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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,366
- 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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That'll give me time to finish it as well :)
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BTW, not related to this particular group of chapters, but a general point... going for a walk yesterday in our frosty fells here brought home to me again just how good, in an unobtrusive way, Gene Wolfe is at describing a nearly-dead world. Only ve…
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> @Apocryphal said: > Also, the the flying wheels not make you think of Ezekiel? I thought it was pretty cool how they were described. > From Ezekiel's first vision: "This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They spa…
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> @clash_bowley said: >. The fighting units were what made no sense to me. They looked like they came out of a pre-game set up session using random tables of people, mounts, weapons, and accoutrements. Yes, that captures it very well. Eith…
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Totally chaotic, and deliberately so on Gene Wolfe's part I think. The oddness for me was in the lack of any understanding of the big picture (and for me this made it, as @NeilNjae says, Napoleonic). Each unit seemed oblivious of the whole, though o…
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In a weird piece of synchronicity I got posted this link by a friend yesterday... https://www.tor.com/2019/11/20/michael-moorcocks-elric-saga-optioned-for-tv/
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> @Apocryphal said: > (Quote) > Clear as mud! :-) > Hoho yes! I'll try again... So going with the time-like-a-river metaphor, and looking forward, the future becomes more and more blurry. The same set of starting conditions migh…
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I liked the exploration of time in these chapters... these various places we have met before are actually layering through time as well as space, brought into particular focus with the house. I reread the Hut in the Jungle portion from book 1, and t…
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> @Apocryphal said: > LEXICON > > (Quote) > Isangoma: We looked this up at the time (back in the first book) and discovered that an Isangoma is a Zulu Witch-doctor. > > I wonder why Wolfe is calling our attention back to…
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> @Apocryphal said: > LEXICON > > (Quote) > Merychip: We've had this before, maybe in the first book. Merychippus is an extinct proto-horse. > So I guess we should be saying meryc-hip rather than (as I have been) mery-chi…
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Indeed, I hope you and your partner get back on an even keel again soon. If I was judging I'd give the prize to Foila. No doubt about it in my mind. What will Severian choose? The trip to the house reminded me of an ancient world storytelling …
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(Quote) and presumably finish what you're saying sometime next year
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And, of course, infinite are the arguments of mages...
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I've wanted to reread Brave New World for a long time, I've not heard of the other two and don't have strong feelings pro or anti
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(Quote) I imagine it's Darmok? Back with the chapters, the conversation with Ava the Pellerine raises the interesting possibility that Severian has a sister - indeed, if I am interpreting her phrase "brother-sister names" correctly, a twi…
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(Quote) This reads as though Chin ultimately came to accept the view that Sarah Canary was a wild woman / wolf child, permanently unable to integrate socially with others. I guess at some stage he abandoned the faint hope that she would be his spiri…
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Aha! Recursion ! Love it!! I don't mind the Emily Dickinson ones - firstly they are chapter heads rather than in-narrative passages, and secondly her work could (slightly implausibly given her lack of in-lifetime publication) have been known in the…
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It just occurred to me that if this is, as we all suspect, a reference to the Wizard of Oz, then it is a rare example of anachronism. The Wizard was first published in 1900 (to be followed by another 13 sequels of which I had never heard) and so can…
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(Quote) This all has a very local resonance for me - Sara Hutchinson was Mary Hutchinson's younger sister; Mary became William Wordsworth's wife in 1802, and Sara was a frequent visitor, often for months at a time, to Dove Cottage, here in Grasmere …
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Interestingly (and nothing to do with gaming, for which sorry) the statement "Owls hoot in B flat, cuckoos in D" was a point in the book where I thought, "I wonder if that's true?" and went off to check. And, apparently, it isn't…
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(Quote) I wonder where they got that 1000 years from? That seems to me vastly too short a time considering the other parts of the story. I don't recall us reading anything this explicit about a prophecy in the text (if it was there, I missed it :) )…
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Maybe - though relatively short - this would have been a good slow read candidate. I've certainly come to appreciate some facets of Sarah Canary better as a result of this discussion.
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BTW (here is as good a place as any) I really like your technique of using quotes from the book as the discussion seeds :)
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As someone said in another thread, I'm not really sure they changed at the time. We hear a bit more about Chin going back to China, but it wasn't clear to me whether the changes in him were anything specifically to do with Sarah, or generally to do …
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I can't quite remember what I said before, but my current position is that a reader inevitably trails into a book their own presumptions and prejudices. So reader responses to a book vary, and it's important that they do. In that sense, the way peop…
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I saw it as more psychological. The same basic story - the uncommunicative central character around whom an unlikely group of others cluster, attempting to understand what's going on - could be dressed in many costumes without in any essential way c…
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Does it bother me... yes and no. No in that staying with uncertainty is not a bad thing, as a general principle. Yes in that I think the story suffered from the lack of direction that resulted, given that this is in fact a novel. Beginnning, middle …
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> @NeilNjae said: > I felt that wider change was missing from Sarah Canary. Did any of the main characters really change as a result of Sarah appearing in their lives? They were put in interesting situations, and we found out about their ch…
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Actually there is something that I would like to add here, not so much about the questions but the starting quote “The Wild Woman does not recognize herself in a mirror”. Mirrors can come in all forms, and the ones which are most in focus here are (…
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Adding comment so I see what others say about this.