In particular, the C4 series Ultraviolet has vampires that are immortal but don't heal. They tend to start off pretty, but have to be very careful to keep themselves that way. When one gets burned ugly by a brief exposure to sunlight, he's very annoyed, because he knows he'll now look like that forever.

I don't know about "great", but the French books listed at

The marines are fallible. The leader is inexperienced, and many of his bad choices are flagged as such. "The area is secure!" "The hell it is." Hick's bravado collapses under pressure. That's fine. It's all justified. It's the characters making mistakes and not the writers. The marines also do a lot that's smart and…

Ripley returns because she comes to believe it's the only way she can quiet her nightmares, slay her demons, restore her reputation and put her life back together. It's not for trivial reasons. She is also reassured that the marines will suitably trained and equipped. And even then, she acknowledges the risk and makes…

That was a surprisingly favourable review. I'm glad you liked so much, but classed-up version of John Carpenter's The Thing? Really? The Thing is a great movie partly because its characters are generally intelligent. The same is true of Alien, and Aliens, and Alien 3. The characters may make mistakes, but they…

I prefer Aliens to Alien, and that's because I prefer SF to horror.

True. Actually it goes a bit beyond that. The screens in Alien are cathode ray tubes. In my view, there be no screen-world justification. More: any attempt at justifying it will make things worse by calling attention to the issue. It's better to just accept it as how the story could be told back then, and move on.…

It'd be a mediocre film (with good visuals) even if Alien had never existed. The screenplay is muddled and the characters are dumb.

"Repeatability" is a good answer. And it's a good question. I don't think I'd believe in ghosts even if I saw one myself. I'd blame my brain.

On free will: I think we can be modelled as having a deterministic part and a random part. Rather like a chess computer that has a deterministic program plus a random number generator. The interesting part, the part that makes you you, is the program. Features such as having a deeper search tree, or a better weighted…

No, the screenplay is objectively weak, regardless of expectations. The visuals are great and worth the price of a ticket, but too much happens that makes no sense, and the plot relies too much on stupidity.

One reason publishers put eBook prices high is because they take sales away from paper books (and especially hardbacks, for new books). A model of, first release as expensive hardback, then a year later a cheaper paperback, and then a year later an even cheaper eBook, could work to maximise revenue. I wonder if that's…

Nope. If it were hard to avoid spoiling, then you might have a point. No-one's saying you can't discuss them, just that you should give a warning. It's not too onerous. It doesn't suddenly get harder after a year, either.

"if it's not something you'd watch/read a second time" Doesn't that exactly miss the point? If it's good, I'll read it twice, once unspoiled and the second time spoiled, and get the best of both worlds. The first, unspoiled reading is special; you can read it a third and fourth kind, but never again for the first…

Really? Cool. I've only read the first few books, but it seemed to me that Snape was the best and most heroic character from the start. I never liked Potter himself, and I liked Snape partly for seeing through him. It's made clear at the end of the first book that Snape saved Harry's life in the Quiddich game.

Did you really think the season would end with Peter murdering 7 billion innocent people? Wow. For me it was always clear they'd find another way.

He also used evidence. For example, he had a kind of database of London soil types which he could use to identify where people had been from the mud on their shoes.

His list of integers contains all of the integers, so it's not possible to add a new one he somehow missed.

I like that they have innovation as goal in its own right. And I suspect this kind of technology could have commercial applications.

"Whichever Olivia Peter chooses, that's the universe that will survive". That was said by the chap in the bowling alley. He knew about the machine and Peter's relationship with it. He was almost right. Peter got to work the machine. He could have used it to save one universe and doom the other. It's logical that he'd…