When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer are excellent period pieces. I believe they were written during the Great Depression.
I enjoyed all of the first trilogy. The second trilogy was more work, I think he had pretty much run out of things to say, although "The One Tree" has a great twist towards the end that I sure didn't see coming.
Oh, I agree, you certainly can't take them seriously, and the last 2 books or so were pretty awful. The middle books are a fun read as just pure space opera, as each side revs up their weapons and uses their super-duper-super blasters to blast entire space fleets apart. Perfect for when you want to switch your brain off and just have some fun.
As I recall she was about 19 and Jubal was in his 40s or 50s. It just reminded me that as Heinlein got older, the stories ended up with younger and younger women sleeping with older and older guys. By the end it was getting pretty creepy.
Personally, I like Heinlein's earlier work (e.g. The Moon Is Harsh Mistress, which I think was his best) much more than the last few books, which seem incoherent. But in any event, read Varley, he is definitely superb.
If you like Heinlein, check out John Varley's most recent series (something like "Red Thunder", "Red Lightning", something something...) It's a trilogy that starts with ex-astronaut teaming up with some other folks including an oddball genius who has just invented a space drive in order to go to Mars. It's pure Heinlein, including the kind of creepy part in the last book where the young lady falls in love with the old guy.
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever.
Not quite forgotten, but I keep running into people who haven't heard of the series. Great read, really; it's a strangely wonderful blend of Tolkienesque high fantasy and dark smarminess.
I don't know why this got modded to oblivion but Thomas Covenant was fantastic. It can be pretty depressing but as I recall it just has some amazing twists and turns, well worth reading.
I read the Lensman series when I was a teenager (a good 40+ years ago) and still have dogeared copies of the books. One thing I've always wondered was whether that edition was somehow abridged or rewritten. My impression was that the original stuff came out in a series of magazines? There are just some odd gaps and jumps in the books. If I'm right I'd love to read the original stories.
The answer is that those meetings don't work very well. You get people not paying attention, people answering their email, people who are hard to understand over the phone, etc etc etc. Such meetings are very rarely productive. If you are having a lot of them, time to starting looking for another job, because your company is in trouble.
Yeah, a country run by a theocracy that has announced it wants to annihilate one of its neighbors and is busy getting nuclear weapons, what could possibly go wrong?
I buy new cars and then drive them "forever" because I'm not interested in buying someone else's problems. Sounds like you've been manipulated into thinking used cars are a good deal.
Gosh, thanks. I definitely didn't see the link. As I said earlier, the story doesn't include the entire text message which seems pretty important here. I know I'm supposed to just condemn this but I'd rather actually know what happened before freaking out. My apologies for wanting some context.
This is slashdot. Amerika is the center of all evil. Get with the program.
And will the other 200 people carrying weapons also have that level of training? For that matter, how well does YOUR training hold up when it's a fire fight and not target practice on the range?
Or, in this particular case, nuclear bombs kill people. Remember, the only reason there are sanctions is that Iran is defying the United Nations (NOT the USA) and refusing to halt it's nuclear weapons program. Iran is determined to become a nuclear power, regardless of the cost to its own people.
The whooshing sound you hear is my sarcasm going right over your head.
What you are saying is EXACTLY my point. The post I responded to said nothing had been done by NASA in the last 50 years... and I said "right, 50 years ago we had..."
Right. 50 years ago we were landing rovers on Mars. 50 years ago we had orbiters around Saturn and Mercury. 50 years ago we were sending a probe to Pluto. 50 years ago we had two spacecraft entering interstellar space. 50 years ago we had landed on an asteroid.
The December Scientific American outlines a step by step program that makes small, incremental increases in our capability that eventually get us to Mars. Unlike the "invest tons of money and build a huge rocket" approach, this gradually increases our capability within our means to pay for it, so at no point are we going to lose ground, unlike the Apollo program where once the massive funding dried up, we were done.
This has nothing to do with whether the motives of the various groups are good or bad or right or wrong (although I do disagree with the idea that newspapers are dead). But that's irrelevant. The issue is that we have two organizations, each of which creates a "product" that is an aggregation of information. Each organization, for its own reasons, wants to restrict the product. Why does slashdotters think one organization will fail and the other will succeed?
How come when the NY Times puts up a paywall, Slash think converges on "ha ha information wants to be free, this will never work" but when Wikipedia proposes trying to limit access in the US to make a political statement, it's a great idea?
Slashdot Mirror
Hal Clement is excellent... well worth reading.
When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer are excellent period pieces. I believe they were written during the Great Depression.
I enjoyed all of the first trilogy. The second trilogy was more work, I think he had pretty much run out of things to say, although "The One Tree" has a great twist towards the end that I sure didn't see coming.
