As an aside, I've always thought: poor Aulë. Most like Melkor, two of his chief Maia become world class Dark Lord types (Sauron and Saruman), and he creates the dwarf race besides - which gets him into deep trouble with Eru, who calls him "child-like". He's a trouble-attractor; Tolkien went out of his way to describe…

Oh, fun. I get to trot out some Tolkien-lore:

It happened when governments and corporations in wealthy, industrialized nations began to shift from paper to electronic communications and record keeping at about that time. However, rising use of electronic printers and other paper-medium devices by the public - as well as the growth of modern organizational…

None of this information is new. The first quality, well-accepted studies done of the revolutionary climatological, demographic, and cultural effects of the industrial revolution, as well as somewhat similar effects in the Roman and Han Empires, or the agricultural revolution, were completed in the 1950s. Since then,…

It's just a film. Don't take my disagreement with the majority of viewers - and the listing of reasons why - so personally. (wink)

I dunno. That tree looks dangerously close to falling over. If not for the drunken driver, we might have needed some idiot scoutmaster from Utah to knock it down and save us all....

I met Death upon a lonely road but once in my long life, all done up in bones and tattered robes and carrying a scythe that looked three times too big for his fragile frame. And I frightened him near to death, or so he told me. For among all the voids and all the rocks and gas clouds and all the planets empty of…

Rubbish. But then you know that already, don't you, Troelski? (wink)

From the archives of the Academy of the Arts, Grants for Artists Program, Seventh Galactic Empire, Reign of the Beloved Emperor Deo IX, 7851 AE:

Ms. A. Bester, felicitations!

The Grants Council has decided against funding your grant proposal at this time, for the following reasons:

Szilard and Einstein actually wrote four letters to FDR over Einstein's signature - one to introduce nuclear energy (the famous one), two to hurry the US government along when it was dragging its bureaucratic heels on setting up the project, and the final one to introduce a plan for the international control of…

I think you need to understand the difference between deus ex machina as it is defined in literature, and as it is commonly use in the "film community". The argument there proceeds along the lines of practicality - in film, there is no practical difference between the script writer introducing known fallacies without…

That's too bad. Last time I was in HK was about eight years ago, and I did see a few.

I enjoy a non sequitur now and again, too.

"No that is not at all what it means.... It is where a plot device appears out of nowhere, with no prior reference, without connection to the established facts or setting just to (yes) push the story along.... Greys, UFO's, resurrection...."

Those are junks - light cargo/people haulers still used along coastal China, including Hong Kong, which the illustration probably depicts. (I believe the illustration is from the video game Stranglehold, which was based on a movie set in Hong Kong.) HK shore districts do have that "look".

One idea I've read about that I do not see listed here goes in a different direction - vacuum bacteria. "Vacuum" referring to bacteria engineered with hard shells for survival and propagation in space, and also referring to the function of such a species, which would clean up the "spaceways" by ingesting junk and…

Charlie J. - concerning myth #7 - as a professional SF writer, what's your take on the idea that SF must always engage the recognizable past (past human history, not past SF literary tropes, works, etc.)? I'm not baiting; I'm actually interested - stories about the far future (Asimov's Foundation series comes to mind,…

Your argument is an extreme case of flattening relativism- taken to a logical end it means that everyone's perspective is equally valid. Sorry, they're not. I'm arguing that my perspective is more valid than others (and then here's why, followed by evidence and analysis); by definition, that's the practical meaning of…

"God in the Machine" - in film (notice the qualifier), understood to mean when environmental and/or phenomenal factors are aligned to push the story along - basically, a script writer's artifice, since the script writer is "God" in this case. In Gravity, one example among a collection: the unlikely orbital alignment…

First things first: a number of people who commented here need to read my post more carefully, because what they say I said is not what I said....

Second, the problems with the Kowalski-lets-go scene have been well-documented elsewhere; and starfield rotation and angular momentum do not constitute a "save". I'll defer…