Recent content by LCatala

Option A isn't mixing present and past tense. Although forms in "-ing" are often called "present participles", they in fact have no temporality associated with them. They just tell you that an action is an ongoing process (rather than an instant action or a generic truth), but they don't...

The people that the romans conquered also employed slavery, often to a greater degree than the Romans. You cannot tell how well the Romans performed against a rival civilization without slavery because there was no such thing back then.

Finished Spiderlight by Adrian Tchaikovsky Overall I found it just ok. There are some very clever twists to the "classic D&D adventure" that this is riffing on, but that means in the process of getting there we still have to go through a number of scenes that I found rather dull and tired. The...

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I finished The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2015) A story taking place in England in the decades following the death of King Arthur, it is initially told in extremely classical prose with an omniscient, self-aware POV that adresses the modern reader directly, but this is not overbearing, and...

A unreliable narrator is one of the tools of narrative tension, a form of tension that doesn't rely on conflict, but on which piece of information you present to the reader and in which order. Since "tension" is essentially a situation that feels unstable and that it must soon resolve to a less...

Hello and welcome. From what you're telling of your reading tastes in fantasy, it seems that among contemporary authors you would quite enjoy the work of Brandon Sanderson, notably the Stormlight Archive (not a super original recommendation, I admit, but if you want "epic", "interconnected"...

Sailling across the Atlantic is the easy part. Having native Americans colonize Europe however would require so many things to be completely different that you might as well just write a fantasy story from scratch, because the result will bear no ressemblance to actual history, or even to...

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Finished Gideon the Ninth, quite good, bought the sequel already. Then I started and finished Dune, which was very good. Next I think I'll read The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Eh, the technical achievements of the Romans and Ancient Greeks are massively overrated (something we got from the Renaissance and their fanboy attitude for everything classical). Greek "science" was mostly abstract, ungrounded philosphy, that explicitely rejected observation of the natural...

It's hard to have both slavery and a dynamic economy. Slavery discourages technological innovation, mechanization, widespread education, investments in anything than the specific good and services produced by the slaves, it makes the economy centered around producing and exporting just a handful...

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