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[james_davis_nicoll]

Chapter one of Orson Scott Card's Hidden Empire.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I will trust that this particular carton of milk indeed smells rancid and will not avail myself of the opportunity to sniff it.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

a) "we're America, we win our wars." hahahaha uh what?

b) has his writing always sucked that badly? because you know me, i love me a good book about plagues. but i'm sort of thrown out of his story every paragraph.

[katestine.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on that. I even meant to read Empire and yet this is... crep.

[dancesontrains.livejournal.com]

I think I can say "Oh Orson no :(" without reading this.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

Oh, god. Empire was the first Orson book I failed to finish once I had started it. (And he's written some stuff that REALLY REALLY didn't work for me.)

Avoiding this one like the plague that it contains.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

It was a lucky thing that at first it was a disease of poor and uneducated villagers, and of the shopkeepers in Lagos where the Nigerian scientist had sneezed before he died. None of them were the kind of rich and educated people who flew across the Atlantic or north across the Sahara. So far, at least, the airborne epidemic was confined to West Africa.

*has no words*

[ms-danson.livejournal.com]

Not. Going. To. Read.

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

Ow.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

*blink*

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

You know what I can extrapolate from that? Card isn't talking much with the current generation of LDS missionaries. A lot of whom are young hip cosmopolitan... well, LDS missionaries. But not as wound up in Card's crazy culture war crap.

Re: I don't blame authors anymore

[avram]

I blame the readers. Nobody'd publish Card if people'd stop buying him.

[cofax7]

Oh, dear god.

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

"This is a dangerous planet. Only a politician would try to tell you otherwise."

First two sentences, first two errors. Ratios like this are an achievement of sorts.

[(Anonymous)]

What do you mean? We've had at least five massive extinction events, and now there's these darn ice ages, and the sun is likely to warm up enough to bring about run-away warming within a billion years. Then there's the fact that 3/4 of it are covered with deep water, earthquakes happen unpredictably, and let's not go into the parasites, oy... (:)}

Bruce

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

All of which makes it a paradise compared to others. He's only got the rest of the solar system to compare it to, and frankly the rest of the solar system doesn't come off too well.

And even with those presumed dangers you speak of... I notice that we're still just skin, not shelled or horned or scaled. Can't be that bad then.

[(Anonymous)]

Perhaps I should have added more smilies?

Bruce

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

(Answering seriously for a moment) No, I find smilies pretty useless actually (my "boom de yada" icon is pretty much my "light-hearted response" equivalent, but I don't expect people to figure that out immediately).

Less seriously (paradoxically), yours was a legitimate repsonse and I thought that there should have been at least a resonable attempt to answer it. Sorry if it sounded like defensiveness.