Oh, I agree, you certainly can't take them seriously, and the last 2 books or so were pretty awful. The middle books are a fun read as just pure space opera, as each side revs up their weapons and uses their super-duper-super blasters to blast entire space fleets apart. Perfect for when you want to switch your brain off and just have some fun.
As I recall she was about 19 and Jubal was in his 40s or 50s. It just reminded me that as Heinlein got older, the stories ended up with younger and younger women sleeping with older and older guys. By the end it was getting pretty creepy.
Personally, I like Heinlein's earlier work (e.g. The Moon Is Harsh Mistress, which I think was his best) much more than the last few books, which seem incoherent. But in any event, read Varley, he is definitely superb.
If you like Heinlein, check out John Varley's most recent series (something like "Red Thunder", "Red Lightning", something something...) It's a trilogy that starts with ex-astronaut teaming up with some other folks including an oddball genius who has just invented a space drive in order to go to Mars. It's pure Heinlein, including the kind of creepy part in the last book where the young lady falls in love with the old guy.
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever.
Not quite forgotten, but I keep running into people who haven't heard of the series. Great read, really; it's a strangely wonderful blend of Tolkienesque high fantasy and dark smarminess.
I don't know why this got modded to oblivion but Thomas Covenant was fantastic. It can be pretty depressing but as I recall it just has some amazing twists and turns, well worth reading.
I read the Lensman series when I was a teenager (a good 40+ years ago) and still have dogeared copies of the books. One thing I've always wondered was whether that edition was somehow abridged or rewritten. My impression was that the original stuff came out in a series of magazines? There are just some odd gaps and jumps in the books. If I'm right I'd love to read the original stories.
The answer is that those meetings don't work very well. You get people not paying attention, people answering their email, people who are hard to understand over the phone, etc etc etc. Such meetings are very rarely productive. If you are having a lot of them, time to starting looking for another job, because your company is in trouble.
Yeah, a country run by a theocracy that has announced it wants to annihilate one of its neighbors and is busy getting nuclear weapons, what could possibly go wrong?
I buy new cars and then drive them "forever" because I'm not interested in buying someone else's problems. Sounds like you've been manipulated into thinking used cars are a good deal.
Then don't. No one holds a gun to your head and forces you to buy a system pre-loaded with MS Windows.
whoosh
Gosh, thanks. I definitely didn't see the link. As I said earlier, the story doesn't include the entire text message which seems pretty important here. I know I'm supposed to just condemn this but I'd rather actually know what happened before freaking out. My apologies for wanting some context.
This is slashdot. Amerika is the center of all evil. Get with the program.
I'm not, I have my tinfoil hat on
And will the other 200 people carrying weapons also have that level of training? For that matter, how well does YOUR training hold up when it's a fire fight and not target practice on the range?
What a great idea, I'd love to be in a tin can at 35,000 feet with a bunch of untrained people whipping out their guns and blazing away. Brilliant!!!
Or, in this particular case, nuclear bombs kill people. Remember, the only reason there are sanctions is that Iran is defying the United Nations (NOT the USA) and refusing to halt it's nuclear weapons program. Iran is determined to become a nuclear power, regardless of the cost to its own people.
You do know that the current issue isn't the USA stealing resources, it's Iran trying to develop nuclear weapons, right?
The whooshing sound you hear is my sarcasm going right over your head.
What you are saying is EXACTLY my point. The post I responded to said nothing had been done by NASA in the last 50 years... and I said "right, 50 years ago we had ..."
Got it?
Right. 50 years ago we were landing rovers on Mars. 50 years ago we had orbiters around Saturn and Mercury. 50 years ago we were sending a probe to Pluto. 50 years ago we had two spacecraft entering interstellar space. 50 years ago we had landed on an asteroid.
The December Scientific American outlines a step by step program that makes small, incremental increases in our capability that eventually get us to Mars. Unlike the "invest tons of money and build a huge rocket" approach, this gradually increases our capability within our means to pay for it, so at no point are we going to lose ground, unlike the Apollo program where once the massive funding dried up, we were done.
Right... the Chinese are almost up to where the USA was 50 years ago, so they must be ahead.
Right, because bug fixes never introduce bugs. Code just keeps getting better and better and better.
This has nothing to do with whether the motives of the various groups are good or bad or right or wrong (although I do disagree with the idea that newspapers are dead). But that's irrelevant. The issue is that we have two organizations, each of which creates a "product" that is an aggregation of information. Each organization, for its own reasons, wants to restrict the product. Why does slashdotters think one organization will fail and the other will succeed?
How come when the NY Times puts up a paywall, Slash think converges on "ha ha information wants to be free, this will never work" but when Wikipedia proposes trying to limit access in the US to make a political statement, it's a great idea?