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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,372
- 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) Yah... none of this nonsense about the post not getting through on time...
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Hi all, a point of curiosity here. Way back before we even began the reading, @dr_mitch said "...the author makes deliberate use of archaic words to invoke an exotic effect, and they're deliberately obscure ones. He does this rather than invent…
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> @clash_bowley said: > The deer finally found its way here! I will attempt to keep up! Great news... I'm intending to post discussion starters towards the end of this week so hopefully people can join in next weekend
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btw, in Deuteronomy 34 the word represented in Shadow of the Torturer ch21 as "The Compassionating" is the divine name YHWH, typically regarded as coming from the verb to be and hence with root meaning something like "the existing one…
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These chapters seem to me to be heavily laced with biblical references, as well as Theoanthropos. The passage read in the Jungle Garden house is the death of Moses (Mount Nebo, overlooking the Jordan Valley, recounted at the start of Deuteronomy). …
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(Quote) That'll be your trained deer again :smile:
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(Quote) According to Etymology Online, the English verb "speculate" was a late 16th century back-formation from the noun speculation, which itself is attested from the 14th century. The root of that (apparently) is Latin speculari, from sp…
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A couple of things to add to my earlier comment: 1. The reflected light thing sounds like a really cool idea for an FTL drive that is very different from other ideas I have read. On the whole I suspect that the idea of mirrors will repeat a lot (as…
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What a fabulous review! Thanks
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I am finding the narrative gaps bizarre, and keep wondering if they are deliberate or just show poor reconstruction after editing (which can happen to anyone). For example, the issue @dr_mitch mentioned about whether Severian and Thecla were inti…
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Maybe I should have included thriller writers like Hammond Innes or Alistair Maclean as well as Fleming and LeCarre! I've read lots of Maclean but, oddly, no Innes. Maybe a monthly choice sometime?
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I had a thought about the book, triggered by these chapters, which made me kind of review my thoughts about the whole tale to date. First, I contrasted the kind of dying world presented by Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe. In Vance, the people in the worl…
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Great news!
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The saros period (getting on for 18 1/2 years) is very important for understanding the relationship between sun and moon (ie not just eclipses), and is implicitly built in to most ancient stone circles. It turns up there by way of indicating the mos…
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Just spent a happy time reading through parts of this and must say again what a great production job you did of it @Michael_S_Miller ! My other half was equally impressed and commented what a great record it is of some wonderful discussions :smile:
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Another curiosity I found out - about Earth, but it would apply to pretty much any planet - is that rivers near the equator flow uphill. This is an effect of the component of net gravity due to rotation, meaning that the surfaces of equal gravity do…
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Nice pics!
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It felt quite uniform without much in the way of highs and lows, which I guess is entirely appropriate for a book about a very high gravity planet with little by way of surface features!
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Another typical failure is the power of networked (and hence cloud) computing - most older SF authors assumed that computers would have to just get bigger and bigger in order to be more powerful, and totally missed the opportunities of doing things …
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The weirdest one for me was the end of Mission of Gravity. There was the hugely long chapter "Under", which to my eyes just ended on another cliffhanger... except that then there was a lecture (clearly removed from the actual story univers…
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Not a lot to add here to what's already been said by @dr_mitch and @Apocryphal
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Generally yes, but the problem with hard sf is that it encourages you to check it out, so you'd better be right. I went down something of a rabbit hole about gravity on the surface of oblate spheroids, and think that Clement vastly overstated the ra…
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I might read another story, and being by another author would attract me more than another one by Clement (sad to say). My version of Heavy Planet included both Mission of Gravity and Starlight - I read the second because I wasn't sure that MoG had …
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I think both your summaries are very fair :smile: It is odd, though probably a good assessment of human character, that clients go to the brothel to fulfil a fantasy of sex with one of the nobility, and how appropriate that Severian, who has actuall…
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(Quote) I don't think we can answer that just now - certainly what you say is right for the solar system, but we have xero information about satellite size for Earth-sized planets in other solar systems. If current solar system formation models are …
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Ready when you are
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(Quote) I kind of felt the same. Yes, there's loads of world-building going on, but some of the episodes seem to be blind alleys and I wasn't sure if I needed to keep track of the things in them or not. Take for example the dog - is this a Chekhov d…
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> @Ray_Otus said: > OK. I just found the path again. Slow Reads in left column, then the Book of the New Sun, then the right week. Not really that difficult. I just don't get a ping to remind me to go look. I think that if you find the rig…
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> @Apocryphal said: > Its pretty hard to predict when the last post will be. Queue bugle music stage left...
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> @Ray_Otus said: > Is there a post for the next section? https://www.ttrpbc.com/discussion/214/shadow-of-the-torturer-chapters-five-to-eight#latest