JReynolds

Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on Crib Sheet: Glasshouse
  The hardcover Ace US edition that I have has a number line ending in 2. Did it have a second printing? Almost certainly not in hardcover. Before the ebook format shift really geared up around 2010, Ace rolled books out into paperback exactly 12 months after the hardback release date, at which point h/c sales fell off a cliff so there would never be a post-mmpb release hc reprint order....
• Greg. Tingey commented on Crib Sheet: Glasshouse
  Charlie Contrariwise (what a suprise!) there are, & always have been "artists" who suvive by passing-off incomprehensible bollocks as "art" & making a nice little earning from it, as long as they can talk fast enough. Which is why it is very difficult for the real experts (maybe geniuses, sometimes) to make headway. If one actually looks at works by Salvador Dali or Roy Lichtenstein (as I have) ... then one begins to appreciate that there IS something to it. Very difficult in the case of an extreme self-publicist like Dali, but he was ahead of a lot of the...
• Charlie Stross commented on Crib Sheet: The Merchant Princes
  Middle volume of trilogy needs to end of a cliff-hanger. If you write one and it doesn't, you aren't doing it right. Look at The Lord of the Rings! (Also: the last two omnibuses -- which collect the last four slim novels of the original stories -- cover what was originally designed to be the second story arc in the series. Which I was intending to write as a single 900 page doorstep. As with all second books (or releases of a new piece of software), bloat happened, resulting in a 1370 page story in four volumes, which got refactored...
• Charlie Stross commented on Crib Sheet: The Merchant Princes
  I'm running with Miriam's world. Circa 2020, imagine how much more paranoid our War on Terror/Global Security State would be if the terrorists had nuked the White House and came from parallel time lines. For one thing, the entire territory of the USA could legitimately be considered to be a border, for Customs and Border Patrol purposes (look at those guys' powers -- they're scary) and DHS purposes. And then there's going to be the US government's institutional response when they discover the dome in the forest and realize PDQ that they're not the big swinging high-tech dick in this...
• Nestor commented on Crib Sheet: The Merchant Princes
  The bit about B-21s over Iraq after Saddam was deposed by an internal coup (And Paris Hilton's funeral!) clued me that it's just very close to our world but not quite us. I read the lord of the rings as a big ol' paperback so if there were any cliffhangers there I missed them. But I already got my sticky mitts on the revolution trade so any cliffhanger was more of a speedbump than an obstacle. Thanks be to e-books and instant satisfaction. (Speaking of which, your catalog is spotty in google play, I can't seem to find Glasshouse there,...