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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...

Technically “blade runner” comes from Nourse, not Burroughs, but otherwise, carry on.

As a creator myself, I like “steal” for much the reasons I like “elfgames”: it encourages a good perspective about the innately unserious element in what we’re doing. This isn’t vital medical research, political criticism, legal argument, or whatever, it’s about making games. I want to make the...

I finished the audiobook of The Stand, and loved it all over again. I also encountered a good insight into a common criticism of King, his tendency toward weak endings. Booktuber Lekden is a fan of horror and science fiction, with particular attention to queer genre fiction, and also a Buddhist...

Gibson and Sterling both said explicitly that they saw cyberpunk as anti-dystopian, or at least vigorously non-dystopian. Life is bad for many people, but life goes on, and crucially, life keeps changing. No social, political, or economic power in their worlds can lock them down. Radical change...

@jian , sounds great. Onto the list it goes. William Gibson wrote his early stories with two big influences that weren’t always commented on. One is noir: there is a lot of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in the Sprawl stories, including some direct quotes. This bit of dialogue from...

I’m a fan of both.

I’m big on psionics and settings after apocalypse, but not wild about heat and deserts. Give me a vast dangerous forest, or archipelago, or glacial mountains, or underwater, and I’d be more likely to go for it.

This this this. From D&D’s first year, the field has been going in several incompatible directions. So it makes all the sense that it takes different kinds of measures to get a sense of what we’re up to.

I really appreciate the distinction between being special and being powerful. Weak special characters can be pretty great.