How in this day and age can one make a post about command line text file conversion without referencing Pandoc? : )

VOTE: RHODIA

"Occasionally corny"? Please, those jokes were amaízing.

Whence "phishing"?

How about VR 5 and G vs. E, two TV shows that are both (a) great and (b) forerunners of shows that have gone on to greater success/mindshare.

Every time someone references the Costner movie without pointing out the excellent David Brin novel which Costner crapified, god kills a neohippie cybernetic kitten.

There's another very good reason: atheist dystopias. Smug atheists often tend to think of atheism as intrinsically a force of good/social progress, which isn't necessarily the case. (One only has to look at how polarizing conversations about gender have been lately.)

Oh, and it's interesting to throw "human beings" in the mix as well.

Being a sucker for Google Ngrams, I immediately started messing around, and noticed a couple things:

This is exactly where my mind went as well.

Who uses tea bags? Make real tea! Loose leaf! Old-fashioned, indeed. Harrumph. Rhubarb rhubarb.

Hmm. So, would Lev Grossman's "The Magicians" be a counter-example to this, or would its meta-ness and its...I dunno, demythologizing aspects be evidence of it?

I think that one of the reasons that this trope tends to recur is that the association between time and mortality is strong to begin with, and so time travel has an air of "cheating death" about it — even when cheating death isn't the point of the travel, although in many cases it is. Concluding a time travel story by…

The deadliest son of a bitch in space is regrettably underrepresented here:

Yes, but clearly it should be Dream Master, not Lord of Light.

So were Voices of Time and Labyrinths. I refuse to be constrained by bourgeois definitions of "novel!" : )

Dream Master / He Who Shapes (Zelazny)

Driftglass FTW!