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Good leads are "Another Part of the Galaxy", "The Best of Eric Frank Russell", and "Major Ingredients: The Selected Short Stories of Eric Frank Russell".

I just bought the first one for a few quid :-)

If an Asminov, Bradbury, or Fredrick Pohl started out today they wouldn't even get published, much less have a chance at winning an award.

That's because everybody would be accusing them of plagiarism .

I can't believe that the voters haven't acknowledged No Award before now; it's not perhaps Zelazny's best work, but it's up there (first published in The Saturday Evening Post, then in Last Defender of Camelot).

"Grammar Lesson" by Larry Niven. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/t...

Possessive pronouns have multiple meanings, depending on the context. People have to be bright enough to figure it out, so they don't make stupid mistakes. When it's even possible to figure out. "English is hard."

Frederick Douglass did not own his former master.

I was going to follow that statement with an example that illustrates the point, but I had already done it without realizing it.

"English is hard."

I want to be a sci-fi writer; I can world-build fantasy and sci-fi, but I can't come up with plot. They've all been done; I'd feel like I'm copying someone else--anyone else--everyone else!

As Robert Heinlein said, "just file off the serial numbers". He also said there were only three basic plots. Others have different numbers, but there really are only a few. Just put your own unique twist on one (or a combination) of them.

Even if you start out blatantly ripping off someone else's plot (ideas can't be copyright, just be sure you change the names), as soon as you transplant it to your own sci-fi world, it will start mutating into something unique to you. Go for it.

(And yes, I am a sci-fi writer...although that entry is a bit out of date).

Ralph Williams wrote this tight little story for Astounding in 1958.

His alien engineered replicators cannot reproduce animate objects, which is their only limitation. "No assembly required." Energy is not a problem. Material resources are not a problem. Complexity is not a problem. Craftsmanship is not a problem.

Everything comes out of thin air --- except the prototype.

The department store manager navigating his way through this chaos sees this very quickly. He knows that IP rights in a world of seemingly infinite material abundance will be the one real measure of value.

He knows that the object which is trivially easy to replicate will lose its novelty quickly.

Little boxes on the hillside,

  Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.

  There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

Little Boxes

The fix for this is simple, though far from easy. Education. Without education, we're doomed. Now if you'll pardon me, I'm going to go read.

May I suggest reading Fahrenheit 451?

into meat-eaters and I'll worry.

If one can find a copy, "An Omnibus of Science Fiction" edited by Groff Conklin. Several editions from the Fifties, he also edited a variety of other anthologies. Excellent stories, easily accessible and though-provoking, although some will seem dated. "A Pail of Air" by Fritz Leiber has stuck with me since I read it circa '58.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?298440
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2318155.Omnibus_of_Science_Fiction
http://www.iblist.com/book12137.htm

for starters.

This wouldn't fly in the UK (under Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA)).
You forgot? Tough.
You used some honey-pot ruse like this? Tough.
Either you give the key/passphrase to decrypt the file when requested or go to jail. End of discussion.

... which is precisely why TrueCrypt (and probably other encryption systems) has the ability to have hidden encryption on volumes : the "plausible deniability" defence.

"OK, so you, Mr Legal System have spent lots of time and effort dragging me, Mr Innocent J. Hacker, through the court system to make me decrypt the device ... and I see the redneck sherrif has got a $5 receipt from AToolCo and a copy of Piers Anthony's "On the Uses of Torture" on his desk. So I guess this is a Galileo moment, and those are the instruments. The passphrases for the files you're interested in are ..." And you go on to describe a plausible passphrase generating scheme.

The files are decrypted. There may be some interesting stuff in there - say some confidential documents from your last job, which you shouldn't really have - but nothing criminal to justify the large WOMBAT that the Law enforcement have just indulged in.

Now ... the Law are back at square one. Either they accept that you don't really have any naughty files, or they get out the $5 wrench and book a CIA flight to ...

Where do the CIA render people to now?

There's also ISFDB. It's just a database of fiction, but it seems to be very complete.

