Like a big red flag

[james_davis_nicoll]

Reminiscent of the long-dead population of Easter Island , humanity is stuck in a solar system-sized bubble and, as time ticks away, they can’t help but cannibalize everything good in their ever-failing quest to leave the solar system behind.

Comments

[onyxlynx]

Are we trying to leave the solar system behind? Because we are doing a lousy job of it if so.

[james_davis_nicoll]

We're not even a Kardashev I civilization yet!

[ironjeff]

I suspect that the whole 'speed of light' limitation will keep us stuck here for the at least a couple more centuries... longer if we don't start working on space habitats designed for generational duration - to get into practice for making those starships...

[dsgood]

Last I heard, the Easter Islanders were still alive.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

::starts singing Die Internationale because she can::

Okay, no, I can't, because I don't know the words.

Sing along with Billy Bragg!

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Re: Sing along with Billy Bragg!

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Ta! ::does so::

Re: Sing along with Billy Bragg!

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

By the way, what would you recommend as a first Bragg album?

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Alastair Hulet and Jimmy Gregory bring the goosebumps.

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

That's not a nice way to store Texans. :P

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

You know one standard Texan can be fit into a cube 46 cm on an edge?

Just back from Tor

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

'only slightly less well-known is this: "Never go up against a Nicoll when facts are on the line"!'

[zxhrue.livejournal.com]

oh snap! for you that's riled up and positively loquacious.

[seawasp]

I have not read the work in question; does the author not GRASP just how huge the solar system is, or how very much you'd have to work to use it all up so you have to "cannibalize everything good"?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It's been a while since I read the book but my memory is that the limit isn't Total Stuff but the available toolkit; a large part of the plot centers on a visionary attempt to expand that toolkit/a grotesquely inhumane experiment in Mad Science inflicted on an innocent population.

[dsrtao]

I have read the book in question. I believe the *reviewer* was smoking crack. The authors are under no such pressure -- the book is set during mid-colonization phase, with some established asteroid cities, a well-developed Mars, and the beginnings of serious activity in the Jovian and Saturnine moon systems.

Nobody's cannibalizing nothing.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Hey man, what if I want Jupiter all to myself?!

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

I have to say the review did its job well, although I think the outcome was not quite what either the author or the reviewer were hoping...

[james-angove.livejournal.com]

Just keep in mind that the reviewer seems to be reviewing a book he largely invented from his own neurosis and received idiocies..

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, if there's one thing I hate (and there are millions), it's people who get Easter Island totally wrong.

Not going to bother to retype my rant here--I typed it over there.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Blame Jared Diamond.

Thank you

[advaitin.livejournal.com]

I did not know that, and it is good to have learned about it.

[xander-opal.livejournal.com]

Err, over where?

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I don't know who Aidan Moher is, but after reading that, I predict that within the next 12 months, they are going to say something stupid and get a lot people in an uproar.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Pwned. That is a strange, clunky, amateurish review with errors of fact that no SF reviewer should make...

...nor should an SF review editor allow them to be posted.