Author: admin
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When You’re Writing About Smart People
and you notice something they could do to blow your plotline up, do you 1) Ignore it and hope people don’t notice because what you want to do is cool 2) Paper it over with some nonsense nobody is really going to believe and proceed. Because cool or 3) Fix it and come up with…
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Astronomers make writing sf tougher
Trying to write sf about exploring a few nearby stars. Apparently, the mechanics of Tau Ceti are reasonably nailed down, with five planets deduced from data of the star. It had to be a lot easier fictionalizing planets of nearby stars before the bleeping astronomers could actually find them!
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Universe Building The Empire Step One Iteration Two
Someone asked about building a minimalist government. For a minimalist government to be stable as such, there must be a reason why it does not follow the historical norm of all governments, to arrogate progressively more power to itself, to the detriment of everyone. But it is in the interest of any given member of…
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Universe Building the Empire: Step Two
The prior step ended with the realization that not only did government have to be minimalist, and consciously so, it had to be composed of people who would be paying a personal price if it – or they – failed. How do you do that? One constant of the people who make country- and civilization-killing…
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Universe Building The Empire: Step One
In the late 1970s, it became fashionable to bash the large scale stellar states that featured so prominently in science fiction. It was “plainly impossible” and exhibit A was always the writer’s preconception of what government did: Social work and industrial boards of this and that and regulations concerning the use of typewriters and television…
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Mellon
Another historical post I can’t not bring up – a tribute to a former packmate March 25, 1993 – July 19, 2008 Just got home from running a couple of errands, and when we got back, Mellon was dead. She was fifteen years old, and not in good health, so I’m not all that surprised,…
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House Thing
Going back over the archives for posts to port, this is one I can’t leave behind – a tribute to my heart dog November 18, 1992 to January 6, 2007 Thing was a gift to me from my step-mother, but it would be more accurate to say that he gave himself freely. He spent fourteen…
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Result of Attack
Recently, the page was attacked by people trying to send out spam. Evidently, Movable Type of the version I had is vulnerable, and updating within Movable Type is severely costly. The solution is I will have to move things to Word Press. It’s going to take a while to get the old articles up. You’ll…