They would be divided [...] and insisting that first contact is a sign of the end of days and the aliens are devils in disguise.

Or not even disguised, in some cases.

Niven?

Do you mean this book:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?95586

??

E.g. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle describe in "The Mote in God's Eye" http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1495 tablets.

I recall lots of SciFi novels that do, but can not recall the names right now.

Yep... I think that it was published in Asimov's science fiction magazine; July 1969 seems to ring a bell. I remember the cover distinctly; it was sitting on my nightstand for a while recently.

And yep... a few minutes searching finds it to be July 1968. The story is "Hawk Among the Sparrows" by Dean McLaughlin. Cover image here: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?ANLGJUL68

And no, I'm not that old... we bought a whole collection of them at a bookstore in Chattanooga a couple years ago.

It's an old, old story: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy builds girl.

(Shamelessly stolen from my uncle the science fiction writer.)

It's been reprinted a couple of times. Good luck!

Just because you (think you) can avoid this
cognitive pitfall more effectively than most
people does not mean you are not subject to it.

Elitist much?

And, even if you can avoid it completely,
and tower above the rest of us in your
rationality, it does not mean you don't have
to deal with our defect. See "Persistence of Vision":
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41070>
.

Or we can wait for a planet that gets so addicted to people it tracks them down... http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?350901

Wouldn't they hire great known writers to create game-friendly stories

http://www.isfdb.org/ Apart from the very handy website, there is a nice MySQL database dump that is very easy to grab and use yourself. It helped me find some old novels that had read that I couldn't remember the name of, but knew when they were published. A few queries, and there you go.

Yeah, this is the same guy who hopes to live long enough so that he can live forever. Keep on reaching for that rainbow, Ray.

Funny you should use that phrasing, since Tom Rainbow suggested over 20 years ago that we might be the last generation who see death as inevitable.

Then again, Tom Rainbow is dead.

You forgot Science Fiction (sf)

This book was written by someone that doesn't appear to read or watch much in the way of SF beyond what they see at the movies.

It's called The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin.

In case you don't care to RTFRulebook, it can be synopsized as follows: The Universe doesn't care, physics dictate survival or death.

You refer to slow glass, the technology responsible for the psychological insights and human drama in the story Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw.
Rightfully a critically acclaimed story and classic SF.

Wow^2. I actually remembered the author correctly. (Anthony Boucher) ...and... you remembered that it appeared in Astounding.

I bow to your omniscience.

"My personal expectation is that robots will BE their brain, and that the bodies they use will be their peripherals."

I concur. That degree of mind/body compartmentalization or disjointedness may not be so easy for us to comprehend because we humans are inextricably made out of meat.

Oh, and we do genetically designed slaves too.

One of his earliest works??? Thanks for making me feel old, I can remember when it came out!! But I'm reassured to see that it came out in 1993, and so is (just) from the second half of his novel writing career (first was Sundiver in 1980). In fact, as much as I love the ol' Brinster, his earlier novels are the best so far, IMHO.

Reminds me of a story, Down Under Crater Billy by Stephen L. Burns. In it, it is discovered that certain people have a genetic predisposition for technology to fail around them!

No. At least not according to isbn.nu or amazon but strangely enough, ISFDB does show Pournelle as an author. Well, lets check a more authoritative source... Library of Congress and you are definitely correct, Pournelle is also listed. Thanks for the info!

Yes. it was Asimov; "The Martian Way". If you want to read it again. try one of these references

Science Fiction already has two sites (though not with rankings) with tens of thousands of book and story titles already listed. They are:

The Locus Index; and

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

The Locus database covers SF/F/H/etc. from 1984 on fairly comprehensively, while the ISFDB covers a wider timeframe, but isn't (yet) nearly as comprehensive. ISFDB was also suffering under some badwidth caps earlier in the year, but expects their problems to be solved (via hosting through the Texas A&M library system) very shortly. Both are well worth bookmarking and using.

This has already been done for speculative fiction. Unfortunately, their ISP pulled the plug on cgi scripts a couple of months ago according to this news update.