Charlie Stross

I've been doing that all along in the Laundry, albeit less with media/pop culture and more with espionage/secret state/history.

No, it's the other way round. The Phibes menage's presence in the book is entirely due to me seeing the violin in the movie and thinking "wait up!"

No, it was a direct homage to the (real, but different from the novel) Dr Phibes movies.

Here's the cover of the book.

It is time the USA's former friends and allies turned away in disgust.

He is already committed to a policy of Imposing fascist governments on other democracies including and especially the USA's close allies.

How can even conservatives go along with becoming vassals to the whimsical murderousness of a corrupt feckless tyrant?

He is Harkonnen

He has no plan in this war and now threatens allies who fail to support him on the reasonable grounds that it's a guaranteed military disaster and utterly immoral as well as illegal.

It's at the very least plausible that he did this rather than deal with accusations, true or false, that he likes raping little girls.

I'm always amazed by the lack of self-respect and what used to be common decency shown by the current UK Right even on what used to be their own terms.

They are cheerleading a US President who has started a war, illegally in both US and international law, that threatens to smash the world's economy

It's a really fun book, too!

This is a whole lot of fun!

Think superheroes, only English, and the big activating event was listening to the Beatles' 13th studio album and transcending: the whole thing is a paen to the forgotten ephemera of British 1970s culture.

You should read it. OK?

Picking a fight with a critic is, however, somewhat less self-destructive than picking a fight with social media.

I sometimes respond to reviews/opinions that contain clear factual errors (eg. a publication year is wrong) with a brief correction. The reviewers opinions? I've got nothing to say: they're none of my business.

This book is very good and you will enjoy it. Get it cheap now!

I was never much of a fan, and lost all interest about midway through the third movie. Wizards in Space is simply not my groove.

Daaaamn!

(I want to do a Prisoner of Zenda myself, but it's going to have to wait until book 3 of the new series, if indeed the new series survives long enough to reach book 2 and continue.)

"Soylent Green is … people!!!"

Mandelson - 'Triangles [Xanax] are all very well but you need someone to use them on'

They didn't call him "the prince of darkness" in Westminster for nothing!

"JEFFREY Epstein illegally supplied Peter Mandelson with drugs while he was a government minister, The Mail on Sunday can reveal today." [Mail on Sunday front page]

"Mandelson tells the sex offender that drugs thought to be Xanax sedatives are ‘all very well but you need someone to use them on…’"

To be precise, it all depends what the word "right" means. I'm pretty sure at this point that the only thing keeping Trump from his enemies is the fear of nuclear war (he's of that age), and the USA may be at *our* throats in the very near future.

Galaxy Quest as Prisoner of Zenda?!? (That hadn't occurred to me!)

Yes, which means it's likely to be a very inhospitable neighbourhood for planets—they tend to get ejected very rapidly from binaries, never mind multiple binary systems, unless they're orbiting a long way apart, which these are not! Also, they're massive, hot, young stars (300My old).

If the USA is pushed towards petrol rationing, expect Trump to ban EV imports and manufacturing first: in fact, that'd be a warning sign of impending automotive doom. (He's not just in the pocket of Ford/GM/etc, he actively hates decarbonization and EVs.)

It's nice to have figures to back this up!

Nuremberg is at least accessible by electric train from pretty much all of Europe (Scotland included). Brisbane is effectively inaccessible except by airliner. (Yes, there are trains: it's 14 hours from Sydney by diesel-powered sleeper train, 900+ km.)

While I agree in principle I think we will need to re-visit this question in a few months, after Trump fucks that particular dog in public.

As a reminder: my only eligible work (in the Hugos) this year is my short novel "A Conventional Boy" (which is, alas, over the maximum word count for the Best Novella category so will be kerb-stomped by the big bois in the Best Novel crowd)

https://www.lacon.org/hugos/

They don't need an excuse to downsize, they need an excuse to have done so without tanking the share price. We're in an irrational bubble so slapping a fresh coat of "AI" paint on everything makes the questions go away.