I'd generally agree with this, but I'd skip Lady Sally and get one of his short story collections (probably "Antinomy") instead.

Nuclear winter involves many orders of magnitude less energy than the asteroid or comet strikes associated with mass extinctions.

Given how incredibly crazy-long Egyptian history is (more dynasties than a lot of monarchies got kings, Cleopatra closer in time to us than to the building of the pyramids), I'd prefer they not treat "ancient Egypt" as the sort of place that everyone we've heard of is likely to overlap. It's like having cavemen fight…

I liked the Hawkworld ongoing, at least for a while. But I don't think the "immigrant to America from decadent authoritarianism" story necessarily needed to be Hawkman and Thanagar.

I'm not sure you need a college degree to do KGB sleeper agent work.

Could happen, or it may be in the context of another agent, or someone they're running.

Sure. But you (hopefully!) focus on the sights after you've identified that the person you're shooting at is the person who needs to be shot. If you have to put on your glasses to do the first, and take them off to do the second, odds are that one of those jobs isn't being done properly.

I look forward to the inter-network, intergenerational crossover between Mail Robot and the Salmon Ladder/Cosmic Treadmill team.

But Elizabeth can't reliably. Insisting would be a break in a lot of her roles— especially in 1982. Herpes and the dawning recognition of "GRID" in the gay community notwithstanding, "VD" to most people is something that can be easily treated with antibiotics. The idea of condoms as disease preventatives rather…

While I'm no more rooting for them than I do for Richard III, we certainly agree in wanting to see how it all plays out.

I can't imagine how her ability to hit a target being inversely correlated with her ability to correctly identify it could have any plot importance.

And so Peggy gets a definitive answer as to whether Don is a true friend or not.

The concurrent op to recruit Ron Jeremy is one of the Center's highest priorities.

I find that as I get older, I'm less tolerant of the heroes' causing— or even not making some effort to avoid— collateral deaths in action films. E.g., Man of Steel, or 70s car chases which leave behind a street full of twisted metal belonging to people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. (This may…

I may have been reading too much into what Elizabeth was saying about her. Since you and 3hares didn't see it, that seems the most likely explanation.

True. As witness all the Afghan news from the last decade and a bit datelined from the city or province of Kandahar— which name is, at root, "Alexandria".

I don't think Elizabeth wants Paige to have to do what she did. (Though she doesn't like how soft Paige has grown up either.) But she's firmly committed to the idea that everything can and if need be must be sacrificed in the service of the larger goal. She's conflicted about the possibility that that includes her…

Yeah— the fact that the part they stole and kitbashed into a sub without adequate testing sank it is an earned Soviet own-goal, and the protagonists' anger at the Americans is pure deflection. But the mostly-draftees on board the sub didn't ask to be born there, didn't vote for Brezhnev, and generally just wound up…

And Paige really shouldn't spend too much effort learning the names of his next two successors.

I don't think the merits of socialism really come into it. Elizabeth's ideology is the sort of straightforward you-can't-make-an-omelette-without-killing-lots-of-people Communism that considers western democratic socialists at best useful idiots. Paige's interest in socialism is a hopeful sign for Elizabeth…