A new game

[james_davis_nicoll]

Factual statements beginning with 'I've read enough Sci-Fi to know [...]'.

My suggestions were:

"that long series whose plot threads are diverging instead of converging are unlikely to go anywhere interesting."

"that many Golden Age writers behaved as if women were something they'd only heard of 3rd hand via malicious intermediaries."

and

"that turning to SF for the science is like turning to Carl Barks for the ornithology."

Comments

[mishalak]

...that there is more apocalypse in Sc-Fi than in the average season of Buffy.

-or-

...that dystopian could be a synonym for most sci-fi.

[gingicat]

I turn to Hal Clement and Arthur C. Clarke for good science in my good science fiction.

[oh6]

that they can't explain how the hyperdrive really works because it doesn't, really.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I had to look up Carl Barks. Heh.

[emt-hawk.livejournal.com]

I did, and it was worth the effort.

Brightened up my last half hour of the day.

--Hawk

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

Fantagraphics is releasing his complete works in deluxe hardcover editions. They'll brighten your day for more than half an hour.

[wakboth.livejournal.com]

As a Finn, it always surprises me that people don't instantly know who Carl Barks was. Donald Duck is big over here, and Barks' stories in particular.

[bwross.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know, people don't give the Duck comics enough respect in North America (being Disney doesn't help... that's almost always considered stuff just for little kids). But then again, if they did a massive following in the US, we probably wouldn't get things like The Quest for Kalevala (which, yes, is Don Rosa, not Carl Barks).

And given some of the things that the Duck tales have done, it really wouldn't surprise me if there was some good ornithology hiding in there as well (but probably not with the anthropomorphic birds).

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

"which sci-fi writers I like."

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

This.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

Yep.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

"...that it's fiction, not prophesy."

-- Steve used to wish differently, but not now.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

...gasping for air here...

[kaffy_r]

"that turning to SF for the science is like turning to Carl Barks for the ornithology."

*ding-ding-ding*

And we have a winner!

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

I don't think Carl Barks actually believed that drawing pictures of cartoon ducks made him an authority, though. Some science fiction writers...

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Cool ideas can be wasted by forcing them into action plots.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

Action plots can be wasted by the writer thinking that cool ideas is enough to make a story exciting.

Hey, you have your priorities and I have mine... :P

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Any stories with excess cool ideas that you'd like to mention?

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman, perhaps? Amazingly bizarre setting, tragically wasted on the author doing nothing but going, "look at how amazingly bizarre I'm being!" instead of telling a decent story in it.

And just about anything by Iain M Banks, it seems. The Player of Games takes place in a world of god-like supercomputers, amazing alien vistas, technology that defies imagination. What's the story about? A chess tournament.

Ursula K LeGuin. Which of her stories? ALL OF THEM. :P

Ooooh oooh ooooh, and Philip K Dick! Awesome ideas, that man had. He also somehow managed to make hunting killer androids boring.

Oh, dear lord, I can't possibly leave this reply without mentioning Peter F Hamilton's The Reality Dysfunction. A giant sprawling universe of living space stations, pirates, aliens races, and, just in case that wasn't enough, let's have an invasion of the dead come back to life! Then show that off through countless shaggy dog stories about unsympathetic characters being idiots and usually coming to a sticky end, and add in a lot of poop and gratuitous-yet-unsexy sex, because it's just not science fiction if we don't have poop and gratuious-yet-unsexy sex! Yeah, that's the ticket! Gaaaah, the wasted potential, it burns!

Actually, name one big-name science fiction author, and chances are I am dissatisfied with their interesting-premise/exciting-story quotient. I've wracked my brain coming up with an exception, and all that comes to mind is Glasshouse by Charles Stross. A marvelous story, one of my favourites, because it had the novel idea of taking an interesting setting and - oh marvel, oh glory! - actually telling a story set in it! On the other hand, Accelerando is everything I despise about science fiction with an extra layer of geek-smugness, so I'm on the fence even with Stross.

... man. I apparently had a lot more repressed frustration about this than I thought. ^_^;

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Some of your bad examples are among my favorite stories.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't doubt it. There wouldn't be this many authors writing stories like that if there weren't even more people wanting to read stories like that.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Since herpetology is the study of reptiles and amphibians, and birds are closer to reptiles than amphibians are, why isn't ornithology a subset of herpetology?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

That gave me an idea -- flying frogs. The trouble is that if they go too high, it gets cold and then they fly too slowly and fall out of the sky. I think there's something about it in the Bible.

[botia.livejournal.com]

There are several species of gliding frogs already. And I've had a flying snake before (Chrysopelea ornata).

[botia.livejournal.com]

http://xkcd.com/867/

Also, how can you tell the herpetologist in that comic is female? the hair isn't long enough to be a male herpetologist.

(my own hair is about as long as hers, haha)

[(Anonymous)]

In fact there are no "reptiles", as we understood the group - modern systematics has mammals closer to the rest of the amniotes than turtles, so your "reptile" groups would have to include mammals as well as birds, if it were to include turtles.

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

cough.

Turtles have been pretty solidly recovered as close relatives to archosaurs these days. anapsid skull condition has evolved and reevolved multiple times it seems. Synapsids and sauropsida are generally described by what used to be called mammals and reptiles.

Too bad about turtles. I was hoping they were a surviving clade of parareptiles. Alas, they are part of the great enemy, the archosaurs.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, it isn't anapsids all the way down.

[(Anonymous)]

If Michael Lee doesn't think it settled, and views the case for grouping chelonians with parareptiles, that's good enough for me. Particularly as the case for Eunotosaurus as an ancestral turtle has been revived - left my ICVM notes at home, am not sure that this work has been published yet. But a good case for a paraphyletic Reptilia being equivalent to Amniota is by no means obsolete.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

In fact, there is no *clade* of reptiles. It's a perfectly fine paraphyletic group, like bony fish.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

That it's more fun the fewer delusions the author has of making valid predictions of what things will really be like.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

I dunno: if enough time has passed since the author made his predictions, it can be a source of unintended hilarity.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

Not my preferred type of hilarity, alas. ;)

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

That superconductors have infinite thermal conductivity!

(listens to a whisper)

Oh. Never mind.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

"...that engineers instinctively know that they can solve any problem. Especially in disciplines that they have no experience in."

"... that nobody likes Einstein."