They Speak Very Well Of You". -

Stories Set In The Culture In Which Things Went Wrong Tended To Start With Humans Losing Or Forgetting Or Deliberately Leaving Behind Their Terminal. It Was A Conventional Opening, The Equivalent Of Straying Off The Path In The Wild Woods In One Age, Or A Car Breaking Down At Night On A Lonely Road In Another.

Most Mainstream Male Fiction Is Littered With Heroines, And Female Characters Are Basically So Great, You Want To Fall In Love With Them.

Empires Are Synonymous With Centralized If Occasionally Schismatized Hierarchical Power Structures In Which Influence Is Restricted To An Economically Privileged Class Retaining Its Advantages Through Usually A Judicious Use Of Oppression And Skilled Manipulation Of Both The Society's Information Dissemination Systems And Its Lesser As A Rule Nominally Independent Power Systems. In Short, It's All About Dominance.

I Just Took [my Cancer Diagnosis] As Bad Luck, Basically. It Did Strike Me Almost Immediately, My Atheist Sort Of Thing Kicked In And I Thought "ha, If I Was A God-botherer, I'd Be Thinking, Why Me God? What Have I Done To Deserve This?" And I Thought At Least I'm Free Of That, At Least I Can Simply Treat It As Bad Luck And Get On With It.

I Think We Need Politicians; We Need People Who Want To Serve.