Fred Pohl. I didn't drop him, I just thought his last book was boring.
I made it about halfway through Tale of Two Cities, it started becoming a tedious read, but I don't think language had much to do with it, and neither would it be presented as a serial. His A Christmas Carol is still a favorite, though.
Indeed they are.
Couch
I woke up about twenty after seven. I put on a robe and trudged bleary-eyed to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. Destiny woke up just as I was going to the head. I still think that's a stupid name for a bathroom.
She had the robot make French toast and sausage and was in the living room drinking coffee and watching the news when I got dressed and went in there. "I wish we had some pork sausage," she said.
Well, anyone can make those errors when very sleepy or drunk, but some folks always do. The last data I saw said that only 3% of Americans read books regularly. So 97% of Americans are either illiterate (1% of the population) or aliterate. I'm pretty sure that's where the problem stems from.
No need to do so in every damned post, but yeah.
Oops, that's "get off of Weird Al's lawn."
I still have paperbacks with prices printed on the covers of a dollar or less... but I'm getting pretty old. Books back then were more the size of Nobots than today's books. Of course, back then a gallon of gasoline was under fifty cents and a six pack of beer was about a dollar.
These days, judging by what I've seen, new paperbacks range from $6 to $10, so $7 doesn't seem too out of line.
The library here has a book sale every year, and I picked up a huge writer's guide for two bucks. Its copyright date was 1978 and it was completely obsolete. Along with talking about typewriters and carbon paper and estimating the number of words, it stated that publishers would rather publish two 40,000 word books than one 80,000 word book. When Twain was asked how many words should be in a book he said "as many as it takes to tell the story, and no more."
How times have changed!
It annoys the hell out of me that my books are so damned expensive, which is why I wanted Mars, Ho! to be 100,000 words. I'd hoped that possibly Baen might publish it so it would be, oddly, far cheaper. I can buy a copy of Andy Wier's excellent novel The Martian from Barnes and Noble or Amazon for less than I can get a copy of my own Paxil Diaries from my printer, and Wier's book is a lot longer.
It's been on TV network news, too.
Who cares what that idiot thinks? She is completely unimportant.
Drills
I got woke up early again, about five thirty this time. Fire in passengers quarters number forty seven. God damned drills, but I had to get up and inspect forty seven anyway. I put on a robe and trudged down there.
Yep, just a stupid drill. I noticed that Tammy was in the commons with the German woman as I walked past on my way back home. It was still early enough that I could still get another hour's sleep or so.
You, sir, are an abusive moron who is obviously not intelligent enough to realize that the Mars rovers are spinoffs from Apollo. Were it not for Apollo there would be no Hubble, no Martian robots, no ISS, none of the space exploration done today. Obviously unlike you, I remember Sputnik. We can thank the Russians for Apollo.
Now crawl back to 4chan where flamebait like yours is welcome. Where in the hell are the moderators?
I agree, more investigation is warranted.
NASA doesn't have a lift vehicle, but three American companies do. The last ISS resupply was delivered on an American rocket, and the Dragon capsule being tested now will hold seven people.
I was working at Disney World when the first shuttle took off, and saw every shuttle launch before Challenger without a TV. One was a night launch I saw from my mom's house in Tampa. We drove to the cape to watch one, man that thing is LOUD.
The first one I not only didn't see firsthand was Challenger; I missed that launch completely. I was in Illinois looking for work (we'd just had our first kid and moved back to be close to family and besides, Florida is a shitty place to live).
The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.
