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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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I'm having minor problems seeing how the even number chapters integrate with the whole. Last time I thought that #2 was a flashback to Essun's early life, but it seems we're just being treated to a quirky set of background pieces of the jigsaw. But …
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> @Apocryphal said: > You read some books in what... Hindu? Sanskrit? I knew you were a polymath, but still - that's impressive. No no... only in translation :)
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> @Michael_S_Miller said: > I'm enjoying the narrative style, but maybe I just have weird taste. The bit that @Apocryphal quotes is when Essun is so stressed that she loses control of her powers. The fact that the narrative voice loses contro…
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My personal favourite in the Culture books :)
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@clash_bowley aha... I realised on looking again that I had simply assumed that the two were the same... I don't think there has been anything explicit that tells us that
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I've just finished the Kindle version, great stuff
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The overall structure seems to be alternating 3rd person narrative flashback scenes to trace the history with 2nd person "now" scenes to move the story forward. Like the rest of us, I'm still struggling a bit with the 2nd person bits. T…
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Thanks... I thought I'd updated my notification settings but obviously then forgot to save them :(
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From the map / description I kept thinking "Gondwanaland" but clearly that's more like a beginning end than an end end. Then I decided that maybe the Earth (I am assuming it is on Earth) has been around sufficiently long that it has recapi…
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> @NeilNjae said: > Just in case people have missed it, I've posted the first thread about the book. Further threads will be in the Broken Earth category. Thanks! I had missed it on account of the default of no notifications for new catego…
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Out of curiosity, I compared the episodes near the start of book 1 and the end of book 4, where Severian goes through the series of tunnels. There are a lot of parallels, but to be honest it's hard to see which are deliberately made parallel for the…
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I suppose, being charitable, that Huxley might have meant for the society to have thought and spoken like this, without him personally holding such a view.
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(Quote) Though the regular BNW folk considered them fairly revolting, and their society a salutary example of how not to live.
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(Quote) Naturally this got me wondering what the correct plural for utopia should be :) utopiae, perhaps? But regardless of that rabbit hole, I agree with your point, and add the following. I think what you refer to as "maintaining a shadow en…
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Great, all sorted in my calendar... now I just have to buy the first book and read the first portion...
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There's an interesting and probably relevant row brewing at present in the Lake District National Park - it's not clear how it will develop, and there are both credible and incredible arguments bandied on both sides. Let me explain, while attempting…
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Incidentally, this also reminded me of a game mechanism in @clash_bowley 's new opus, The Great Game, in which colonisation of the solar system is triggered by problems happening on Earth. The basic assumption is that people need the impetus of diff…
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I kind of touched on this stuff in my thoughts on your "what is culture" question... if anything else comes to mind I'll add it later!
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@dr_mitch commenting on crime procedurals brought to mind Minority Report (I'm thinking of the film as I haven't yet read the book) - would we class that as Utopian or Dystopian, I wonder?
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I've mentioned this before, but looking back at teenage efforts to play Empire of the Petal Throne, with its flamboyantly rich and diverse inner world, we totally failed to do it justice, and were just geeky south-of-England kids wandering round. …
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I don't think I'm saying anything different from others, but I think a) emotional range is necessary for art of any kind (to avoid blandness or boredom) but b) art can and often is born out of emotional experience other than profound suffering.
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A novel or film needs some kind of tension to move it along - as @dr_mitch says, this doesn't have to be an outsider but often is. An internal rebel or disaffected person (arguably Bernard Marx is this) is another way. I suppose it depends how far &…
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I found the writing style to be largely rather dull and pedestrian, so agree with @NeilNjae that the book's main strength is in its ideas. In a few places it became (stylistically) more fluent and compelling... sufficient to make me wonder if the dr…
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I suspect that Huxley was writing from a position where religious faith was seen as only having relevance in the gaps in knowledge, and that would (so it was thought) inevitably diminish as the gaps grew s
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Something that struck me about this was that Britain has (so far) avoided the trend in Brave New World towards a kind of monoculture. In lots of ways we have become far more diverse than the Britain that Aldous Huxley knew: it is not always smooth, …
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(Quote) I think that societies are often presented as utopian in contrast to some specific starting point. Take for example Avatar (maybe not the best case but it's fun) - the woodland world of Pandora seems utopian to Jake in contrast to the marine…
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(Quote) Some churches do allow for voting in leadership, or at minimum the opportunity to ratify a decision. But I do agree that often the situation is set up, and emotionally laden, in such a way as to rubber-stamp the choice that existing leadersh…
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(Quote) the last phrase ("that I might not walk shod on holy ground") is intended to remind us of Moses at the episode of the burning bush, and one assumes (by virtue of the complete lack of explanation in Exodus) that it was a routine way…
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This is one place where the lack of technology development shows very starkly. The Epsilons are not, so far as I can see, essentially different from machines that we might use in a factory or whatever, and although there's less detail about them, I …
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I think Huxley was probably reflecting the UK he knew - if he were writing today he would, I suspect, include a lot more overt diversity. As it is, he has the Controller called Mustapha, which must surely not have been a common UK name in the 1930s.…