William H. Stoddard

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• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  So if magic runs off of heat it seems that thermodynamic considerations must be relevant. Heat by definition cannot do work under isothermal conditions; you need a temperature difference to make a heat engine work. It doesn't seem the power...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  In terms of land travel, the emergence of the bicycle, especially the version with equal sized wheels in the late 19th century, made a huge difference. See for example Hugill's World Trade since 1431. H. G. Wells wrote a lot...
• Commented on Minor updates
  I have to note that when you show Shrekeli reading Atlas Shrugged, you have him missing the point in a major way. In Atlas Shrugged, the businessmen who get rich by regulatory capture (influencing politicians and administrators and using regulation...
• Commented on Minor updates
  "And in any case, the Resurrection Beast just has the bad habit of coming back from the dead if you kill it, only bigger and stronger as more people believe in it. It doesn't need a terribly elaborate life cycle."...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  In what publication did Alan Moore revert to the original Mary Poppins? I haven't heard of that one, and I'm curious....
• Commented on Place your bets
  CharlesH: I think that's leaving out part of the story. The crucial issue for Grevan and the kids colonizing the new planet wasn't whether they could eat the food or not. It was whether they could break free of the...
• Commented on Place your bets
  The argument that cats domesticated us, and the evidence is that we feed them, seems to have things backward. Providing food is a means of control. Consider an old-fashioned company store: Was it the coal miners who domesticated the mine...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Nojay: I've worked for a variety of US publishers for years, and every one of them has used the Oxford or serial comma. I do have Strunk and White on my shelves, but I don't consult them professionally, and taking...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Speaking as a professional copy editor, who mostly works on manuscripts whose authors have doctorates, I'd say two things about Pigeon's comment 69: On one hand, very few of those authors have mastered the subtleties of punctuation, or of syntactic...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I've played with ChatGPT a little. On one hand, as far as factual content is concerned, it makes egregious errors (when I asked it to explain a line from one of Joni Mitchell's songs, it gave a lucid explanation of...
• Commented on Abolish the monarchy!
  I don't think your account of the legal immunity of the monarch can be quite right. This is discussed in Kantorowicz's classic work of legal history and culture The King's Two Bodies, which examines, among other things, the episode where...
• Commented on Obligatory Hugo eligibility post
  My GURPS Future History came out in August. It's a companion of sorts to GURPS Space, with advice on creating worlds of the future. (You got into the bibliography twice: for the Laundry files, as an example of near future...
• Commented on PSA: Publishing supply chain shortages
  I've gotten more conservative about buying print books, now that we have two people in a three-bedroom apartment that holds 10 1/2 sets of bookshelves; a book has to justify taking up shelf space. But on the other hand, my...
• Commented on CMAP #16: Book Title Blues
  I read Barrie's play a decade or so back, when I was running an RPG campaign inspired by The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and I wanted a Peter Pan guest appearance. I was impressed by how creepy it was! It...
• Commented on Lessons learned: writing really long fiction
  Compare Lewis's portrayal of Islam with Bujold's Chalion series, where the societies analogous to medieval Spain are gay-tolerant, and the ones analogous to Islam are not merely intolerant but brutally repressive. It was interesting reading Kay's Sarantium novels at the...
• Commented on Lessons learned: writing really long fiction
  Tolkien's own letters from the decade or so after LotR came out show him becoming ill at ease with the whole "irredeemably evil" view and looking at the question of whether orcs might have free will....
• Commented on Lessons learned: writing really long fiction
  I hear about that sort of naiveté in RPGs, both with players who always play the same one character type (I've had players like that) and with GMs who run the same campaign for a decade or two, or a...
• Commented on Lessons learned: writing really long fiction
  I quite like the Sharing Knife books. They sound simple, or even simpleminded, because they're written from the PoV of characters who don't have sophisticated vocabularies or complex educations and in fact live in worlds where such things scarcely exist...
• Commented on Deaths and Deadlines
  A decade or so ago, I was running an RPG series inspired by League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Planetary, and the Wold Newton material, and I decided to bring in Peter Pan. So I read the play. That version of Peter...
• Commented on What do you know about my inner demons?
  The book sounds interesting, by the way. How would a Californian get to read it? An ebook for preference, as I'm already up to 100 shelf feet or so. Can a US edition be anticipated, or should I be looking...
• Commented on What do you know about my inner demons?
  I'm thinking of an epigram I just saw this morning: The "s" in IoT stands for "secure."...
• Commented on Dread of Heinleinism
  As it happens, I just reread Friday, with mixed feelings. But I feel that I have to note that Friday itself is "all about a diseased society and an abuse victim," and indeed makes this quite explicit: There is a...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  Some years ago I ran a cosmic horror campaign influenced by Lovecraft, but set in Steve Jackson Games's Transhuman Space game world. So nearly all the horrors were not alien entities, but products of advancing technology—not "the Singularity," though it...
• Commented on The Nakamoto Variations
  I think you could steal the plot of Ready Player One with Satoshi Nakamoto as the mysterious figure who left all his bitcoins to whoever can win his trivia contest....
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  This seems like an ironic situation: I made a comment to suggest that you are using a word, "value," in a different sense than that in which it was used in classical economics, and thus not understanding economic though, and...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  I think you're misunderstanding the concept of "value" as it's used in economics. (Or, actually, as it was used in the 19th century; economists don't talk about "value" much any more.) The measure of a thing's value is the most...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  What's your criterion for "the mainstream of English [becoming] non-rhotic"? In terms of numbers, I believe more people speak General American than the Queen's English. Is "mainstream" defined by something other than number of speakers? (In terms of the proposal...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  I have read that ancient Athens did have a police force. But it wasn't considered fitting work for free men, so it was made up entirely of slaves. I wonder how that actually worked. . . ....
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  That's a new word for me. So I looked it up. Now I know what it means, but I'm still not sure I understand it. Something to do with the way you pronounce the letter 'r'? Back in the sixties,...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  Yes, and that was what I suggested in my original post: That if Stirling wanted to sneak in a hint as to the pronunciation for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the word, he could have had the engineer talk...