HunterJE

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• Commented on Houston: what are the long-term consequences?
  What is the current lasting impact in areas of Pakistan affected by the 2010 floods? I've been trying to look in to it but the global attention span about non-Western disasters means I'm not finding a lot of discussion in...
• Commented on Evolver
  It seems quite likely that if new tool-using sophonts arise, the timescale in which they will do so will be considerably less than the timescale on which fossil fuel reserves replenish. This means when they hit their industrial revolution, they...
• Commented on What are you reading this summer?
  Earlier this summer devoured all of S.A. Corey's "The Expanse" series to date—some of the best semi-hard space adventure I've read in a long time, really engrossing and with a pretty good mastery of human behavior and politics. Can't wait...
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  Genuinely curious, to those saying they prefer magic that's "not understandable" to magic that follows some kind of "scientific laws," what does that mean? Unless it just means "not fully understood by practitioners in-fiction," I don't see a principled distinction....
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  I like the "most magic is just technology without science" bit a lot, and it reminds me about another thing that I think gets ignored by a lot of writers coming up with magic systems. I feel like a lot...
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  I think that's related to the "the more a plan is explained in advance, the worse the plan will go" rule....
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  Something that bothers me with the way magic systems are usually done in fantasy literature: Generally, the story tells you the rules, usually through the filter of the understanding of the inhabitants of the setting, and then that understanding is...
• Commented on A different cluetrain
  A few more important points that I think both tie into these and provide a failure state for the seemingly entrenched status quo (though one that is no happier for the little guys than the entrenched interests): 1'. All modern...
• Commented on Escape from the planet of the Ice Giants
  The work side seems probably unavoidable, but on the money side I wonder if there's a way publishers wanting to explore this territory to come up with different advance/payment structures to smooth the author-end cashflow to make it more doable?...
• Commented on Escape from the planet of the Ice Giants
  Great news! Especially cool about the rapid release of the new three-parter--I'm midway through Southern Reach right now and am excited by this new trend of bucking the conventional wisdom of "series installments need to be published at least a...
• Commented on In which I am crabby about viral archery videos.
  As someone with no archery experience later than summer camp 20 years ago, my first reaction to that video was "those claims sound dubious, and the action shots are reminiscent of Lightsaber Kid in their overearnest clumsiness." Cool to get...
• Commented on On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
  Somewhat, but not really on point in this context; juridical personhood of organizational entities is a legal fiction distinct in many ways from natural personhood, and natural personhood is a complicated and not well discussed or understood concept mostly because...
• Commented on On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
  Also, the other side of the transit of the unacceptable to acceptable that has accompanied liberal societal progress is the transit from the "not entitled to equal personhood" to "entitled to equal personhood," and it's entirely imaginable that we may...
• Commented on On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
  Also in the pretty near term, open polyamory--within recent memory this has moved from "unacceptable" to "radical," at least in the socially-liberal fringe....
• Commented on On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
  I also think there may be a degree to which some SF writers have misunderstood the antonyms-when-literally-constructed "hard SF" and "soft SF" to actually be opposites. It's a thing that frustrates me to no end--"hard SF" means "SF that to...