James Nicoll Quotes
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The thing about the Star Wars expanded universe that most impresses me is how the need for endless sequels has taken what was way back in the late Disco a fairly upbeat series where the good guys eventually prevailed and turned into a crapsack setting that's grimmer than the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Congo Wars I & II and the Mongol Conquests combined.
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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.
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All gone. Zelazny was one of the first times I looked at something I had had familiarity with to find the spot where the memory should have been empty, replaced by a scrawled 'Moved South for the Fishing' sign. Calculus was another loss. It was quite upsetting to reach for a skill and find nothing.
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The one job that machines cannot do is be a cruel plutocrat. That’s why humans are still needed.
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Manitoba… Not sure what to do about them. Restock the province with megafauna and encourage tourism, I think. How quickly can we breed back the saber-toothed cats?
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My grandfather for example only died twice, once during the war and once in the 1980s.
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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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Niven made a name for himself as a hard SF author, which is to say, someone whose SF provides enough technical detail that the reader can be certain that various mechanisms and events couldn't work the way the author has them working.
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It's bad to wake up and see a large cat in mid-leap from the rough vicinity of the ceiling.
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You may have trouble getting permission to aero or lithobrake asteroids on Earth.
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Aha! The Alien Planet Canada series, where the planet the characters are marooned on seems to be Manitoba. Bad bad world building.
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The number of times I have been declared dead is statistically insignificant,although admittedly non-zero.
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Never bring a gun to a fight where the other guy has a time-machine and tomorrow's newspapers.
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Someday I'd like to read a story about competent people on Mars.
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I can't help but notice that everytime I fly somewhere, other people's planes fall out of the sky.
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Goodkind is noted for subtle allegories the same way Mt Kilimanjaro is known for floating weightlessly.
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Engineers and certified pilots may be expensive but talented young men with a teenager's grasp of risk are surprisingly affordable.
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Call me an extremist but killing a few hundred million people seems like the sort of method that might have unintended consequences.
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John Barnes is incredibly variable. Pete's Rule (Never buy a Barnes with sodomy in it) is a good one but unfortunately the publisher does not put that kind of stuff on the cover.
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Yes, I was suprised how easy it was to cut the door off my cat.
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I also do not recommend shopping with Cordelia Naismith-but I would watch that reality show.
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Humans hate to admit error even as they stand there, black and smoldering, with the stub of a cigarette in one hand, in the middle of a wide crater containing them and the remains of a sign that once read 'DANGER: VOLATILE EXPLOSIVES'
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It’s a sad thing that the march of time and evolution of mores can rob one of the ability to laugh at simple domestic abuse.