Athletes recognize a phenomenon called 'bonking', where extreme exertion - and resulting depletion of the body's reserves - causes a shutdown of some part of the body. Low glucose levels will often affect the brain before they affect the muscles, resulting in an inability to perform even simple mental tasks.

The original users of these - as far as I know - were the Pundits, who were Indians and other South Asians working for the British intelligence service in the 19th century. They used a Buddhist rosary modified to contain 100 beads instead of 108, and were trained to walk an exact number of paces to the mile. Using the…

Once you've read this, it's very hard to watch "The Thing" without interpreting everything in the light of this story. It offers a consistent set of motivations for the thing's actions that fit perfectly. If there's such a thing as 'Thing-canon', this probably belongs there.

Now we know what happened to Spirit - pulled over by Martian police for speeding.

It's the little things that make it scary, throwaway lines or details that make you realize that it's building up to something. And the central image of the final scene pushed some button that I didn't know I had, hard.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. My learned colleagues, Dr McMenamin among them, continue to deny the implications of their discoveries. Even in the face of the incontrovertible evidence that they themselves have found, they still babble…

I need trepanation like I need a ... oh never mind.

I've said it before and I will say it again.

"several days" may be optimistic.

This is a tried and tested 'reasoning' strategy. The general case goes:

New definition of science-fiction: "that which Margaret Atwood does not write".

Not in the least. If I ever start a band, that's going to be the name of our first album.

That's what the genetically-engineered monkey servitors are for.

"... SF needs to stop mucking around with steampunk and dystopia, and start making decent roadmaps for a future where we all want to live."

Carolyn Fry, "Pitch Black".

They're not _really_ good at gliding. They're just better at it than, say, helicopters or grand pianos.

A nervous friend once commented: "I know the statistics, but the fact remains: if I'm traveling by plane and the engine stops, I can't just push it to the side of the road and wait for the repairman."

Klingon Jesus wouldn't have let Himself be meekly nailed to the cross: He'd have gone down fighting and taken some of them with Him. In Klingon churches, the stations of the cross include scenes of Klingon Jesus strangling Judas and Klingon Jesus beating the crap out of His torturers with their own whips. In the end,…

The world's loss is my gain. As soon as they list it on eBay, I'm totally snapping that thing up.

In hindsight, NASA agreed that carving rockets from a solid block of diamond and requiring that all buttons and switches used in the control rooms should be made from 24-carat gold might have contributed to increased costs. "Our designers are pretty smart guys," a NASA spokesman said, "but once that initial…