So, whilst I was off being a good little grad student, apparently there was a Thing in the blogosphere about this fun little rant. By special request of RRRJessica, here’s my take on the subject: He’s got a point. Wait! Stop! Before you fire up the hate mail, I should probably clarify that a bit. There is a valid point in there. It’s a tiny little thing; like most points it is 0-dimensional, lacking depth, width, and breadth, and is […]

For anybody who didn’t catch my review of Variable Star almost a year and a half ago, I’m a big fan of Spider Robinson. Though I haven’t read as much of her work, Jeanne Robinson’s collaboration with Spider on the Stardance trilogy is also exceptional. Well, word is that Jeanne is fighting a rare form of cancer, and the couple is running low on cash. That link has several ways that you can help, but being the of-limited-resources types that […]

A brief technical supplement in support of our proposed new unit, the grrm. The grrm is a unit of change over time. Specifically, it measures the degree of warping of a shelf under a constant weight per distance over a given length of time. In terms of quality, more grrms represent a shelf that bends more under stress. In standardized units, 1 grrm can be described as: 1 degree of deflection under the weight of a full shelf of ASOIAF […]

Note: I started this as a reply to a comment on my review of Marooned in Realtime, but it grew to the point where I decided to split it out into its own post. Well, the most important Asimov to read is the Robot-Empire-Foundation series (which is actually three separate series that he joined into the same universe after the fact). Wiki can give you the full list in chronological order, but I think how you read them depends on […]

Marooned in Realtimeby Vernor Vinge288pp (Paperback)My Rating: 8/10Amazon Rating: 4.5/5LibraryThing Rating: 4.04/5Goodreads Rating: 3.94/5 Vernor Vinge, in the days before he became a three-times-running Hugo award winning author, was merely a two-times-running Hugo nominated author. Last year I reviewed the first of those two novels, The Peace War. The second novel, Marooned in Realtime, is a sequel to Peace in the sense that it takes place in the same universe and timeline, but you have to think rather broadly to […]