James Nicoll Quotes
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I wonder if every near-future SF series in which the US is not a brutal theocratic police state ruled by doctrinaire bigoted oligarchs and their boot-licking enablers became obsolete on November 9? Won’t it be fun to find out together?
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Livejournal comment
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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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The cat and I have an agreement: I leave her alone and don't make sudden moves when I wake up to find her perched on my chest, staring with an unblinking hostile gaze at my face and in return she rarely mutilates me.
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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 number of times I have been declared dead is statistically insignificant,although admittedly non-zero.
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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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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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I can't help but notice that everytime I fly somewhere, other people's planes fall out of the sky.
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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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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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You may have trouble getting permission to aero or lithobrake asteroids on Earth.
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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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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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Goodkind is noted for subtle allegories the same way Mt Kilimanjaro is known for floating weightlessly.
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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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Yes, I was suprised how easy it was to cut the door off my cat.
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Deadly nightshade is the only plant I have ever been able to get to grow for me.
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A common issue with SF settings is that causally disconnected civilizations nevertheless are close enough in technological development that conflict is possible, rather than it being a matter of laser cannons against a thin film of single celled organisms.
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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.
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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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Creating stars in laboratories on the very planets you inhabit turns out to be a bad idea.
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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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If there's a stack of novels to review, the unpromising stuff goes at the top and the promising stuff goes at the bottom. That way, I am eager to finish Overwrought Romantic Mary Sue Fantasy because I know that will let me read Niche Product That Only the Author, James and Some Guy at JPL Likes.