Pride of Wooloo

Alt Text: A trio of young birds peek out of a nesting box when one of them spots a giant moth. It backs away in horror nearly toppling over.

Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler

Still, these days Larry Niven is probably most interesting for how much of a formative influence he was on Terry Pratchett.

Yeah, and in more recent SF you've got people like Stephen Baxter achieving similar things. Is the Xeelee sequence well-written? No. But the big cosmic ideas are phenomenal.

And even Wells could do humour - The Invisible Man is actually really funny.

You can really see how Theodore Sturgeon was inspired to create his famous law - "90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud" - at the time.

Oh definitely. There really is a lot of astonishingly good sci-fi from the era... but unfortunately, there's the almost unreadable likes of Asimov and Heinlein too.

The narrator's male in this passage, unlike the other one. Quite how a man like Heinlein - who'd been active in free love circles for decades by this point - had the same general understanding of women's bodies as a couple of 12 year old lads swapping rumours behind the bike sheds, is beyond me.

Deety appeared, set down a loaded hamper. "That's the last." She had her hair up in a bath knot and was dressed solely in rubber gloves. "Hi, dearest. Aunt Hilda, I'm ready to help." "Not much you can do, Deety hon - unless you want to relieve Zebbie." Deety was staring at the corpse and did not look happy - her nipples were down flat. "Go take a bath!" I told her. "Scram." "Do I stink that badly?" "You stink swell, honey girl. But Sharpie pointed out that this may be our last chance at soap and hot water in quite a while. I've promised her that we won't leave for Canopus and points east until she has her bath. So get yours out of the way, then you can help me stow while she gets sanitary." "All right." Deety backed off and her nipples showed faintly -not rigid but she was feeling better. My darling keeps her feelings out of her face, mostly - but those pretty pink spigots are barometers of her morale.

Also from Number of the Beast:

Different book but ol' Bob wrote a lot of staggeringly weird and creepy stuff

SPUNG!

Ahh, the immortal works of Robert Heinlein. Who can forget this passage from The Number of the Beast?

I'm pretty sure I would have thought Blindsight was the greatest book of all time if I'd read it at ten

Honestly, Wells probably holds up better today than the likes of Heinlein and Asimov.

Over on Reddit someone is asking for science fiction for their precocious young reader and the people there are suggesting books that were old when that kid's grandparents were the same age as the kid, for fuck's sake if you didn't know any SF books from this millennium maybe sit this question out

The Jeremy Brett version of Scandal does it really well, too. While following the story closely, it manages to subtly change the emphasis away from "Holmes is outwitted by WOMAN!!" to "Holmes is horrified to realise he's been on the wrong side right from the start".

Yeah, Brett's is so good. He really enjoys having a chance to be extra about things, and doesn't understand why social norms say he shouldn't be rude to someone who's already annoyed him first. But he also cares deeply about *people*.

Probably more than any of the other films, Final Frontier gets the feeling of an episode of the original series writ large. A deeply crap season 3 episode, but a TOS episode nonetheless.

Russell T Davies blames Reform and Trump for decline in UK gay rights Screenwriter known for reviving Doctor Who and writing Queer As Folk says LGBT community needs to fight back

quick question russ, who is in government rn

Them: What are your favourite books?
Me: ...
Me: I read a book once. Green, it was.

If a psychologist could come up with a treatment for the phenomenon of "someone asks me for a book rec > I forget every book I have ever read" that would be a good deed. #UkKidlit

I like using a line from Doctor Who - "she's my carer - she cares so I don't have to..."

The first rule of paradox club is not the included in the set of all rules of paradox club.

the third rule of paradox club is to disregard all the rules of paradox club

Dammit. I honestly was going to but I got distracted by a notification. Sorry

Although once considered the greatest performer of his era, in later life Dwaynethe Rockjohnson saw his career decline and could only find work in less prestigious dramatic forms, like the so-called "kinema".

I dread to think what his "rad legal takes" are actually like.

Jesus.

I often struggle with creative projects because all the ideas I come up with seem like utter shit to me. John Boyne, alas, has never had that problem.