James Nicoll
Canadian freelance game and SF reviewer.
About James Clemens's Wit'ch Storm: "Nothin'g sa'ys q'uality fantas'y l'ike misuse'd apos'tro'phes."
Hell, Chuck Yeager could do it in his sleep while on fire, I'm sure.
After enough concussions the head injuries blur together.
John Barnes is incredibly variable. Pete's Rule (Never buy a Barnes with sodomy in it) is a good one but unfortunately the publisher does not put that kind of stuff on the cover.
I don't mind hidden depths but I insist that there be a surface.
My father once discovered that one cannot "walk off" gangrene.
"Gun-wielding recluse gunned down by local police" isn't the epitaph I want. I am hoping for "Witnesses reported the sound up to two hundred kilometers away" or "Last body part finally located".
I have hated every Kress I read, especially this one, but the Bear is a standard Bear and if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like.
As I've often said, I'm a fan of hard SF. No, it's more like I am addicted to it, even the stepped-on 20 times and cut with powered milk and rat-poison sort of hard SF. This gets us to Stephen Baxter's Mayflower II, published last year in a limited edition from PS Publishing. In one of the great tragedies of publishing, it was not a limited enough edition and so I have read it.
The thing about the Star Wars expanded universe that most impresses me is how the need for endless sequels has taken what was way back in the late Disco a fairly upbeat series where the good guys eventually prevailed and turned into a crapsack setting that's grimmer than the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Congo Wars I & II and the Mongol Conquests combined.
The number of times I have been declared dead is statistically insignificant,although admittedly non-zero.
Never bring a gun to a fight where the other guy has a time-machine and tomorrow's newspapers.
About First Landing by Robert Zubrin: Someday I'd like to read a story about competent people on Mars.
Romeo and Juliet *died*. I always liked that in a teen romance story.
Yes, I was suprised how easy it was to cut the door off my cat.
[The cat] and I have an agreement: I leave her alone and don't make sudden moves when I wake up to find her perched on my chest, staring with an unblinking hostile gaze at my face and in return she rarely mutilates me.
A lot of my stories end with "And when I regained consciousness, there was a crowd standing around looking at me."
It would let me protect the Earth from asteroids. In fact, for a small fee I would protect the Earth on a monthly basis, locating rocks that could be steered into the Earth and then not doing it if the cheque didn't bounce.
[Elizabeth Moon's] antagonists are always evil moustache-twirlers. She could write a book about a golf open and the main rival to the hero would turn out to have clubs made from compressed kittens.
All gone. Zelazny was one of the first times I looked at something I had had familiarity with to find the spot where the memory should have been empty, replaced by a scrawled "Moved South for the Fishing" sign. Calculus was another loss. It was quite upsetting to reach for a skill and find nothing.