MobileRead August 2013 Book Club Vote

[Stephjk]

No, don't worry about it, all will become clear!

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by John F

I've started this and have a question. I'm towards the beginning, and they are speaking "middle english?", am I supposed to understand this when someone speaks it? I'm getting a little hung up on it, and I find it a very minor distraction to the story.

You can understand it just as much as the character hearing it. Don't worry about it.

[sun surfer]

I've started Doomsday and am about 100 pages or so in, and one thing that has really struck me so far is how dated certain things in the "near future" feel despite the book being written relatively recently. I expect it of old sci-fi books and films, or even those 70s ones (I even just watched a really fantastic 70s German sci-fi film about virtual reality called "World on a Wire", but I digress), but one from the 90s? It's a little jarring!

In the author's defence though, near-future sci-fi would have to be the easiest fiction to become quickly dated, and we can't expect her to have predicted the absolute dominance of mobile phones and the internet. But it is the phones in particular that are so funny about this future, mainly because they're such an important plot element over and over again these first 100 pages. I find it entertaining though, and I basically imagine this as an alternate history where mobile phones and the internet as we know it never happened, a sort of unintentional nouveau-steampunk maybe ("landlinepunk"? ).

[Gabriel Morcan]

Hahaha... I also kept thinking about mobile phones while I read that part and how she couldn't predict them. The lines are often times engaged, a thing that also happens with mobile phone, but hey, they do have video calls.

O.S. Card did a better prediction. In "Ender's Game"'s near future, internet forums play an important role in everyday life.

[pdurrant]

Perhaps leave this for the discussion thread?

[Bookpossum]

Is there a reason for waiting so long before we can put up comments? I assume it's so as not to spoil things for those who haven't read it yet, but surely in that case those people could simply not look at the thread until they were ready?

I'm going away for 10 days early tomorrow morning Australian time, so won't be able to make any comment until I'm back. By that time there probably won't be much point, so I shall just say here that I enjoyed it and gave it four stars.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Is there a reason for waiting so long before we can put up comments? I assume it's so as not to spoil things for those who haven't read it yet, but surely in that case those people could simply not look at the thread until they were ready?

I'm going away for 10 days early tomorrow morning Australian time, so won't be able to make any comment until I'm back. By that time there probably won't be much point, so I shall just say here that I enjoyed it and gave it four stars.

We've been through this before, and the reason for waiting until the 20th is indeed to have a target date when everyone can start the discussion at the same time; not only the slower readers, but the faster ones as well. Speed readers can wait until the day before the discussion date to read the book if they want the book to be fresh in their minds, while slower readers don't have to worry that all the important points will have been made by the time they're ready to begin the discussion.

But since it is now the 20th, you can add your comments in the August 2013 discussion thread of Doomsday Book by Connie Willis:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=220478

[Bookpossum]

Ah, thank you Tom. Sorry - I was thinking the thread would be going up on 20 August your time, rather than UK time.