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Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s long-term lyricist, wrote “We Built This City On Rock and Roll”, with Martin Page. And also “These Dreams” for Heart.

Yeesh. Yeah. Back to Bruce Sterling: “The Street has its own uses for things.” Whatever a controlling interest is up to, it won’t last. Whatever comes next will probably be better and worse and different.

Oh, yes, good point. The two trends are siblings in mutant deviation.

Arguably, “D&D but narrative” is the oldest genre of play that’s distinct from D&D as whatever TSR/WotC is doing at the moment. It emerged in the first few months of D&D being for sale, with various communities of connected people and campaigns taking various approaches to mechanics and...

Yeah, about the closest I can think of are stories where a harsh Singularity drastically dehumanizes its victims, turns the planet into grey goo, or something like that. And even some of those show that better outcomes may still be possible.

I probably did when it was new, but not since.

Michel Foucault Plays D&D. Thoughts While Reading Disciple & Punish: In discussing premodern (before the last couple centuries) punishment in European legal codes, Foucault discusses various ways the body of the condemned is made to testify to the finding and sentence, a second testament for...

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...