Ms. Valente is right: if you go through a portal to an awesome world and then immediately turn back, YOU ARE AN IDIOT. If I walked through a portal to a world full of daemonic bellydancers and tentacled gods, my ass would *never* be seen again!

I love this series so much. It's not only hysterical, it's well-drawn *and* clearly demonstrates that its author really knows what he's writing about!

Time to dust off the grey goo assemblery....

I LOVED LOVED LOVED The Green Slime when I was a kid! Such a fun movie. It combined everything I loved as a child: rubber monsters, bubbling green ooze, rocketships, and surf-rock music.

HOLY. SHIT. Is it just me, or do the really big aliens look like 'borged Cthulhus?

I would much, much rather live in ANY corporate dystopia than some feminist eco-wanker's agrarian Amish utopia.

The posthuman future (a.k.a. the age of the Fourth Mentality) belongs to networked intelligence. In fact, I'm beginning to think it more likely that networked human intelligence will fuel the next Singularity more than Digital Intelligence will.

@anuran001: Yep...and I *really* wasn't very impressed by 90% of the book. See, it's technically IMPOSSIBLE to be "Lovecraftian" without leaning to the lavender, verbose side stylistically or—more importantly—eliminating tentacular beings and all manner of other creepiness. The ONLY story in the book that truly worked…

Hmmm. You know, I'm actually beginning to think this might pan out pretty nicely.

Oh, man—I LOVED the Unarians when I first discovered them in the late '90s. Somebody actually converted a bunch of their videos to RealPlayer format and posted 'em to his Geocities page. It was revelatory!

Sadly, what happened to horror is quite simple: by the early 1990s the market was utterly glutted with thousands upon thousands of hack-work horror novels, most of which were virtually indistinguishable from one another. Now, that kind of formulaic writing works for some audiences—romance, for instance, or fantasy—but…

@forsinain42: HA! Yeah...I kinda got a lictor vibe there myself.

Wow. That was AWESOME! I think my wang actually grew a few millimeters while watching that. I literally cannot wait to see the whole film.

I remember *loving* this book when I read it back in highschool. I need to dig it up and give it a run-through now that I'm older and a billion times more cynical and bitter.

Why terraform baryonic-matter worlds when you can grind them down to the quark level, reassemble them as vast matrioshka clouds of computronium around stable, long-lived stars and recreate damnear *infinite* iterations and reiterations of past eras?

My GODS, I loved this book. Any novel about bootie, cities built of lucid dreams, and map tattoos is bound to be good, but Ms. Valente's incredibly masterful prose and surprisingly likable characters make this a masterpiece of mythic narrative.

Also, this song would make a great anthem for the Master Race's human spahi mercenaries.

Holy shit—T.A.T.U. went industrial! I like it.

Idaknow....I liked the whole concept better when William Barton did it and it was called When Heaven Fell. The Shongairi don't sound like they'd last a minute against the Master Race and a few starships full of Kkruhhhuft mercenaries.

Nice to see Venkeman's still around after he retired from Ghostbusting!