The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Mikhail Bakunin:

I'm really surprised it hasn't already turned up in something by Ken Macleod or Charlie Stross.

They forgot violation #10: "Use of model, who, as depicted, bears disturbing resemblance to Michael Jackson."

Quite on the contrary, I think the purpose of our intellectual property laws should be to protect intellectual property. Promoting innovation is the purpose of intellectual property itself.

Sorry, BSD, but that's crap. Congress has no power to create an intellectual property right except what it derives from its power to promote innovation. Protecting intellectual property is only an implementation detail of promoting innovation; a law that protects intellectual property at a net cost to innovation has no business existing.

I won't even get into the host of issues swept under the rug by calling a time-limited grant of certain defined rights property.

John Scalzi, here we come.

Anecdotal data point: I’ve been working my way through the collected short fiction of C.M. Kornbluth, and I’m not seeing a lot of optimism. Famine and overpopulation, yes; eugenic concerns (‘subnormals’ outbreeding ‘us’ — dysgenic concerns, maybe?), yes; Toynbee-style cyclic theories of history, yes; optimism, not so much. Except in the fantasy stories.

Pretty good prose, though.

How often does that come up in cover letters?

I agree about the Rusalka books. I think I plowed through the first two, or maybe one and a half, during my hard-core Cherryh fan phase, and that was all I could manage. Too much cold water and dead wood.

I liked the first couple of Fortress books, but by the end of the series (which she should have saved those 100 pagese for) I got the feeling she'd chickened out of writing the dramatic high tragedy she'd set herself up for, in favor of rehashing the same "let's march to the border and fight the faceless bad guy" plot she'd used in the first one.

That said, I think her science fiction can be just as hit and miss. "Foreigner" got off to a great start, but now we're on, what, book 7? and they've all had pretty much the same plot.

Er, "science fiction", I mean.

So, Xopher, by that criterion, are the Morgaine books fantasy or SF? :)

Jo, have you tried to get your teen to look at Cherryh's fantasy? Or, failing that, the Morgaine novels? ("Yeah, I know there's a half-naked chick with a sword on the cover of Gate of Ivrel, but read the prologue! It's a Union-Alliance novel in disguise!")

Thanks, Kathryn! "Better than it has any right to be" is exactly what we were hoping for. :)

Yesterday, on some random bulletin board, I was reading a thread in which several people stated that they didn't read SF magazines any more because so many of today's stories are just too hard to read. Chock full of literary depth and subtle nuances, but without a scrutable plot or sentences you could swallow in one gulp.

Hey, Steve, do you remember which random bulletin board? I've just been reading some editorializing about how SF is driving away its potential future Delanys (Delanies?) with its intolerance for stylistic experimentation. It'd make a nice contrast.

Thank you, Dr. Asaro.

Makes me want to buy coke so that poor Peruvians and Colombians don't have to spend their days making gewgaws for the tourists.

We also can't tell whether the ransom kidnappings have anything to do with terrorism. If I was a freelance kidnapper in Iraq, I'd claim I was in Ansar e-Islam, too.

Yeah, so far, not paying ransoms has really been cutting into kidnappings and car bombings, hasn't it?

P.S. Less entertaining, though.

Sounds to me like Vox and Nick have been reading too much Dave Sim. Not just the content — the rhetorical style’s similar, too.

Hey, I wouldn't have picked him either. I agree with Patrick that the correct response to this is laughter.

I figure it's a fair standard to not let someone on a jury if you know (for a reasonably certain value of "know") they're going to be voting based on gender rather than merit. How is that a bad thing?

I think it's absolutely appropriate for someone in the position of choosing jury members to have such a standard in his or her head. And how are you going to prove they don't, already?

But let's say we had such a standard in the Nebula rules. What good does it do? How do you enforce it? How do you keep one half-decent standard from turning into an ever-growing laundry list of well-intentioned bad ones?

(You start with an amendment to ban flag burning, you end with something as long as the EU Constitution. Don't go there. Just leave the First Amendment where it is.)

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