Goop stole Martha's CEO—so, legitimate game-on at that point.

Oh, she's always best as a bitch—Tracey Flick and Little Red in Freeway. She's awesome in Freeway. I like her *despite* all those phony America's sweetheart roles (gag).

Nah, she'll have an underling do it. Vee v. Martha? Martha wins.

Okay, why do I suddenly kind of hope that Martha has a secret prison tattoo? I don't even like tats. Just because I'd love to see an oh-so-Martha tat—you just know it would feature her monogram.

Yeah, I sort of like Martha for the same reason I like Reese Witherspoon—neither one really succeeds in hiding just how tough and ruthless she is . I find it weirdly amusing.

The pseudo—Connecticutt WASP persona has been slipping farther and farther with age.

That, alas, does not count as insane, but some sort of weird mid-century trope—just another version of James Bond.

I was long past reading her stuff anyway, but that's how I feel about Marion Zimmer Bradley. The fiction reads like atrocious rationalizing.

You're not alone—I give him points for being the first in a lot of things and knowing how to construct a strong narrative, but his books annoy me (I've read four) and there's a smugness to them—the world-building is strong, but the female characters reek of wish-fulfillment to me, which I find irksome. And he just…

Well, I think the Ebola-conspiracy types can fall into the depopulating-Africa set without having to be anti-vaxxer, though I just had an insane argument with an anti-vaxxer/depopulation conspiracy nut on FB. Honestly, it can make your head spin to deal with someone like that.

Look, it wouldn't be cheap by any means, but we could certainly develop the technology to make it doable. And there are people who want to go there—I'm not one of them, but they're out there.

I don't think we're ready for Mars yet, but I think things like 3-D printing will develop in such a way as to make some sort…

Donde? It's a short story—it's in the collection Bloodchild. May even be online somwhere. Butler didn't write very many short stories, but there are a couple of great ones.

I thought they were teens, not kids, per se. And while we're going through a period where such associations are strongly condemned, it was more acceptable even 20 years ago, where as sex with prebuscent children has always been pretty strongly condemned in the U.S.

Only the kid vampire didn't have sex with anyone. Actually, the vamps don't have sex as blood-slurping's more fulfilling. I'd say Rice, though, is almost the reverse of the authors on the list. I felt like she made the vampires more and more normal as the series went on. Witching Hour and Taltos were reasonably…

It's funny, I didn't find Fledgling that strange—more like Butler decided to riff on vampires for the fun of it. I suppose it is weird, but Butler always examines power dynamics in her works—well, I don't know about the Parable books, I've not read those—so I don't find Fledgling stranger than Clay's Ark or her short…

Yes, 11 billion people is too many, given that we've lost half our wildlife in 40 years and we're only at 7 billion. We're already breeding less (the only area with a high birthrate issue is Africa. Much of the First World has childbirth rates below replacement levels), but with increased longevity, we're going to…

Yeah, but you can go outside and actually breathe the air . . .

There are going to be 11 billion of us destroying this planet in 90 years, so I'd say looking off-world isn't the worst idea ever.

Seems to me that the longterm solution to that will be a combination of 3-D printing and mining that creates some types of replacement parts out of what's on Mars. NASA already has begun using 3-D printers in space.

Really, really big wasp.

You don't count—parents are a whole different ball of wax. :)