Viewing profile — cstross

I'm not a fan of actually-existing late-stage capitalism, frankly. What I want is Banksian fully automated luxury gay space communism. (You can quote me on that. I hate what tech h…

This was written in 2005(!) -> No, I wrote that in 1998. It was published as the novelette "Lobsters" in Asimov's SF Magazine in 2002, made the Hugo and Nebula shortlists in 2003 (…

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Oh wow, it ran MWC Coherent! I still have a (printed on dead trees!) manual for Coherent 3.2 (286 version, circa 1990-91) kicking around. Ran multiuser (login via tty or virtual te…

Worth noting is that because Starship HLS carries astronauts, it has to be capable of abort-to-orbit -- that is, to cancel the landing at any point and return to Lunar orbit. The A…

I notice that the news media are bigging up the *private enterprise* angle for some reason -- marketing of commercial transport services maybe? But I also note that Odysseus cost N…

The problem with aviation is that if you get your innovation wrong, people die . With E-VTOL, which is presumably aiming for local-to-local flights, you have the added problem that…

Short inter-city distances over land run into competition from high speed rail. Which I know is not a thing in the Americas, but is all over Europe and can compete with turboprop a…

It was published in 2005 -- actually I wrote the 9 novelettes that went into it from 1998-2003 (they were originally published in Asimov's SF magazine from 2002-2004 before I assem…

Also worth noting is the work of the late George Turner (d. 1997), notably The Sea and Summer and Beloved Son .

Not only am I not Californian, I'm not American: I'm a left-wing Scot living in Edinburgh.

Amusingly (or enragingly) one of the effects of the Sad Puppy voting slate in 2015 was that it pushed William Patterson's magisterial and definitive biography of Robert A. Heinlein…

What Einstein did do for the Atomic Bomb was to co-sign Leo Szilard's letter which got the attention of President Eisenhower and kick-started the Manhattan Project. https://en.wiki…

Please can you add a big bold warning right at the top of your article? As it is, the safety details are buried way too deep for casual readers who might be skim-reading by the tim…

Modern airliners are designed for a 30 year service life, this one is barely at ten years old, so it won't be airframe at end of lifespan. One of the engines has only 800 cycles; t…

if true demonstrates a deep level of organization ineptness It's true, but your mistake is in assuming an actual organization exists. WSFS is just a club, the membership of which c…

It's bullshit. There was an extensive campaign in favour of a particular faction circa 2013-17 organized by two loose groups (the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies) which in retros…

you seem to think that Dave and Ben have any control whatsoever over the Chengdu worldcon. They don't. World science fiction conventions are autonomous and independent of one anoth…

Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. McD-D had for a couple of decades prioritized military/defense/space contracts over civil aviation and had turned into a finely tuned …

That's a good starting place, then. (It's still polite to ask/let the heirs know what you're doing.)

I can't find the bibliographic details for the 2013 edition, but the 1992 one was published by Addison-Wesley, so it's quite possible that anyone participating in this project to "…