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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,369
- 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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> @BarnerCobblewood said: > I found the ending unsatisfying. I thought that it was simply shoe-horned in to produce a work of the 'right-size' to bear the price-point. I think you have identified a very common problem. It can happen both …
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I'm really enjoying this book right now :smiley: I think this section integrates in a very interesting way with Typhon, the link being made by the net. Typhon tried to snare Severian with a magical/psychic net and failed... the hetman used a reg…
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Back in the sphere of writing, when I was studying poetics a few years ago I read up what various folk had to say about endings in poetry. Granted that this is a more structured form of writing than a novel, but some things carry over (and likewise …
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> @Apocryphal said: > So yeah, I think RPGs should usually be more than just entertainment. But sometimes, 'just entertainment' is all one really needs. Well put - it reminds me of a friend from years ago whose kids were into highly deta…
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(Quote) I agree - dementia was very much a side issue and it wasn't clear to me how the chair could ever have been repurposed as a therapeutic device. I chatted with a friend who has read other books by Crouch (but not yet Recursion) and he reckoned…
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I'll come back to this one: meanwhile commenting to I get to see other replies
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I thought a couple of things about the ending: 1) As mentioned in another thread, I was vaguely unsatisfied by Crouch's resolution which seemed a bit too ad hoc to me 2) An area the book (deliberately, I think) left untackled was that of independe…
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Nothing to add about gaming: commenting so I see future replies :smile: But obviously the indy world exists in most areas of life these days - games, books, music etc. You could probably include at least some parts of the open source software movem…
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I can't really speak much about gaming, but I think that fiction, especially speculative fiction, works best when it tackles a contemporary problem in some coded way, ie not head-on explicit but indirectly so it encourages readers to engage with the…
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Time travel is of course a favourite story device in film/TV series SF, and the various star trek series have done this lots of times - sometimes well and sometimes not so well. I especially liked Farscape's Different Destinations as a twist on the …
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I liked the book and finished it very quickly - so clearly it had me compelled to get on with it. Like @Apocryphal I had some reservations about some aspects - I agree that the memory trigger was odd, and I didn't like the specific way he resolved t…
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(Quote) This is just a spur of the moment thought, and I might reconsider as the chapters unroll, but I wonder if there's some mirroring of the geography he crosses and his overall moral compass (outer and inner journeys, if you like). He gets to t…
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Pace those who think otherwise, but I reckoned this was an exceptionally important encounter. Let's start with the name Typhon - I'm sure @Apocryphal will have more to say but Wiki has "Typhon was a monstrous serpentine giant and one of the dea…
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I think we are saying the same thing - JRRT and CSL had very particular views about relationships, which they wrote consistently into their books. But even among the Inklings there was diversity - Charles Williams in particular had what could best b…
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(Malacandra is not of course Narnia, but gives a clearer example of what I think is Lewis's general position)
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Being of a more sceptical nature, as well as nerdy, my inclination is to see this as more like a simple reluctance on JRRT's part to deal in the narrative with the more physical side of relationships. He shared this with CS Lewis, who (in Out of …
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This (rather belatedly) made me wonder if there was a link between Gene Wolfe and Teilhard de Chardin. And it seems that others have speculated about this too. For example "Like the theologian Teilhard de Chardin, Wolfe speculated that as c…
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> @Apocryphal said: > According to the creation myth as described in the Bundahishn, Ohrmuzd's (Ahura Mazda) sixth creation is the primeval beast Gayomart (Gayamarətan), who was neither male nor female... > Meschia and Meschiane live…
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> @NeilNjae said: > If the Conciliator is Christ (and I don't doubt you), what's the Claw? What does it correspond to in Christian mythology? > The specific passage which clinched it for me was "Then his task was to forge a peace…
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> @clash_bowley said: > It's mashup of Mowgli and Romulus and Remus that went nowhere. I'd spotted the Romulus/Remus link... it feels like Severian never quite finished the tale
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I enjoyed Severian's comedown when he realised that his glib assessment of the magicians nearly proved fatal! Also the Conciliator is very explicitly linked to Christ. Do you think that the thing which attacked the magician was a notule? I must r…
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The story of your search for the book sounds almost as much fun as the book itself!
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Again I liked the geographic sweep of this section. However, this part even more than the previous made me think that his coverage of ground is infeasibly fast! I don't think he has the experience to move with the indicated speed, especially with li…
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(Quote) Hence, perhaps, the rise of self-publishing books. It not only provides complete control over the content (which, depending on the author, might be a good or a bad thing) but it also encourages cross-genre books. The publishing industry (and…
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BTW Liu Cixin is also the author of The Wandering Earth, which is available for viewing on Netflix (and no doubt elsewhere). The story is kind of absurd in this case as he has compressed about a billion years of stellar development and change into a…
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(Quote) That's a really interesting question, analogous to the one we have in another thread about having the "same" story but told with different underlying motivations / universe assumptions. I also don't really know how to answer it! W…
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Now on my Kindle...
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> @NeilNjae said: > But, relating this to gaming, it would perhaps be more plausible if Mrs Bradshaw had been possessed by some evil entity, or was pursuing occult power, or something like that. But that's a different question thread! Ac…
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Nothing to add but again commenting to see later additions. And since this is the last discussion starter it's a good place to say that I did enjoy the book, though perhaps not for anything to do with the internal structure and characters!
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Nothing to contribute here but I'm commenting so I get to see other people's additions!