The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Mara:

Thanks for all the Zelazny info, I'll be adding those titles to my wishlist.

Jim, the friend of my father's who lent me the book, passed away a few years ago. He was a voracious reader, and a book-hoarder. When I did a high school term paper on Lincoln, he lent me his set of the collected letters & speeches. Most endearing thing in there was Lincoln's letter to the King of Siam, where he politely thanks him for his gifts--including a sword, a portrait of his Highness & his daughter, and the kind offer of "elephant stock" for the Union Army. Lincoln said something like wonderfully polite like "But I regret that our latitude does not yet extend to such a clime as would further the propagation of said stock."

Since it's an open thread, maybe someone can help me identify a story fragment that's been bugging me lately.

I read an sf book (or short story in an anthology) years ago, lent to me by a friend of my father's--I'm thinking it might have been a Harlan Ellison story, definitely someone well-known and probably written in the 60's or 70's.

In the bit of the story I remember, cars had become so computerized that people no longer had to take an active role in driving, you just sat back and let the computer & the GPS-equivalent system take care of it. The roads were monitored to prevent pedestrian crashes. But in the story, someone managed to successfully commit suicide by climbing a tree and jumping down to the road without setting off any sensors. The car that plows into him has two passengers, a straight couple who are fooling around in the back seat. And I think the scene ends with the woman getting hysterical, and the man telling the car to make its windows opaque.

Ring any bells for anyone? (And, hello all, I'm a lurker drawn from the links at neilgaiman.com)

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