I am a bit royally ticked about this book. See I like it. I've liked other books by the writers they have turned out some great science fiction (and science fantasy). Much of it with plenty of action, a lot of it with thought provoking ideas. The book's great. I sort of stumbled over it after see...
Arthur Clarke said it first: If mankind is to survive, then for all but a very brief part of our history the word "ship" will mean "space ship." We will spread through space. We will build a colony on the moon: if we had a government of courage and imagination we would have that in time to celebr...
Empires do not grow old gracefully. As the edifice of ancient government succumbs to entropy, as civil war reigns, the result is indeed "interesting times," the times of interstellar Huns locked in mortal combat with Imperial storm troopers. Original.Content: The crash of empires / Jerry Pournell...
I went back to the problem of setting our sixteen thousand tons of ship onto the rock.It wasn't much of a rock. Jefferson is an irregular-shaped asteroid about twice as far out as Earth. It measures maybe seventy kilometers by fifty kilometers, and from far enough away it looks like an old mud br...
Between the closely-huddled walls, he could look out to the slope beyond the village where the fields he hated were stretched furrow on furrow, waiting to be worked.Today the houses were smaller, he saw. The cattle would be back in their long shed, no man's property again. Chugren'd said he'd do ...
Radically, because I have never said that human society ought to be aristocratic, but a great deal more than that. What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it ...
[E-ur-o-tas], named for river in southern Greece, Earth. (see names, Mythological, Graeco-Roman)Largest river on the planet Sparta [see Sparta];Length (main stream): 9,600 kilometersDrainage basin: 8,225,000 sq. kilometersMaximum volume: 860,000,000 litersMinimum volume: 475,000,000 litersDescrip...
B. Cole John W. Campbell, Jr. had his own notions of Utopia: a world in which social science worked. He had no doubt that we would some day have scientific penology and sociology.Campbell paid lip service to cultural relativism, but in fact, he was pretty sure what the Good Society would look lik...
Whenever we make an assumption, it's not enough simply to leave it at that; to be fair to the reader, the SF writer should also see what that assumption does to everything else.This was brought home to me when Jim Baen called to ask for a column on "What happens if we get an economical space driv...
Stevie said. She threw her arms around Zira. Both laughed as they danced around the hospital wing of the zoo. Stevie halted suddenly and looked around. “I’m sorry you’re still here . . .” “It’s as good a place as any,” Cornelius said. “Thank you for the furniture.” He indi...
She worked in the roof gardens and tended Arnimer, the son born months after the Burning. She taught all the Placehold children. She worked with the other women, and she was respectful to Freethspat; but except to go to Peacegiven Square on Mother’s Day, she never left the Placehold, and she neve...
Drums thundered and pipes skirled as the massed forces of Rick’s army marched across the parade ground. “Eyes—RIGHT!” The First Pike Regiment marched past, their pikes held aslant, the regimental banner dipped in homage to Rick and the others on the reviewing stand. The banner held three battle s...