I was out near my city's airport last week and spotted our local CAP's F-15s on touch and go runs. That hasn't been a state of the art design in a long time but it's still a fighter to take seriously.
If we're lucky some government will get into air superiority drones and prompt the other players to invest in anti-drone measures before some crank in a garage builds a conversion kit to turn Cessnas into cruise missiles. Note that I'm not terribly optimistic.
]]>Sure. Something like Captain Kangaroo might possibly be known; a major landmark like Sesame Street is a safe reference. But as a little kid I watched Ramblin' Rod and I can't expect anyone who's not from just the right place and time to have heard of him.
]]>But is that an unacceptable number of them?
The next memo might read: Painting your briefcase "nightmare green" is not as amusing as you think.
]]>The 'Genre' field lists Mystery before Science Fiction, but that may be due to alphabetical order.
]]>From memory, my local library keeps the physical object on the SF shelves with the other Charles Stross novels. Fair enough. Querying their computer, I find they've got it helpfully tagged thusly:
I'm certain you're not. Remember who took a smartphone to a stolen Bible?
]]>You may be more hip to the police procedural genre than I am. How do Niven's Gil the ARM stories hold up under that lens? Yes, there are psychic powers and spaceships - but all the other things you list are in there too, front and center, and more important to the plot than the set dressing; generally organleggers and stun darts could be replaced by drug lords and coshes if necessary.
It probably says something about my age that I can imagine Gil Hamilton, psychic powers or not, working through a pile of paperwork in the Barney Miller squad room.
]]>And for anyone worried about telepathic Lensmen invading privacy, the Arisians are worse. They know what you're going to do out on your little podunk planet at the edge of the galaxy centuries before you actually do it, if they care to. That ship has quite thoroughly sailed.
]]>That's not a coincidence. Unlike many superhero costumes that feature arbitrary, imaginary, or obviously fanciful footwear, the new Batgirl costume explicitly includes perfectly practical Doc Martin boots.
]]>As will surprise nobody who's read Neptune's Brood, that's coming hand-in-hand with the assumption that everyone will have nigh instantaneous communication over all distances at all times. Need to buy a tractor on a Saturday in Nebraska? No problem. Need to get money out of your London bank when you're in Thailand? No problem. Of course, that communication needs to be not only nigh instantaneous and ubiquitous but also secure - if your credit card is being copied to Russia or the bank on the other end is actually a teenager in Nigeria the whole scheme is likely to fall apart quickly.
It's working pretty well so far, aside from rather a lot of misplaced credit card numbers; how it will have played out in a hundred years is open to enough game changing variables that I won't speculate yet.
]]>On codenames, I thought highly of #187: "It is difficult to take a threat to reality seriously when it has been classified THROBBING SHAFT. Please remove those words from the random codename generator." But it can't top BILLION CORPSES and the explanation.
Then there's #48: "Used Langford Fractal Parrot as a Livejournal user icon..."
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