Paul Turnbull
- Website: profile.typekey.com/chigaze
Recent Actions
-
Commented on Radio silence
While I am eagerly awaiting "Ghost Engine" this change pleases me as when I finished "The Delirium Brief" all I wanted was more! The Laundry Files is reaching the stage where things are rushing forward and waiting for the next...
Comment Threads
-
Heteromeles commented on
Radio silence
I'm not surprised at the number of combat soldiers needing psychiatric treatment after Northern Ireland. It appears that similar problems happened in Vietnam, in part due to mismanagement. Similar problems are happening now in Iraq and Afghanistan on both sides (although I wonder how ISIS and the Taliban deal with PTSD). In any case, I do wish the skills were more transferable. A friend of mine who was a Navy medical technician got really frustrated after moving on to a civilian hospital, where they told him he couldn't do procedures that he'd been routinely doing in the Gulf--apparently he was...
-
Martin commented on
Radio silence
I'm not surprised at the number of combat soldiers needing psychiatric treatment after Northern Ireland. To make it clear - the vast majority of soldiers in Northern Ireland were operating as "policemen in green", patrolling urban and rural areas, and AIUI had quite a low rate of PTSD. The "50% of Special Duties" figure refers to the very small number of soldiers in what has now become the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. They were operating individually and in pairs, in civilian clothes, in very high-threat areas (i.e. get caught, and you're dead - if you're lucky, without torture). Living at that...
-
Alatriste commented on
Radio silence
@361 [Regarding the societies that Asimov depicts] It has been too many years since the last time I read the Robot series but if memory serves me well the Spacer society - at least the Aurora one - wasn't so utopic. Actually I wonder if Asimov didn't deliberately use the Old South as a model, because Auroran humans behaved pretty much as a planter class, including forbidden romantic liaisons with robots and the ever-present but unspoken fear of a robotic rebellion... Incidentally Asimov knew perfectly well what racism is. He had suffered it himself. I think it's no coincidence that...
-
Pigeon commented on
Radio silence
Not utopic, certainly - they had plenty of flaws, as I said - but it's still quite clear that people in general have a much less crappy time in their everyday lives than people on Earth do. Earth society seems to me very much an example of one that relies for its cohesion on people's proficiency at deluding themselves that the crappiness is desirable. Interesting point about the Aurora/South parallel. That had not occurred to me - British perspective, no doubt. I'm afraid that my perceptions are so warped by having essentially no exposure to portrayals of the South (that...
-
Roger commented on
Radio silence
At the risk of returning to something related to the original subject of the thread, once The Labyrinth Index comes out next year, we'll get to see what the Mandate and his Management 2.0 has done with the Laundry. It was pretty clear from The Nightmare Stacks and The Delirium Brief that the Laundry's constitution as a very secretive intelligence agency is no longer a good solution to problems of the size that they're now starting to face. Assuming that the Mandate wasn't lying when he said the he wanted to defend the country he now rules (or at least...
Following
Not following anyone
Buy my Books
Quick Stuff
Specials
- Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
- How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
- Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
- Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
- Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
- Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
- The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
- “Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
- Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)
Merchandise
About This Page
Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.