Good thoughts. You’re right, we tend to forget that Tolkien (with Brookes in his immediate afterdraft) was the only fantasy anyone seemed to have heard of in the early 70s. Part of the reason for the resurrections of Eddison, Mirlees, Cabell etc. in that decade, perhaps - a dearth of good contemporary fantasists, with…

I believe that the working volume in which the cannister is being manipulated has a pure nitrogen atmosphere. Really something like xenon would be better, though, it doesn’t react with anything.

Immigration is more than making up for this.

Haven’t seen any new Sterling fiction in yonks. There’s a copy of Schizmatrix around here somewhere - should look it out and see how it’s aged. I enjoyed it a lot on first reading - headlong and radical.

Yes, but there’s more of everything being published today than at any other time in history.

Ranching cattle on natural rangeland, if done properly, preserves a lot of native grassland species. Native prairie vegetation communities co-evolved with big grazers, and since we’ve largely wiped out the bison etc. in North America, grazing by cattle helps maintain these communities in something like their original…

Corporations have precise legal definitions that determine what they can and cannot do. They aren’t simply “collective groups of individuals”, but are themselves legal persons, at least in western countries.

No, you’d just be subject to deep deprogramming. Nothing to worry about except those missing days.

I heard that it was gay marriage that did them in.

Hey, there was a big solid gold $ monument in Galt’s Gulch, right out there for everyone to see. Putting a $ in your new development’s name would be a suitable tribute to Rand’s blinkered vindictive worldview.

So the dinosaurs were done and dusted, then.

I enjoyed Attack Surface. And Walkaway. They both have an edge to them.

So now we’ve got Tabula Ra$a to look forward to:

The Doctorow looks worth a read, although I like his non-fiction better than his fiction. And of course the second volume of the Saevus Corax series, as temporally and geographically disorienting as Parker’s secondary world is.

Instead, they have toothed oral suckers packed neatly inside their disk-shaped suction-cup mouths

The market will take care of that. Just wait and you’ll see.

An added bonus is that when you describe a new species (alive or extinct), your own personal name is appended - it’s part of the full species name. Even if your published description is of something that someone else has already published a formal description of, your erroneous name goes in the list of synonyms in the…

What does “allowing the fantastical to the bizarrely normal” mean?

Is it just me, or are there a whole lot more paperclips around lately?

Or they’d think that it was a government conspiracy. For once, they’d have been right.