Transterrestrial Musings




Defend Free Speech!


Amazon Honor System Click Here to Pay




Site designed by


Powered by
Movable Type 4.0
Biting Commentary about Infinity, and Beyond!

« Reagan Versus McCain | Main | Scopes of Evolution »

The Top Six Heroes

0 TrackBacks

Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: The Top Six Heroes.

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.transterrestrial.com/admin/mt-tb.cgi/10253

5 Comments

Robin Goodfellow wrote:

FYI, it's Neal.

Jim Bennett wrote:

No Diamond Age?

Lame, lame!

Rand Simberg wrote:

FYI, it's Neal.

A rose by any other name.

Though I have no personal experience as to how sweet he smells...

Carl Pham wrote:

Gah, dumb list. Raven from Snow Crash? Ugh. That aspect of the story is why I find Mel Gibson movies generally unwatchable. The sheer sadism is stomach-turning, and not at all fascinating.

And then to omit Diamond Age, which has some of the most wonderful subtle pieces of character development (Judge Fang) and wit, e.g. this marvelous description inserted as pure word-play, from when Hackworth meets with Colonel what's-his-name from the Imperial spy agencies in a restaraunt:

"...a tall bottle with a paper label printed in an ancient crabbed typeface. 'McWhorter's Original Condiment' was written large, and everything else was too small to read. The neck of the bottle was also festooned with black-and-white reproductions of ancient medals awarded by pre-Enlightenment European monarchs at exhibitions in places like Riga. Just a bit of violent shaking and thwacking ejected a few spurts of the ochre slurry from the pore-size orifice at the top of the bottle, which was guarded by a quarter-inch encrustation....If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this:

Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings."

Jonathan wrote:

I want to know who does Stephenson's hair.

Leave a comment

Note: The comment system is functional, but timing out when returning a response page. If you have submitted a comment, DON'T RESUBMIT IT IF/WHEN IT HANGS UP AND GIVES YOU A "500" PAGE. Simply click your browser "Back" button to the post page, and then refresh to see your comment.
 

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Rand Simberg published on September 10, 2008 1:43 PM.

Reagan Versus McCain was the previous entry in this blog.

Scopes of Evolution is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Powered by Movable Type 4.1