Because I care

[james_davis_nicoll]

As mentioned in comments, Dan Simmons has a dystopic novel coming out.

Canada, used to dividing itself into smaller parts to appease ethnic groups, languages, and claims to prior ownership, [...]

Is that a snipe at Nunavut?

Comments

[cshalizi.livejournal.com]

The phrasing of that paragraph in Simmons's self-advertisement is (as I would put it to a student) uncomfortably similar to the Wikipedia entry on Hagia Sophia. This may be due to the shared influence of a third source. Wikipedia, of course, correctly and repeatedly gives 1453 as the date of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in that very article; I have no idea where 1532 is coming from.

In fact, it strikes me as very odd that someone who was as obsessed with the clash of civilizations and the scary, scary Muslims as the narrator of that rant is, would would repeatedly screw up the date of the fall of Constantinople. This gives me a tiny sliver of hope that the who thing is an elaborate put-up job by Simmons. More likely, of course, it is all too horribly real, and the loss of a genuine talent to the brain-eater.