Dreamer Easy

Warts and all, I'm really enjoying re-reading The Mote in God's Eye. It's crisply written, although I think it takes us too long to get to the Moties, who are the best-drawn characters. And that moment when Bury sees the spacesuit with three sets of eyes? Priceless!

However: the Moties have genetic engineers. Here collapseth the entire premise of the story. Whoops.

(And while I'm kvetching: how did the Moties test their Crazy Eddie Drive?)

ETA: ( But wait! There's more... )

Excessive Daytime Sleepiness is like the bit in Legacy of Heorot where the space colonists have a dodgy power supply for their computer and keep shouting, "Save it, save it, save it!" Woke up from a nap this afternoon with the first energy I've had for days and went, 'Quick!! Vacuum the back room!!!"

In unrelated news, there's a whole stack of new CD-Rs here which came with a white label already attached on the top, ready for labelling. I assume it's this which has somehow rendered the working surface of every disc sticky. Not only will they not burn, they're freaking the Mac the hell out.

I was thinking about that thing in Larry Niven's Known Space stories where female aliens are almost always non-sentient, and human women are a remarkable exception. Kzin females and Puppeteer females are animals, and it's hinted that the latter are eaten alive by their own offspring. I'm pretty sure there are other examples too (ETA: Yep - Thrint females are non-sentient). Where the heck did Niven get this idea? Not from nature, that's for sure. Weird.

Before sending it off (tysolna, I still need your snail mail), I re-read three of my favourite Larry Niven stories from his anthology Neutron Star - the eponymous Hugo winner, At the Core, and perhaps my favourite Niven story, Grendel. I probably haven't read these since I was a teenager, when I was in love with Niven's "Known Space", its species and its physics and its gadgets. (More recently, I was similarly delighted by the physics of the galaxy in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep.) The stories are arguably reeeaaallly science essays, but they're written so crisply and wittily that it doesn't matter. (As a grownup used to squeaky-clean TV heroes, I'm also rather pleased by Beowulf Schaeffer's self-interest and slightly dodgy ethics. :-)

Five bits - some of which I still quote occasionally:

1. Bey! What'll I do?
2. "You would be interested in a high-paying job?" "I'd be fascinated by a high paying job."
3. Oho, said I to myself, said I. [years later I discovered this in turn quotes Gilbert and Sullivan.]
4. "My General Products hull just failed." "I beg your pardon?"
5. "I was thinking that the two of you are like a medium-sized beach ball standing next to a baseball bat."

ETA: I can't help but imagine David Tennant as the seven foot tall, skinny as a rake Schaeffer. :-)