impart more particular meanings or triggers to the statues - sort of "this one points in th…
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Mr Tumnus belongs primarily in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, but also to a much smaller extent in The Horse and His Boy and in The Last Battle. A major connection with The Magician's Nephew is the name Dr. Valentine Andrew Ketterley, who is …
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This is probably the right place to mention one of my early theories about the context - which in part had to be abandoned and yet still has something going for it (I think). For the first few chapters I was convinced that Susanna Clarke was describ…
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Something to add here which I meant to write earlier but forgot... were the statues intended to be archetypes (in the Jungian or any other sense)? I don't think so, but I often wondered. Alternatively, the closing pages suggest that the statues were…
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Is Memento the film where events are presented as scenes in a kind of random order, and part of the plot is to work out the true order? And there's something about making notes on the protagonist's own body to help his memory? Anyway, yes it worked…
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I liked him a lot (for a time I wondered if He was in fact a She, and that this was going to be a big revelation later on in the book). But yes, it was refreshing to meet a protagonist who isn't determined to be cunning and scheming all the time.
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I liked the recurrent theme of personal devotion, largely to the bones of the dead but also to certain of the statues, the bird-life, and ultimately towards the world as a whole and its animating principle. It was a very neat way to explore a spirit…
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Yes, I picked up the CS Lewis allusions very fast, starting IIRC with Mr Tumnus but becoming a major theme through the book with various character names pointing at Narnia. Which made me wonder a lot, since there does not seem to be any obvious them…
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Curious - would you want to include the more explicitly dangerous environmental hazards, such as the occasional very large floods? Although in some sense predictable, the narrative makes it clear that you had to be pretty obsessive about recording d…
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Yes, totally - one of the great things about this book (and IMHO there were several great things) was the reticence of the author as regards the world. So much more satisfying than a kind of lay-it-all-out-in-chapter-1 pattern which one often sees i…
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> @BurnAfterRunning said: > On a tangential note, in 2020 I started logging the RPGs I play on a big Google Sheet. And this is amazing! I have so many games I might have forgotten about otherwise, and it's definitely made me play more games (…
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Hmmm, I don't believe that Rebecca Deczynski has a real job that actually takes too much of her time...
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> @Apocryphal said: > Announcements go in the Nominations category - make them easier to search for if they're all in one place. Thx Done!
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(Quote) Not a problem... where would you like me to post? Here? Or will you set up a new category?
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It's a bit of a long shot, and may not at all be what you are looking for, but some music album covers fit along these lines. I'm thinking particularly about Roger Dean (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Dean_(artist)#) many of whose album covers …
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(Quote) I suppose in a certain sense, that is (part of) the point of the story... the Paonese at the start are so insipid that they are not only unmemorable, but easily conquered by an absurdly small force. Their only form of revolt is a kind of civ…
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Part-way through, thoroughly enjoying it (and inevitably coming up with my own theories as to what is happening...)
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> @NeilNjae said: > Oops! Mistakes happen. At least it's not as bad as when Queen Victoria asked Lewis Carroll for his next book... > > (Which apparently didn't happen.) What a charming story (which I'd never come across before). …
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(Quote) You'd have needed an awful lot of aqua...
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> @clash_bowley said: > I will confess here that The Languages of Pao selection was a total mistake... :) They say confession is good for the soul, but in this case I wouldn't worry... Languages of Pao might well stimulate some great discu…
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Nothing to comment here, just adding a note so I see updates
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I'm going to post this year because I can't see anywhere else to put it... and it is vaguely relevant to the discussion starter @clash_bowley set... As I read it, pretty much all normal novel criteria are set aside in order to pursue the main thing…
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Again (usual risk assessment) I don't think the book is about individual character development, whether of men or women, except incidentally as serves the arc of cultural development. In that sense pretty much everyone is fridged...
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Again, at the risk of repeating myself, I feel that they were a type of personality, rather than people. Even Palafox doesn't really get much narrative space as a personality, except as seen by others. The oddity in the presentation, I think, was t…
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(Quote) Not quite that far but a decent way in - have to admit I am loving this one, great choice
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It's a problem for an author to try to describe multiple languages all in English, and US English at that, especially here, where the concept is that they differ so much as to reshape their whole culture. In a film or TV show you can do this through…
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I don't think that in this story, Vance was interested in realistic world-building - rather, he wanted to set up a collection of artificial constructs to pit against each other, represented by the languages. Indeed, this artifice (IMHO) took over th…