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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,205
- 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) Yes, employment was kind of lackadaisical back then regarding leave applications... though to be fair to his employer it didn't sound as though he was terrifically busy when he was there so maybe he wouldn't be missed too much...
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(Quote) How excellent! Shows off the watersheds behind each of the islands really well
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(Quote) It's a place where the written version comes over much better than the film - in that version you just see them going through mist and stuff and don't really get much sense of how difficult it would have been. There's a bit of voice-over say…
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(Quote) Yes that's the kind of thing I was wondering about - whether it could work in an RPG or (as @BarnerCobblewood suggests) might be better in a tabletop mode. But the basic idea of having terrain that isn't uniformly fixed, and hence the need …
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(Quote) Milkin here is transparently a thinly-veiled Melek or Moloch hence the dichotomy between bestowing kingly gifts or cursing them :) That aside, my long-ago memory of random encounters while travelling was that they served mainly to boost lev…
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Some of the tales in the compendium "invasion genre" book I've been reading - all the stories having been written between 1871 and 1914 - have a kind of post-apocalyptic feel to them. It's like the writers were trying to posit "this i…
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(Quote) Good point, I'd forgotten the reliability part of that equation
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As some of you know, I've been reading my way through a compendium work called The Battle of Dorking and Other Invasion Stories 1871-1914 which includes a variety of variations on a theme - the chief variation being whether the adversary was the Ger…
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(Quote) Which is not unlike how things panned out for the author over the next decade or so
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Discussion area for Arkhangelsk now set up
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Discussion starters for Riddle of the Sands now in place
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How are people getting on with Riddle of the Sands? I'm planning to post discussion starters next weekend if everyone's happy with that
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(Quote) I can see we're all going to get adept at small-boat nomenclature :) I did a quick search in the kindle version, and an onlooker refers to Davies' boat as "your yawl". Also, the galliots are explicitly said to be "ketch-rigge…
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I've not heard of her either but sounds fun. If there's general agreement I'll set up the discussion area later in the week
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(Quote) Motivated by all this I went back and reread The Girl with all the Gifts - just finished last night and what a cracking book it is :) Better, I think, reading it the second time through, as you then have a better understanding of some of the…
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(Quote) I wonder - and this is spur of the moment writing so is not fully thought through - if the business of not looking at the Wilderness should again be seen as a metaphor? In the story, there is an injunction in the guidebook not to look at it,…
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What a cool idea!
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(Quote) I think there was the alternative longer route available - wasn't that how some of the travellers (Grey? The Professor?) had arrived in China in order to board the train? If so, then I guess folk decide to travel on this train either for spe…
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(Quote) I suppose Weiwei's motives for not reporting Elena were a) it was another person of (seemingly) about her own age so there's an identification with the plight, and b) there are some hints that Weiwei's relationships with the crew had drifted…
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I didn't get very far with Snowpiercer but didn't the plot revolve heavily around conflict between the two ends of the train? A bit like Silo (though of course that was vertical rather than horizontal) but even more so? Whereas here there was some i…
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> @clash_bowley said: > (Quote) > A fun occupation to do while not reading? :D B)
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Still some chatter going on regarding The Curious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands which has stimulated a lot of good stuff. This is also a reminder that July's read is Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, chosen by me. @clash_bowley any th…
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(Quote) What a cool idea! You could probably do some good scenarios based on Mountain Rescue or Coastguard teams.
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That's a nice read, thanks for sending the link. I was intrigued by this statement: (Quote) Again this relates to a common theme in the article that it all depends what "kind" of human is being assumed as the basis for comparison. So for…
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On a different tack, maybe it's always true that wildernesses divide people by their response - or at very least our collective response to wilderness changes with time. So regarding our own mini-wilderness here in Cumbria, in 1724 Daniel Defoe cal…
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(Quote) Going back to my "meaning of names" theory, Artemis is a fascinating one as a pseudonym for the Professor - the original Artemis was female, a hunter, a virgin, a protector through childbirth, and was a goddess associated with the …
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(Quote) Isn't that perhaps because neither first not third class passengers had any power? Both were entirely dependent on the train and crew to get them to the other side, and the first class lot didn't appear to have authority over the thirds to g…
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(Quote) Another similarity with The Girl with all the Gifts is that both books grew on me as I thought about them over a span of time after finishing them. I remember not linking Gifts much for the first 1/2 or maybe 2/3, and then being somewhat tak…
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That's an interesting quote and thanks for copying it here. And (for me at least) it raises a lot of questions about writing form. I do certainly agree that a (short) story has to have a strong focus, whereas a novel does not need every part to have…
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(Quote) Of course there's a fun double meaning here - we use "name" to not only mean a tag for a person, but also to mean "reputation". There's a Father Brown story (I forget which) where the plot turns on one character saying so…