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The Chronoliths
Witness to it all is our narrator, Scott Warden. There's nothing special about this guy. He's no clever scientist, no tough soldier. He's just a computer programmer who happens to be close to the location of the first arrival. After that he's pulled into the Chronolith investigation by a series of seeming coincidences. But where the manipulation of time is involved, coincidence becomes a slippery concept--something his co-investigators are well aware of.
I consider this quiet, unassuming novel to be on the cutting edge of science fiction for this reason: it creates a literary metaphor for our current view (and fears) of the near future. Just as giant, mutant bugs stood for our fear of the bomb in the '50s, the Chronoliths represent our fear of what's just around the corner today. But today we can no longer easily predict what the future holds. Science changes things too quickly--so quickly that we can only say with confidence that we cannot say what the future will be like.
Science fiction writers have devised a variety of means to cope with this threat to their livelihood. Vernor Vinge pulls off a plausible (and excellent) space opera in A Fire Upon the Deep by having the universe limit how far science can progress depending on its location in the galaxy. Other writers retreat to the very near future. The rise in popularity of alternate history stories could be another byproduct of this dilemma.
But in The Chronoliths Wilson doesn't resort to any tricks. The novel is all about the unknowableness of the future, as represented by the Chronoliths themselves: impenetrable, unstoppable, and, most importantly, of our own making.
*Perhaps one reason Wilson isn't as well known as he should be is that his novels are not as strong as his short fiction. The Chronoliths, interestingly, is his first novel written in first-person, the point of view he chose for many of his best short stories including "The Perseids" and "The Inner Inner City."
You can purchase The Chronoliths from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered trolling community when recently Slashdot confirmed that, after several changes were made to production Slashcode, wide posts account for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all Slashdot posts. Coming on the heels of the latest verions of IE which make page-widening more difficult, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. the wide posts that we love are collapsing into the narrow posts that we are used to, as further exemplified by the lack of Slashbots complaining about difficulty reading Slashdot's articles.
You don't need to be a Klerck to predict PWP's future. The hand writing is on the wall: PWP faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for PWP because PWP is dying. Things are looking very bad for PWP. As many of us are already aware, PWP continues to be defeated by users with thresholds of 1 or higher. Mod points flow like a river of blood. Klerck's PWP-bot posts are the most endangered of them all, having been filtered early on because of their uniformity.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
PWP leader Klerck states that there are 7 wide posts in the average Slashdot article. How many non-wide crapflood posts are there? Let's see. The number of crapflood versus wide posts on Slahdot is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7*5 = 35 non-wide crapflood posts in every Slashdot article. Tacosnotting posts on Slashdot are about half of the volume of crapflood posts. Therefore there are about 17 tacosnotting posts per article. A recent article put Goatse.cx trolls at about 80 percent of total troll posts. Therefore there are a hell of a lot of homosexual trolls. This is consistent with the number of Goatse.cx Slashdot posts.
But Slashdot is only part of the picture. Due to the troubles at Slashdot, negative revenue and so on, the site will soon go out of business and many users will flock to alternative weblogs, where PWP is almost completely unknown. Trollaxor.com, the popular troll hangout, is also dying, its corpse sodomized in yet another Greek bath house.
All major surveys show that PWP has steadily declined in the scope of all troll posts. PWP is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If PWP is to survive at all it will be among Blog faggot using outdated versions of Slashcode. PWP continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, PWP is dead.
- poopbot: information likes to be narrow
BELLEVUE, WA-- You may gloat now if you wish, but your deathmatch victory was cheaply won, and you will not fair so well in a rematch. If the playing field had been level, you most surely would have lost.
I'm ready for that rematch.
You see, I was disadvantaged from the start, with my 38 ping to your 30 ping. It is quite obvious to me that had those pings been reversed, you would have tasted the sweet load from my shotgun far more often than you did. Those 8 precious milliseconds were all you needed to evade my blasts.
And were it not for my inferior hardware, I would have squeezed those extra frames into victory. I would have had to be more than human to battle you with my mere 85 frames per second. It is truly sad that you would cheer, knowing that I was handicapped from the beginning.
Had I not been playing with a dirty mouseball on a worn-out mousepad, my twitch-like responses would have been more than enough to rail you mid-air. But alas, that and my coffee-soaked keyboard may have affected my play.
It seems barely worth mentioning that I had not even played that map before. It would be beneath me to say that I had barely gotten in my four hours practice time beforehand.
There were times during the match that I wished I didn't have two copies of Photoshop running in the background, and that I wasn't downloading MP3s from that private archive. And if my roommate hadn't been leeching ISOs off of my hard drive through the local network at the same time, I'm sure the outcome of our battle would have been much different.
But I think the turning point may have occurred either when that ICQ message popped me out of the gaming window, or when I spilled my can of 5-Alive. Had I been drinking cola like I should have, I'm sure we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
And there was that moment when I accidentally knocked out my monitor cable from my machine. Those few seconds certainly cost me a frag. But that pales in comparison to the instant I hit my Windows key just when I had you in my crosshairs.
I know it was my own fault answering that telephone call from my girlfriend mid-match. I had to get up anyways to let my dog outside for a pee. But none of that would have mattered had my chair wheel not gotten caught in that rut in the carpet.
So you see, it is apparent to me that your win was not entirely based on your skill. It is quite clear that you were lucky.
But I must take at least some blame. I really shouldn't have rebinded all my keys when I noticed I was using my CTF config, and I'm sure I didn't help my own cause by readjusting my mouse sensitivity while you were gathering weapons.
So I think it is only fair to both of us that we replay that match on my server. Good luck.
On an unrelated note, anyone else notice the karma system has changed? Apparently, my karma is now "excellent." Man, I want a point system back!
So when I hit the cap, shouldn't my karma be "most excellent"?
Nope, no sig
Whoa, slow down there. This is science fiction, not high fantasy.
Dude, ducks float. Therefor she must be a witch.
On an unrelated note, anyone else notice the karma system has changed? Apparently, my karma is now "excellent." Man, I want a point system back!
My Karma is NOT "Excellent" damnit! I want a number score!
Pgpckt: [panting] Grade me...look at me...evaluate and rank me! Oh, I'm good, good, good, and oh so smart! Grade me!
[CmdrTaco scribbles "Karma = 50" on a piece of paper]
[Pgpckt walks off, muttering crazily and sighing]
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