Phil Edwards

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• Commented on The crazy years
  I'm fairly sure this wasn't what Adam Smith had in mind It's precisely what Adam Smith was writing against, in ...The Wealth of Nations in particular. See discussion here. And it makes sense, when you think about it - how...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  There is a term of art that developed early on in the field of SF criticism: willing suspension of disbelief. A bit earlier than that - it was coined by Coleridge in 1817, initially in reference to his own and...
• Commented on Two Thoughts
  The free market thrives on transparency - the better the information available to everybody, the more efficient the market is. What doesn't thrive is the poor sod trying to make a living competing within the free market, for whom the...
• Commented on Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable From Cthulhu
  Is this a new genre? Back in 1990-something, when I worked in IT and was having trouble with a guy in Accounts who was running a freelance system development operation in his spare time*, I sketched out the beginnings of...
• Commented on From the hemline index to the vampire/zombie ratio: SF/F by the numbers
  74 - I completely overlooked GoT for years because I looked at the author and thought "isn't he just that guy I wasn't reading in the seventies?" (Memory is fallible - actually he's that guy I wasn't reading in the...
• Commented on They Took Our Myths
  Not entirely coincidentally - it was prompted by a namecheck from Charlie - I got The King In Yellow the other day. I wasn't totally swept away by it - for me that "extremely unreliable narrator" style is only good...
• Commented on The Biggest Little SF Publisher you never heard of pulls on the jackboots
  Or do they? And what do we mean by 'believe' anyway? I was making this up, of course, or thought I was. Then I had a quick look at the comments thread at Jamie Bartlett's 2014 article on these gits....
• Commented on The Biggest Little SF Publisher you never heard of pulls on the jackboots
  The upshot is that the whole neoreaction / New Right Weltanschauung is a kind of long con designed by magicians to speed up the personal development of those who hold it. Oh great. We're not* dealing with neo-Fascist Darwinist elitist...
• Commented on Terry Pratchett
  Lovecraftian horrors are a gimme, though. You don't need to read Lovecraft to recognise a squamous tentacled horror with insufficient vowels in its name, any more than you need to read Bram Stoker to know who the Count is. Obviously...
• Commented on Terry Pratchett
  The early books are not bad, but the later ones are much better, even if only for the lack of a need to know the references to earlier works by other authors. ??? According to APF, there's one chapter in...
• Commented on Terry Pratchett
  I'm surprised at the suggestion that TCOM+LF is a bad place to start "if you don't already know the Discworld". Were we doing it all wrong? Something the OP brought back, for me, is just how long it took for...
• Commented on A brief, bitter quiz
  The two gross examples were Stalin's refusal to lift the siege of St.Petersburg (then called Leningrad) and the Homodor famine in the Ukraine Since the 1980s, the engineered famines of 1932-3 have been given the label of 'Holodomor' or 'murder...
• Commented on A brief, bitter quiz
  I think your parenthesis is too kind to Brzezinski & co. I saw an interview with ZB once in which the interviewer asked him whether he regretted effectively creating the Taliban (I think this was pre-9/11, so creating AQ wasn't...
• Commented on Martial arts and the cycle of bullshit
  A friend of mine, who's both fearsomely intellectual & very very fit, got into Aikido & tried explaining it to me. "So it's about self-defence?" I hazarded. He replied that, in an Aikido perspective, if the situation had reached the...
• Commented on The referendum question
  If I had a vote I honestly don't know how I'd use it. I've always been sympathetic with Scottish (and Welsh) nationalism; I don't have any particular investment in the UK applecart staying horizontal; and I think there is a...