As I said elsewhere

Regarding the case for Landisian colonies in the atmosphere of Venus:

Ultimately there will have to be a compelling reason to spend trillions of dollars to move off-world: a vital resource located on Venus, mass over-crowding, nuclear apocalypse.

I have to think if the problem is overcrowding, buoyancy-limited habitats floating in a toxic atmosphere kilometers above a red-hot surface is the wrong answer.

Because the comments where I posted this have to the point one could be overlooked

The Frenkel subcommittee hopes to have decision by 7/11, private informing of involved parties by 7/15, public announcement by 7/18.

ReformaTory space efforts as successful as F-35, Cyclone schemes

New satellite brilliant success save in the trifling matter of doing what it was supposed to be able to do.

Meanwhile, in the currently United Kingdom

The UK is apparently entirely dependent on the Scots and would melt like the witch in The Wizard of Oz without them.

There are too many funny bits in this article to quote them all but this caught my eye:

One can almost hear Vladimir Putin deriding the idea of taking lectures from a country that couldn’t even hold itself together.

Those darned Leftists

Controlling everything

Includes accounts of Clarion that are surprisingly sexual-assault free, given the other Tales of Clarion I've heard.

The Kindly Ones by Melissa Scott

Given how the Baen brand has evolved over the years,"Baen Books" does not make one think "Lamba and Tiptree-nominated author" but in the 1980s Jim Baen reportedly made a point of looking for good new female authors and his enhusiasm for gay-bashing SF [1] had not yet blinded him to works of quality featuring protagonists outside the usual hetrosexual limits. Post-Del Montefication, it may be hard to believe this ever came from Baen but it did.



And the cover wasn't even that bad.

Sadly, the font size is just at the limit I can read and the cost was paid in migraines so this took longer to read than I planned for.

Melissa Scott is a Campbell Award winner whose books I probably have not read enough of. I apparently didn't finish this one on the first go because I found money tucked in amongst the pages, although I must have liked what I did read because I didn't then sell it. I am also breaking one of my rules because Jo Walton reviewed this in front of a lot more eyeballs then this will attract but when she did there wasn't an ebook available.

Fourteen centuries before the book opens an interstellar voyage went horribly wrong, marooning the survivors on Orestes and Electra, two inhospitable but technically habitable moons of the gas giant Agamemnon. The colonists prevailed but one of the consequences of the mishap is a harsh and demanding social order, as well as a rich tradition of brutal internecine warfare.

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Brazil versus Germany

Maracanazo II. Who would have predicted *that*?