Eh… not really "turned him down and he had to beg." Holden starts out by making a really clumsy, overly-romantic pass, declaring love for her out of nowhere. Naomi is basically like: I'd love to sleep with you, but I've seen lots of your relationship drama on the Canterbury so I know you always get super-serious about…

I can't say I'm sure I know which way they're going with it… I'm bad at predicting these adaptation choices and I think it's not impossible that they could still end up doing what people were speculating about here earlier (I think it was Motard who mostly commented about that?), and using Naomi's backstory for some…

I can only speak from my own experience, but I wish so much that I could've stayed in my grade and had at least half a chance to connect with kids my own age, even if it might not have worked. I was in kind of an extreme worst-case scenario, though: I got skipped two years ahead into 8th grade instead of 6th, so…

At the start of season 1 it was weird to me how many book fans were saying things like "Holden looks too much like a pretty boy! He's not the weathered, middle-aged man from the books! He's supposed to be, like, forty!" I was like… did we read the same books, where people are constantly calling him baby-faced… and…

Making Mars the villain in the Ganymede scheme is a pretty big change, but I'm surprisingly cool with it. Caliban's War felt kind of repetitive to me in some ways: in the first book the protomolecule conspiracy turned out to be led by a rogue faction of the Earth government who wanted to beat down Mars, and then in…

But it's not just "getting screwed over by the US and then sitting in Putin's office." It's "realizing that the US is probably going to kill you real soon, and now your choice is either to get back onto a plane to the US under armed guard, or head over to Putin's office which is right nearby."

It didn't occur to me when I was reading the book, but good grief, of course… that's exactly what it is, because that's how the whole series started! I mean, first it was a pitch for an MMO, but then when that fell through, Franck was running it as an old-school role-playing game for a while. Wouldn't be surprised if…

"…there’s no immediate danger pressing [Bobbie] to act…"

[Whoops… wrote a silly response because I misunderstood who you were talking to in your last paragraph. Never mind!]

And later she mentioned having fallen in with a bad OPA crowd and committed crimes that she was trying to put behind her. And then just a couple weeks ago, when Prax brought up looking for his daughter, she showed that she knew some things about the school system that a parent would be likely to know - and then she…

I wouldn't have bothered to write you a long serious reply a few minutes ago if I'd seen this response first. Being belligerently skeptical about super basic easily verifiable facts ("let's suppose for a moment that her contract is in fact so ridiculously drafted that it extends to [something that's in fact a very…

So anyway, here's what I think.

Care to dial it down a notch? I don't really feel obliged to explain shit to people who come in on a super-hostile combative note and stay that way. If you want to claim that that means you won the argument or whatever, feel free, but… even though this is an interesting subject, I can't tell if you're really here to…

Yes, I understand that you think that's the point. But it's not, so insulting everyone for not seeing it your way is not clearing anything up.

"This is how the world works" - OK, if you know it all, then you weren't really asking for someone to explain anything, were you?

I think it's… kind of meant to feel like a slog? Not that that helps of course. I haven't read it in a long time, keep meaning to go back to it, but kind of suspect that it's not going to hold up well for me in general (even though I remember some great set-pieces and pretty funny stuff, like everything about Keith's…

Considering that the character is a manipulative sociopath with a death wish, I wonder if that was a subtle clue that the producers wanted everyone to sue them.

Not sure about that one, but there's a Robert Sheckley story, "The Robot Who Looked Like Me", where the narrator is so over-scheduled that he has to send his robot double out on dates with a woman he likes. He only finds out that the woman's been doing the same thing when their robots run off together.

It's been a long time since I read it, but I remember London Fields being one of the ones where he was sort of too interested in theme. I felt like it spent a lot of time telling me what it was about. On the other hand, The Information kind of does that too but it's one of my favorite books.

Equally sleazy, but also sort of the exact opposite plot-wise: in Money, the producers deceptively shoot a bunch of extra footage of the lead actors— not having sex, just acting in long badly written dialogue scenes— that they don't plan on using in the movie or ever watching, it's just to make each actor think that…