People From Ontario

"Manitoba... Not sure what to do about them. Restock the province with megafauna and encourage tourism, I think. How quickly can we breed back the saber-toothed cats?"

"Tor is the hard one. They employ a lot of editors, whose tastes vary. They don't always indicate who has edited what (on the choice of the editor, I think) so editor stalking can be more difficult with Tor. Ear-tagging works but is rather surprisingly illegal."

"We discovered at one point that the brick wall of the pillar would hold up a sock pretty well. This led to sorting socks by putting them on the wall, which in turn led to mosaics built entirely of socks. Mission drift is a hazard in all pursuits, including doing the laundry."

"It's true that the average human in the Xeelee universe can't eat Jell-O with a straw without accident[al]ly removing an eye but these particular humans start off no stupider than than any other human of their era and proceed to breed themselves into imbecility. Well, farther into imbecility."

"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 pow[d]ered 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."

"In point of fact, the meteor was something like 30 km when it exploded. It was over north Waterloo and I was north of St Agatha. Two spherical clouds, and two explosions. Unfortunately, I was dealing with a goat that was trying to eat an oil truck's fuel line, goats having this optimistic 'Well, maybe it has become edible since they last time I tried this' worldview, and I missed seeing the explosions."

"Yes, I was surprised how easy it was to cut the door off my cat."

"I also do not recommend shopping with Cordelia Naismith—but I would watch that reality show."

"Just as people in zombie apocalypses seem never to have seen a zombie apocalypse movie, so people in novels about the pioneering days of time travel never seem to have read novels on the subject."

"Although no credible evidence exists that the speed of light can be exceeded, writers are willing to embrace the possibility that light might be outpaced somehow. Never underestimate the persuasive power of somehow."

"Creating stars in laboratories on the very planets you inhabit turns out to be a bad idea."

"could extrapolate stories, entire worlds, from s."

"It's very difficult to convey how alien and horrifying accounts of how American health care works sound to a Canadian. Seriously, if I didn’t know they were real — if, for example, I didn't know an American reviewer who died because she had to choose between paying her mortgage or having a doctor investigate her incapacitating chest pains — it would seem like something from a particularly silly and Garbageman novel. About the only thing about the US that seems even less believable is the collective enthusiasm for frequent mass murders."

"It's a sad thing that the march of time and evolution of mores can rob one of the ability to laugh at simple domestic abuse."

"Niven made a name for himself as a author, which is to say, someone whose SF provides enough technical detail that the reader can be certain that various mechanisms and events couldn't work the way the author has them working."

", who if I recall correctly is a veteran of the Korean conflict, does mention logistical details more often than I expect in MilSF. Not the fun kind of logistics, involving the production of a million zillion Squamoid Hypermissiles, but the mundane sort, like who gets to dig the latrines. Latrines are not romantic, but nobody wants a battle called off because the men all have dysentery and are too busy shitting blood to fight."

"I wonder if every near-future SF series in which the US is not a brutal theocratic police state ruled by doctrinaire bigoted oligarchs and their boot-licking enablers became obsolete on ? Won't it be fun to find out together?"

"Thoughtful consideration has led me to decide that romance, involving as it does the highly complex interaction of human neurochemisty{sic} with cultural and technological factors, is hard SF. Very hard SF because romance is especially difficult to mentally simulate accurately, not easy-peasy like rocket science. Romance as hard SF may seem counterintuitive, but it's the counterintuitive results of modeling that are often the most interesting outcomes."

"The one job that machines cannot do is be a cruel plutocrat. That's why humans are still needed."

"Atomic war is bad but you know what's even worse? Having had enough atomic wars that you can rank them in terms of horribleness."

"There's a rule I used to call The Niven Rule but which I just now have decided to call the Rusting Bridges rule. It came to me after reading Niven's “All The Bridges Rusting.” In this story, humans have by the early 21st century explored the Solar System and sent not just one but two crewed ships to Alpha Centauri ... despite which the characters moan endlessly about the dire state of the space program. “Eyes of Amber” would be another example of the Rusting Bridges [Rule]: No matter how much the space program you actually have has achieved, whether it's first contact with aliens or trips to nearby stars, it can never have achieved as much as the space programs you can imagine would have achieved in its place, given that imaginary programs aren't limited by issues of politics, funding, or engineering."

