Footwork I can do, it's the software stuff that would stretch my abilities. I don't mind contacting people, inviting people, et cetera. It would take some time to build the community around though, true.

I'm going to talk to a friend of mine with some skills. He founded a company once that was basically exactly what Facebook would be five years later, but the Web just wasn't ready for it yet. (Having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money on the project, he still shakes his fist at Facebook in…

No, but I'm talking like a Wikipedia but for books and albums and movies, extensive and well-organized and community-edited, with forums and book clubs on the side. That may exist in pieces all over the Web right now, but nothing cohesive and complete in one place.

And the world, for all its relative believability, was nothing new. Wizards, witches, the same mythological creatures, et cetera.

I'm feeling that same way about every book as well. The AV Club has caused me to neglect The Onion, and Wrapped Up in Books has caused me to neglect the rest of the AV Club. This has been a just glorious experience so far, with the commenters and the staff all combining to make my reading experiences so much richer.…

That's happened to me in another thread before as well. And thanks for that recommend, it sounds very cool.

The people expected technology to save them from the results of technology, only it didn't work that way. Comparably, in world whose climate is being perhaps irrevocably altered, and in which the primary motors of its energy and commerce are finite and approaching their limits, we all hope that "they," whoever 'they'…

Yay! You'll love it, I would bet money. And I'm not THAT anonymous. I wrote one of the three Amazon reviews of that book, as Mike Smith.

I hope they will.

That series looks interesting, but more interesting to me would be a world not in which superheros actually rule as gods but in which a new dominant religion has emerged whose pantheon of never-seen gods include culturally remembered mythologizings of Superman and Spider-Man, et cetera. I'm not sure what it would…

Are you a writer, Bastard Son? Because the idea of today's comic book superheroes being the gods of some future post-post-apocalyptic theology is one of the most exciting premises I have ever heard. I would read the hell out of that book if you wrote it.

I had a similar feeling, though I thought it highlighted the fact well that this is a world with no possible hope for a Messiah, where even the notion of one has gone away. No one is going to come down from space to help out, because they died up there as well. It's a grim, but at least more realistic, theology: one…

For fans of world-building novels, there are two overlooked sci-fi novels I could not recommend more highly:

I have a Playlist mix of mostly downtempo, mostly ethereal, mostly instrumental electronica that I've been listening to quite a bit while reading about this book online and writing about it here, and it seems to match the mood of Riddley's world really wonderfully, particularly ominous tracks like Four Tet + Burial's…

Also, I thought all the staff comments were particularly insightful today, but I found myself especially agreeing with what Donna said about just accepting the world as is and trying to figure out how it all fits and how it got to be there. The total effect of the book was immersing enough that if there were any…

So, exactly what Todd said, basically.

This was a very localized world—it was really more about Kent County than even all of England (Inland), and with almost nothing about the rest of the world (Outland). So I could see why there'd be no mention of skyscrapers. But there actually were a number of mentions of space exploration, including a bit about how…

Why I really love this book
is mainly for its world-building. Despite the horror of it all, and the tremendous loss of the past and humanity's potential greatness, I found myself kind of yearning for this strange world, most likely because it was so perfectly realized and so inviting (through its halting use of…

Tasha, I'm glad to see you here—your absence was noted yesterday, for sure. And I'll definitely be acquiring THE MOUSE AND HIS CHILD very soon; since having kids of my own, I've grown to really love good children's literature, both for the pleasure it brings my kids (ages 4 and almost 3) and for the pleasure it…

I think there's a Nirvana backlash because there are short-haired accountants-in-training walking around with Nirvana t-shirts tucked into their dockers. That's my guess, anyway.