In recent years, American publishers have embraced trade paperback wholeheartedly, but not with good intentions. Standard practice now, for a book released as a hardcover original, is to issue a trade paperback a year to 18 months after the hardcover if sales warrant, and then, if the sales of the t...

Then again, if you believe the Bible was editted to reflect the mores of the early Church c. 300 AD, Council of Nicea etc., then this whole passage could have been fashioned at that time... An untenable belief. The Nephilim are mentioned in the Old Testament, which is the Hebrew Bible; and the Jews...

I think if you removed all Earthpower from the Earth it would cease to exist. It would be like removing all physical energy from this Earth. Matter is energy in stasis. 'Permanence at rest and permanence in motion, participants in the Power that remains,' said the Giants: they knew the physics of th...

Prayers for you and yours, Danlo. When I had chickenpox at age 5 I ran a fever that touched 106 at one point. I couldn't stop tearing around the house. Didn't feel sick at all, just very very hot. On the other hand, the fever of 104 I ran with complications of flu at 26 put me in a delirium and perm...

Not yet. Canadians visiting the U.S. will require a passport (or other secure document, to be specified later) to visit the U.S. starting, I believe, at the end of 2007. There's no specific requirement for Americans to have a passport to visit Canada, though, of course, getting back into the U.S. co...

Or not, as the case may be. I thought it was ghastly, particularly the casting (replete with American voice actors I recognized from endless Hanna-Barbera tosh on Saturday mornings). On the other hand, it was nothing like as bad as the Rankin-Bass Return of the King , complete with Broadway chorus O...

black_grape wrote:Just as an aside - Did anyone notice in the second to last paragraph of Runes that Jeremiah 'shouted encouragement to the other riders' . He's obviously found his voice in the Land.

Or someone's voice has found him, muah hah hah.

AKA Tropical Storm Alberto, now. . . . Not all bad. They say it's unlikely to develop into a hurricane, and the rain is expected to help after a dangerous season for forest fires.

On the other hand, it may bode ill that they named it after my brother.

10 and 8. But you're quite right, Somberlain. The plural of 'Amnion' is 'Amnion'. 'Amnioni' is the singular: a member of the Amnion species is an Amnioni. (This is the normal inflection of collective names in Semitic languages: cf. afrit—afriti, djinn—djinni, Israel—Israeli.) So I'm claiming credit ...

The trouble with that is that Fleshharrower had no reason to go after the Warward once they entered Doom's Retreat. A quarter of his forces would have been enough to keep Troy from reentering the Land, freeing the rest to burn, pillage, rape and destroy to their Illearth hearts' content. Revelstone ...

www.farseer.org/

Needless to say, I am not Michael Babigian.

As a science writer, Asimov was nothing short of brilliant. He developed a prose style and method of exposition that were perfectly adapted to the subject matter, and could explain any given scientific topic (except those requiring heavy math) more clearly and concisely than any other science writer...

A pregnant goldfish is called a twit or a twerp. Speaking of which, 'twerp', meaning a foolish or disagreeably eccentric person, derives from T.W. Earp, an Oxford don of the early 20th century. J.R.R. Tolkien, who was an undergraduate at Oxford during Earp's time there, referred to him as 'T.W. Ear...

[How come that guy could get 18 kazillion novels published when he can't write dialogue to save his life, and I couldn't even get *one* published? Two reasons: 1. Most of his 18 kazillion books were not novels. There is no dialogue in books of popularized science, which accounts for the majority of...

Really? I thought it was because he fed their paranoid fantasies about how Cavewights were an oppressed minority who really ought to rule the world, and promised (without ever delivering) to put them in their rightful place as top dogs. Sort of like why people join the Democrats.

They have Big Brother in China, North Korea, and Cuba; they have him, too, in Iran and some other hardline Muslim nations; also, allowing for technological failings that make detailed surveillance of the rural population impossible, in a number of African countries. What you have in America, for all...

Murrin wrote:I'm partway through Part One of Ethics.

Aristotle's Nicomachaean Ethics, his other book of ethics, or somebody else's Ethics?

Just so I don't say something stupid about the wrong book.

Still can't believe anyone could be so closed minded enough to act like that. It's shocking to find someone who could be so bigoted. You mean the fat woman in the video? Assuming that wasn't staged (and I have my suspicions), I'd say she wasn't a bigot so much as an all-round head case. There's lit...

I could expand that to include just plain Religious/Spiritual/Strong Un-Scientific Belief bigotry. True. Except that for various reasons, few people are willing to express anti-Muslim bigotry in public. Reason #1, alas, being plain old-fashioned fear. Nobody, especially in the media, wants to be th...