James Nicoll

Aha! The Alien Planet Canada series, where the planet the characters are marooned on seems to be Manitoba. Bad bad world building.

[The cat] and I have an agreement: I leave her alone and don't make sudden moves when I wake up to find her perched on my chest, staring with an unblinking hostile gaze at my face and in return she rarely mutilates me.

I can't help but notice that everytime I fly somewhere, other people's planes fall out of the sky.

Manitoba... Not sure what to do about them. Restock the province with megafauna and encourage tourism, I think. How quickly can we breed back the saber-toothed cats?

[F]olks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid [nitrogen] and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It would not surprise me if reading that book causes birth defects.

If there's a stack [of novels to review], the unpromising stuff goes at the top and the promising stuff goes at the bottom. That way, I am eager to finish Overwrought Romantic Mary Sue Fantasy because I know that will let me read Niche Product That Only the Author, James and Some Guy at JPL Likes.

Creating stars in laboratories on the very planets you inhabit turns out to be a bad idea.

Although no credible evidence exists that the speed of light can be exceeded, writers are willing to embrace the possibility that light might be outpaced somehow. Never underestimate the persuasive power of somehow.

I wonder if he's planning a book called SRS? Or F'lu?

Someday I'd like to read a story about competent people on Mars.

There are no diplomatic efforts that cannot be successfully undermined by a few bigots in the field.

I have hated every Kress I read, especially this one, but the Bear is a standard Bear and if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like.

Niven made a name for himself as a author, which is to say, someone whose SF provides enough technical detail that the reader can be certain that various mechanisms and events couldn't work the way the author has them working.

Call me an extremist but killing a few hundred million people seems like the sort of method that might have unintended consequences.

The [item] that was stolen [in the 1975 novel The Whenabouts of Burr] was the physical artifact the American Constitution, which has tremendous historical and symbolic significance, and not the legal and political framework also known as the American Constitution, which is a quaint relic of no relevance to the modern world.