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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,364
- 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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(Quote) Reading this the names collided in my mind and I realised that when joined together, Damaya and Syenite almost make dynamite...
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Just finished... looking forward to the discussion in a while :)
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> @Apocryphal said: > I forgot to mention: my current pet theory is that Damaya, Syenite, and Essun are all the same person - Damaya the youth, Syenite the young adult, and Essun the mature adult. Interesting. We don't yet know how (or eve…
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My thoughts: the pace moved on a bit better in these chapters, but I think overall my thoughts echo those of @Apocryphal in that there are lots of interesting ideas, but the world-building and language is kind of all over the place. Jemisin is obvio…
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(Quote) True enough, I'd forgotten that one :)
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(Quote) I have been puzzling over this one and so far as I can recall we don't have any other parallel use in British English, not even for the other military service branches. So for example there is no equivalent name for a representative Air Forc…
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The dad of my closest childhood friend had been in submarines: thinking about his age, I am pretty sure he would not have served in WW2 but in the early post-war years. He almost never talked about it with us kids... the only thing I remember is him…
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How exceptionally cool! I'd never heard of it either before this
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Pace @Apocryphal but I have to admit to seriously disliking the interlude :( It seemed to me weird on several levels - firstly it completely threw me out of the story / world, since suddenly the author was addressing me. Secondly, it had the weird …
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(Quote) Probably a trope of the genre. Douglas Reeman's navy books (set in or soon after WW2) usually have a shore-side romance which always feels to me extremely stylised and unconvincing.
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(Quote) Though less so (I think) than other branches of the military at that time. One striking episode is when Lt Grainger, the new navigator, has got rid of Mr partridge because "he was a warrant officer, non-commissioned. I didn't think he h…
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> @clash_bowley said: > 220 meters is far more than 500 feet, @Apocryphal. > @Michael_S_Miller - I believe that both US and British subs in service more or less routinely exceeded their designed depths, which were rather conservative. I …
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Acorns were often used to make a form of coffee, and don't need to be imported here!
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Will be interesting to read other responses to this - my initial impulse is that you'd have to role-play the vessel as a whole rather than an individual crew. But maybe not?
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It interested me (about which I rabbit on at some length in another question)
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Only some of them emerged for me as memorable characters, though I suspect some are being set up for a longer life in future books. The girlfriends were an exercise in contrast, and (I suspect like most of us) I hugely preferred Shirley to Janis. N…
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Mostly of value. I had never once thought about the problems of keeping a submarine level when firing torpedoes, let alone simply moving around. So for me this kind of stuff was a definite plus.
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"sub-culture" has to be one of your more striking puns in this context :) It all made sense to me - in passing, I hadn't realised that Cribbage (often called "crib" for short here in the UK) was popular in American submarines! I…
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The only other books I have read set on a submarine are post WW2, eg Crimson Tide and Ice Station Zebra, and the films which are most similar have been shown from the surface ship's point of view, eg The Cruel Sea. As a setting it really worked for …
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Not really a strength or weakness, but a very characteristic narrative style was Black's habit of describing in considerable detail the run-up to a major encounter... which then for some reason fails or is called off before enactment... after which …
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Great news :)
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(Quote) I guess part of the problem is that even in this world, "I love you" can mean so very many different things, on a whole spectrum from sincere and selfless through to fake or controlling. I don't think we really have enough informat…
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(Quote) This resonates with me. The areas we have seen so far seem to be predominantly inhospitable in one or other ways, eg rocky desert areas. I can't quite see how the economics of this world work. How is food produced? Where does agriculture (ei…
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Sorry to hear that @clash_bowley - hope she recovers quickly from this
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Great!
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Several things caught my eye this week. First, I was relieved that we are (apparently) revisiting the same pair of back stories rather than getting endless new ones :) Secondly, a "Guardian" is apparently there primarily to guard the worl…
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Looks a great resource. It was Wellington's series of battles in the Iberian peninsula, as told in what is now a comparatively old book (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13610519-wellington-s-peninsular-victories), that first persuaded me that ma…
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(Quote) This is worthy of one of those glossary things that @Apocryphal did for The Book of the New Sun... I for one had never heard of gangue until just now.
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Of course, I am being foolish... my mineral name surely has to be Slate :)
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Lol @Apocryphal this is brilliant!! Love it. I have to confess that I had assumed that you'd invented this mineral, but Wiki soon proved me wrong and vindicated you! I shall have to do some mineral research of my own. More broadly, I like your ma…