James Nicoll Quotes
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I believe that I have now experienced the lifetime maximum exposure to bottom spanking in fantasy novels.
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My father once discovered that one cannot 'walk off' gangrene.
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'Gun-wielding recluse gunned down by local police' isn't the epitaph I want. I am hoping for 'Witnesses reported the sound up to two hundred kilometers away' or 'Last body part finally located'.
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'Nothin'g sa'ys q'uality fantas'y l'ike misuse'd apos'tro'phes.'
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Ben Bova seems to work very hard at working in new discoveries into his Glum Future but alas, his future is glum and not that well written.
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It's true that the average human in the Xeelee universe can't eat Jell-O with a straw without accidentally removing an eye but these particular humans start off no stupider than than any other human of their era and proceed to breed themselves into imbecility. Well, farther into imbecility.
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It would let me protect the Earth from asteroids. In fact, for a small fee I would protect the Earth on a monthly basis, locating rocks that could be steered into the Earth and then not doing it if the cheque didn't bounce.
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Before it exploded one night, I went to a four grade, two room schoolhouse and we had textbooks from the 1940s.
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We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
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(James) White seems from all reports to have been a very pleasant fellow but he did have one huge blind spot, which is that he was as sexist as a giant ball of sexists wrapped in a dense layer of yet more sexists.
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Look, I tried the cat experiment. On the third trial, the cat was dead. On each of the subsequent 413 trials, it remained dead. Am I doing something wrong?
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Hell, Chuck Yeager could do it in his sleep while on fire, I'm sure.
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It takes a courageous Mormon to turn to archaeology to support their argument
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After enough concussions the head injuries blur together.
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Just as people in zombie apocalypses seem never to have seen a zombie apocalypse movie, so people in novels about the pioneering days of time travel never seem to have read novels on the subject.
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Tor is the hard one. They employ a lot of editors, whose tastes vary. They don't always indicate who has edited what (on the choice of the editor, I think) so editor stalking can be more difficult with Tor. Ear-tagging works but is rather surprisingly illegal.
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I didn't skip the smut. The author went to the trouble of writing it, after all. I did not feel to make notes for possible application later on but I also never wondered if the author was a virgin raised in an abandoned hentai warehouse, which is always a possibility for modern pornographers and erotica writers.
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Folks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid nitrogen and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It would not surprise me if reading that book causes birth defects.
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I have hated every Kress I read, especially this one, but the Bear is a standard Bear and if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like.
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Let's step back and think about the likely outcome of a scenario that involves the words 'James Nicoll', 'a box of sharp needles' and 'possibly without ever having achieved full consciousness' for a moment, shall we?
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Although no credible evidence exists that the speed of light can be exceeded, writers are willing to embrace the possibility that light might be outpaced somehow. Never underestimate the persuasive power of somehow.
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My grandfather for example only died twice, once during the war and once in the 1980s.
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Elizabeth Moon's antagonists are always evil moustache-twirlers. She could write a book about a golf open and the main rival to the hero would turn out to have clubs made from compressed kittens.
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At some point when I wasn’t paying attention, comedic genocide just stopped working for me. This is a shame because so much fantasy and SF depends on genocide as positive plot element. This trifling oddity of taste must have robbed me of hours of morally equivocal entertainment.