Wow... "loose cannon", "only one man"... this trailer was only missing a voiceover from Don LaFontaine! Way to go, Lock-Out, you've managed to make yourself look like every generic action movie ever - IN SPAAAAAAAACE!

Precisely. In fact, I feel precisely the same way about AI (which could be included under 'mechanicals'). I always wondered about the first person to discover that their mainframe had awakened into sentience...

This is why I love io9.

Nice and thoughtful comment! Those kind of adventure/exploration fantasies are probably the definition of 'escapism' - in a good way!

Came here to say this, but you beat me to it.

Kinetic weapons would work well against stationary targets, but not as well against moving targets, particularly at speeds higher than what we casually use on the ground. Because of the ridiculous distances involved, you'd have to have some seriously good tracking computers, and even then most things could change…

It does seem a bit odd, I admit.

I'm suddenly very sad that my wife and I collected the DVD editions... is there some sort of trade-up program, perhaps...?

Very nicely explained. That's probably the clearest explanation I've heard for how this works, thank you.

Are... are you serious, or did you just make that up?

These are cool!

I KNEW there was a good one about the universe and its potential in "Falling Free"! This is from the ebook edition of Miles, Mutants & Microbes, Chapter 7.

This is a problem I notice more and more in sci-fi. (Damn you David Weber for actually making me *think* about this stuff.) People say things like "a million miles" as though that actually means something when you're talking about space.

As one of the folks who got into the beta test via Kotaku - highly recommended.

Is it just me, or does that look really familiar?

After many, many failed attempts, I finally skipped over the Old Forest entirely and went straight to Bree. I was inspired at the time by playing LOTRO, and I actually made it through all of the rest of the books, and was quite satisfied for having done so.

I need to read more of her stuff. I read Passage and loved it - haunting, inspiring and very believable - but haven't yet had a chance to read more. Must do so!

Interestingly, I had precisely the opposite reaction. I've grown up in New England and lived there all my life, and throughout my childhood was horribly allergic to pretty much every living thing (from the majestic tree down to the damn dust mite). When I went to Hawaii, I had absolutely no allergic reactions for…