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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,360
- 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: > I just finished a short story. I have no idea if it’s any good at all. Although I’ve done plenty of professional and academic writing, I really only started writing lyrics and poems a couple of years ago, and this is my fi…
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> @clash_bowley said: > And vice versa. In both stories, the viewpoint character - a woman - is trying to become part of another culture through sheer determination and inner conviction, and that liminality unfolds within them, transforming t…
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> @NeilNjae said: > Does this fit with a more general theme that "the world doesn't have to be this way"? People don't have to accept the contexts they're presented with, and can find their own places in the world. It is interest…
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Nicely put @clash_bowley !
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Well, who doesn't like liminality :) I think the author here was exploring how the edge of the psyche (for example Casiopeia and Michael's descent into and contest in Xibalba) and the edge of geography (Casiopeia moving away from home towards the o…
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Re @Apocryphal 's point, conceivably she was lamenting that people do tend, for many reasons good and bad, to embrace the dominant culture and in so doing lose their historical culture-specific roots. It's a bit like the Borg arriving, and everyone …
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I liked it a lot, and as has been said it was a welcome relief from The Broken Earth. Yes, it was simplistic, in vocabulary and formal rhetoric as well as setting and such like. I'm not sure I would re-read it very often, but this is not because I d…
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Worked for me too - though I'm not altogether sure that I agree with @Apocryphal that the protagonist is commonly the voice of order. I'm in the middle of listening to Dune (the best audio book I have heard, partly because I know the story so well i…
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I liked the whole twinning theme, which as has been said was brought out in many ways. At one stage (when I was looking for names of mythological twins) I read up a bit about the central American pairings, but I decided that for my needs the unusual…
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Sometime I must read American Gods, but I haven't had that pleasure yet. What I thought was done well here was Casiopeia's constant, and IMHO credible, vacillation between two poles: a) the constraints of her upbringing, poised uncomfortably betwee…
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(Quote) I think you're right - Deepmind was built (I suspect) using a set of assumptions that the situation on the playing area (and implicitly the gameplay until "Now") was sufficient to construct a strategy for going on. There was no fac…
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(Quote) I suppose that's to avoid the need to build some kind of parsing engine to infer what somebody else is offering as a deal? But you'd have thought that as a minimum they could have had a selection from a list of options - "make alliance&…
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(Quote) Sounds grim, glad it's behind you now
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I'm about 2/3 through, really enjoying it but juggling with all the tasks needed in the week running up to our first opening after lockdown (yay)
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The Mule would be good, I think, and probably easier to portray now, nearly 70 years after the original writing, with all of the real life and fiction dealing with mutants that has gone on since then. I remember being utterly impressed by the Visi-S…
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> @clash_bowley said: > [I] was looking forward to the end where everyone dies messily, without compassion. Such a heartless book was not good for me, I must confess. Perhaps you could work it out in your next album... The Stone Sky Thrash?
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> @NeilNjae said: > Nothing to be a good sport about: it's not my book, and the discussions were all civil and fruitful. I think one thing is clear: the books work better when read at speed and you're caught up in the excitement of them. N…
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(Quite long, for which apologies) Personally, I'm not bothered about continuing. Like @Apocryphal , if the collective mood is to continue then I'll join out of solidarity. But as an individual read, it doesn't interest or excite me, and I wouldn'…
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> @NeilNjae said: > (Quote) > Are these stories the same, but ending at different places? Higher beings evolve, first to take care of us, then to transcend and move on to higher things. Which was also pretty much the plot line of _Her_…
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> @BarnerCobblewood said: > LeGuin clearly loved individual persons, and her best stories shine a light on them in a way that makes the reader love them too, but she seems quite cranky when presented with peoples, retreating into clichés. …
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Thanks @Apocryphal , there's an interesting compendium of bits and pieces here. I'm just going to pull out a couple of bits that intrigued me... no point others will have different choices. (Quote) This kind of supports my point challenging her &qu…
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@Apocryphal said: > If she’s not an observer, why is she in an observatory 🤨?! > @BarnerCobblewood said: > Janitor perhaps. PC found the observatory empty and decided to explore the contents, finding that they weren't of much immedi…
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I keep going back to the Pandora classic myth - which I am sure we are intended to by virtue of the name alone. It seems an odd allusion to me... an intrusion of a Mediterranean classical reference into a world with no other large-scale Old World my…
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> @NeilNjae said: > (Quote) > Another loose thread is that Alabaster never actually said what he found in the shaft at Corepoint. Something down there scared him, but we don't know what. Interesting points about the Rennanis attack, th…
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(Quote) Hmm yes but that's my point really. Rennanis is a very long way away from Castrima. Such a large army would take a very long time to get there. Are we to believe a) that Rennanis would leave itself so depleted of personnel during a Season? b…
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Yes, I've been meaning to say thanks for the mention, but it's another of those items which hadn't quite got to the top of the stack of things I'd like to do. Hence my reply here in the group. (I shall be mightily relieved when lockdown ends and the…
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Well, this was a flurry of activity. No end of super-powers suddenly emerging, with no apparent precursor other than the immediate need for a solution. Very ex machina, it seemed to me. And coincidentally, Essun and Nassun seem to have reached near-…
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(Quote) This is a theme which ULG loves to explore and does so in numerous ways in both EarthSea and The Dispossessed (and no doubt elsewhere). She always tries to balance the two themes that a) return is crucial but b) return is impossible. So for …
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I don't have anything to contribute here but am loving the debate :)
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(Quote) This is a very simplistic view of the novel. and of literature that extends deep into the past way beyond the development of the novel - I strongly suspect that ULG knew it was simplistic, and was making the statement for rhetorical purposes…