Revisiting a contest from 2009

Contest! With no prize except the prospect of making me miserable.


In the spirit of what I just realized are in a flocked post and so cannot be usefully linked to, have the Opening Sentences Certain To Put James Nicoll Off context. This was invented by thesaucernews, whose entry was

Omega braced against the coldness of outer space by activating his ship's cloaking device, which instantly captured the heat from his rockets, pulled it around the vessel and recycled it through the Bussard ramjets, rendering him both thermally invisible and toasty warm when he turned on the ventilators.

which llennhoff followed up with

Beta stared at the fuel straw, mankind's greatest achievement, which supplied a limitless supply of hydrogen from the depths of Jupiter. "We could never had accomplished things like this had not a fortunate plague killed of 90% of humanity", she thought.

Top those.

Locus All-Time Novel Results, 2012 f/m

Results here.

Category	              Total  Female	Male	F/T
20th Century SF Novel:    	15	1	14	0.07
20th Century Fantasy Novel 	15	2	13	0.13
21st Century SF Novel 	        16	2	14	0.14
21st Century Fantasy Novel 	16	4	12	0.25
Total	                        62	9	53	0.15

I am in awe.

DCU question

Does Wayne Enterprises own Arkham Asylum?

DCU question

Does Wayne Enterprises own Arkham Asylum?

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.

Vanishing Point:The Silenian Test (based on a story by David Lewis Stein )

The Silenian Test

Ignore the title in the url: some of these are mis-titled. Speaking of titles and hence to title drops, I'd be very surprised if one of the models the people behind Vanishing Point wasn't The Twilight Zone.

Harry Price, living a Cold War existence perpetually on the edge of extinction, leaps at the chance offered by passing aliens to win for the Earth peace and access to the billion stars of the alien civilization [1], if only he can pass one simple test. He believes he passed and in so doing learns just how much he will pay for world peace and access to the stars.

Personally, I think he failed.

I liked how little time it took for giant alien space craft to go from the scariest thing in the world to "yeah, yeah, but who won the game between the Leafs and the Bruins?" and how mundane miracles are when you actually have them.

I am not 100% sure the David Lewis Stein I found online is *this* David Lewis Stein.

1: This may seem like an odd thing to praise an SF story for but Stein seems to have some idea how big a galaxy is and how big an advanced civilization could be.

Two questions

Has anyone ever done Tonto as an Archibald Belaney-type character?

Has anyone done Othello as a white guy who inexplicably insists on wearing black-face while claiming fairly unconvincingly to be a Moor? On purpose, I mean?