Recent content by Autumnal

there’s also Mary Robinette Kowal. Her Lady Astronaut of Mars series begins with a large-ish asteroid crashing into the Atlantic and wiping out a lot of the Atlantic coast, including Washington DC. What follows is very much like vintage hard-ish sf except the narrator is a Jewish woman who flew...

David Dunham used to run cyberpunk with lightly modded Pendragon, which worked greets. You can define cultural and subcultural priorities with sets of traits, and passions for individual priorities. The pursuit of glory is the pursuit of glory. The Ringworld skill system is nicely expandable...

Yup. Wells earned his reputation and then some. It’s a gripping yarn and a brutal deconstruction of colonialism, both at full bore. I never really thought about the naming or lack thereof! That’ll teach me something. I think it’s in leaping with the journalistic style of the time, which named...

Bruce Sterling called his book Islands In The Net “cyberstraight” in a lighthearted moment.

Thanks! I get worried when my tastes seem too popular. :D Seriously, though, very good explanation, and I cannot endorse reading comfort too highly.

Oh, yes, that Earthsea omnibus is such a beautiful book, and a paradigmatic example of Doing It Right.

Yeah, overload is always a risk with Big Huge Book Of A Thing reading. I usually have at least a couple different things going, like an audiobook and a distinctly different ebook. (At the moment, The End Of The World As We Know It, an anthology of stories in the world of The Stand, and a Horus...

A random comment and a random question… Comment: sorting my ebooks. (Several thousand of them), I find that (among other things, about a third of my horror collection is anthologies, just under a tenth of my sf collection is anthologies, and even less than that for my fantasy collection. Partly...

@Cadence : Enjoying it while you got it is very wise and fun. 👍🏼

As far back as the 1990s, observers like Gregory Feeley and (IIRC) Joe Haldeman advanced the idea that cyberpunk was being so thoroughly absorbed into the general mass of sf influences that it was crashing to be a distinct category at all. Instead, said they, we were moving into a post-cyberpunk...

You’re very welcome. As for attitudes, it’s possible the rescuers had some effect on calming crowds covertly. The other thing is that as a 1987 novel, it’s pre-social media, and I do think that would matter a lot to the intensity and distribution of destructive reactions, alas. (And I’m not one...

Excellent stuff, pemerton.

Fritz Leiber worked this possibility to great effect in The Big Time and the related Changewar stories. Two basically incomprehensible powers are fighting for control of history everywhere and eveywhen. A very small fraction of people can remember changed history, and they get drafted into the...

@overgeeked , fascinating. Brand-new subject for me. Everyone, awesome D&D discussion. Every influence I thought of got covered.

A conceptual exercise, then: would you want to see a doctor who hasn’t paid any attention to medical research since the 1990s? Would you feel that person is in a good position to deal with COVID, bacterial ulcers, repetitive strain injuries, and the like? Would you have confidence in.an...