"Alas, time and head injuries are stealing all my memories."

"seems from all reports to have been a very pleasant fellow but he did have one huge blind spot, which is that he was as sexist as a giant ball of sexists wrapped in a dense layer of yet more sexists."

"I didn't skip the smut. The author went to the trouble of writing it, after all. I did not feel to make notes for possible application later on but I also never wondered if the author was a virgin raised in an abandoned hentai warehouse, which is always a possibility for modern pornographers and erotica writers."

"Engineers and certified pilots may be expensive but talented young men with a teenager's grasp of risk are surprisingly affordable."

"The sharp side of the knife goes away from you. Pure reason does not trump brute force but suprisingly few people know what hot peppers look like when the teacher asks if you have enough to share with everyone. Never take the lid of a pressure cooker 'to see if it's done yet'. Even if you are careful with the picric acid that won't matter if you are careless with other items next to it. Move *away* from mysterious burglar alarms. Do not append 'you moron' to exposition directed at people who have just broken into your building. 'We need to talk' is overwhelmingly unlikely to precede good news. A rough brick wall may be used to sort socks or as a backdrop for sock-art (The Neglected Art). A silent cat is Up to Something. Lungs are unsuited for many possible atmospheres, including that of London, and anything with a high content of industrial cleaners. Youth will not save you from Newton's Laws. Or Darwin's."

"This I (still) believe: Fire is not necessarily your friend. Neither are dogs. Things with lit fuses should not be held onto. Beware the savage croquet ball. If it is -30 out, put on a coat before you leave the house. Just because the snow keeps you from seeing other objects the objects do not cease to exist. Clotheslines are the enemy of the bicyclist. If you don't remember how you got on the ground or where the blood came from, don't get up right away. Gym teachers think it's funny to commit assault with a baseball so don't day-dream during PE even if they have you so far in the outfield there are DEW line posts on either side of you. All guns are loaded. So are many bows. Trebuchets are for outside use only..."

"A common issue with SF settings is that causally disconnected civilizations nevertheless are close enough in technological development that conflict is possible, rather than it being a matter of laser cannons against a thin film of single celled organisms."

"At some point when I wasn't paying attention, comedic genocide just stopped working for me. This is a shame because so much fantasy and SF depends on genocide as positive plot element. This trifling oddity of taste must have robbed me of hours of morally equivocal entertainment."

"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."

"First rule of space programs in SF: no matter how successful or large they are by our standards, the people in the stories will always bitch about underfunding. This is probably realistic."

"It takes a courageous Mormon to turn to archaeology to support their argument"

"'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."

"Never bring a gun to a fight where the other guy has a time-machine and tomorrow's newspapers."

"My father once discovered that one cannot "walk off" gangrene."

"The number of times I have been declared dead is statistically insignificant,although admittedly non-zero."

"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."

"Aha! The Alien Planet Canada series, where the planet the characters are marooned on seems to be Manitoba. Bad bad world building."

"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."

"Before it exploded one night, I went to a four grade, two room schoolhouse and we had textbooks from the 1940s."

"You may have trouble getting permission to aero or lithobrake asteroids on Earth."

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

"A lot of my stories end with "And when I regained consciousness, there was a crowd standing around looking at me.""

"I can't help but notice that everytime I fly somewhere, other people's planes fall out of the sky."

"This is the sort of book that justifies fatwahs. If WWIII occurred right now, we could die happy knowing Baxter would never write again. If a dinosaur killing asteroid was headed for Earth and I knew Baxter had another book coming up, I would campaign for letting the rock hit, since it is obviously the work of a benevolent deity trying to save us from another Titan."

"[F]olks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid [nitrogen] and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It would not surprise me if reading that book causes birth defects."

"Romeo and Juliet *died*. I always liked that in a teen romance story."

"Look, I tried the cat experiment. On the third trial, the cat was dead. On each of the subsequent 413 trials, it remained dead. Am I doing something wrong?"

"I wonder if he's planning a book called SRS? Or F'lu?"

"Someday I'd like to read a story about competent people on Mars."