@Jesse Astle: I tell myself that all the time. It doesn't make me feel better :(

@Clutchman83: He's pretty well respected- try his Mars series- but I think he's most respected in the field as an editor, having edited two of the biggest genre mags, Analog and Omni.

@janai: No, because Kage Baker is awesome, and will be sorely missed.

@jknc: The interesting thing is that five or ten years ago whenever I discussed Ender's Game with anyone they always said "No, that'll never happen, we have the internet now but it's never going to have an effect on politics like that"- but I think the 2008 and 2010 campaigns are showing just how much of an effect…

@Christian Williams: I don't know, I thought the Honor series developed these problems well before the latest book. Ashes of Victory was the first one that I really had to slog through, but Weber never has been the best at dialogue and characterization, and I can see hints of what was to come as far back as Flag In…

I really can't recommend Weber to anyone anymore, I haven't read Out of the Dark (and don't plan to), but everything else of his in the past few years has become awful. I started reading the Off Armageddon Reef series because the first book was promising, but it's been almost unreadable since so I gave up after the…

@morodrim: I see a lampoon!

@sdorai1: @edixoo: Didn't Venture Brothers just do that?

@BoxOfScraps: No, but that's why I mentioned they've fallen out of favor for practical reasons, not just existential ones: current thinking is that dedicated 'nanofactories' would actually be more efficient.

@wcanyon: I don't know that anyone thinks resources just disappear into space, it's more that we're using up what exists in forms our current technology can make use of, and it will take a very, very long time for these materials to return to that form. Oil, for instance; those hydrocarbons don't just disappear when…

Colonization- of Mars, Zarmina, whatever- is NOT a solution to overpopulation; even if the MOON was perfectly habitable, you couldn't possibly ship people there faster than births replace them. Space travel would have to be as cheap as air travel is today. I don't believe colonization of the Americas reduced Europe's…

I haven't gotten around to reading any of Ballard's works yet, but the most prescient thing I've ever read is E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops". He predicted FACEBOOK (albeit a steampunk version) in 1909, for chrissakes!

@BoxOfScraps: The grey-goo scenario seems pretty unlikely now, as self-replicating nanomachines have fallen out of favor for practical as well as existential reasons.

@Fanboy: I thought the first game was quite well written; it actually made me care about the characters, which is more than I can say about most videogames.

@The_Sporean_Bob: That's why the child should be informed of these things as early as possible, so it just seems normal.

@lakedesire: True, for two women anyway- a gay male couple being capable of both being the biological parents of a child is a long way off.

@The_Sporean_Bob: Who really cares about genetic relatedness? If she gives birth to the kid and raises it, she's its mom. And since the factors that make taboo the kind of actions that would normally be required to become the mother of your own half-sister are not present here, I don't see why this should be…

@corpore-metal: @Tatterfoal:

@plasticmouse: Hey ya why not, I might take you up on that.

@RizzRustbolt: Yeah, academic database access has been a super-useful perk of being a college student, I almost use it more for story research than for my classes.