The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jeff R.:

There is a 'cheating' way out of the paradox by way of God's omnibenevolence: all he needs to do is to create the smallest pebble, and then place it in a location (say, a load-bearing one, for example) where to move it in the slightest amount would be an act of evil. At this point the omnibenevolence kicks in and prevents him from ever lifting it in a manner at the very least orthogonal to His omnipotence.

My most-wanted is still John Varley and Irontown Blues, which is running on 15-years or much longer, depending on if you only count the 'new' 8 worlds books or all of them.

Before last year it was Robert Anton Wilson's And the World Turned Upside Down, but I guess that's now one with the ending of Edwin Drood...

Isn't part of the problem more political than technological? I mean, during the Cold War it was easy to extend that forward and have a future geopolitical history that at least felt plausible. And right after, one could always visualize a globalism/corporatist world with the center of power staying in the US or moving ever eastward and again, still be plausible.

But now, since the 21st century began, really, there isn't a single obvious trajectory to send a future history into. The last six years themselves aren't all that plausible, so what hope does any kind of extrapolation have? And even if one does manage to write a satisfying near-future history, can one really be confident that another 9/11 or Katrina or something bigger and weirder isn't just going to obsolete your future before you get to publication? At least if that happened in the Cold War era everyone would have been dead and irradiated and spoiling your story wouldn't be so much of a concern...

Well, I think that A Horde of Clueless Goobers would be the move in the opposite direction from the one he's trying to go in...

Another interesting border-case would be George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series, which, though clearly fictional, maintain straight-faced a conceit of non-fictionality in the forwards and footnotes...

(Even though the Fraser of the forward 'claims' them to be actual memoirs, we are obligated to ignore that claim in sorting the works, are we not...)

Incidentally, the "Insane" probably slipped in through Ronald Wilson Reagan's anaram, "Insane Anglo Warlord"

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