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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 28m

Maybe have an unbiased Canadian academic to provide the objective point of view that the median contentment and per capita wealth in the hundred or so million-person states in a 2500 AD DUA is higher than in 2500 AD RUA.

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 32m

If I was writing Foundation 2025, I'd use a US academic who discovers the US faces a thousand years of division, whose plan can reduce that to a century, who never asks if the average person in 2500 AD DisUnited America is better or worse off than the average person in 2500 AD ReUnited America.

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 1h

The angle I'd come at Foundation from would be how much Seldon's context shaped what he thought of as acceptable courses of history. He thought galactic empires were the bee's knees but how much of that was because he grew up in one?

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 2h

The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-Ran

Why do Cheolma Rehabilitation Hospital patients keep plummeting from the 6th floor, and why do none of them bleed when they hit the tarmac? The explanation is outside Detective Suyeon's field of expertise.

jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/blood...

Bloodsucker

Cheon Seon-ran’s 2021 The Midnight Shift is a stand-alone horror novel. The 2025 English translation is by Gene Png. Retired shopkeeper Granny Eunshim isn’t actually Suyeon’s granny, but the two have ...

jamesdavisnicoll.com

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 2h

Five Novels About Coming of Age During the Apocalypse

Growing up is hard enough without the entire world falling apart around you.

reactormag.com/five-novels-...

Five Novels About Coming of Age During the Apocalypse - Reactor

Growing up is hard enough without the entire world falling apart around you.

reactormag.com

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 2h

The moral is that there is absolutely no downside to editing old books to suit modern sensibilities and I am definitely not saying this because I love watching people step on rakes.

6/6

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 2h

So as I recall, the Baen books got fixed to remove the Cold War references, no more difficult than doing the same for the Smiley books.

The Tor sequels didn't, because until I asked Norton's Tor editor how he was handling the issue, he had no idea the Baen versions had been changed.

5/n

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 2h

One amusing incident involved Norton's Time Traders series. So, the rights got divided between Baen and Tor in an interesting (and clearly demarked way): Baen had the original Norton only books, and Tor the new collaborative sequels.

The originals are very much Cold War books.

4/n

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 2h

As I recall, the protagonist was a youthful Korean war vet, which was a pretty small group by the mid-1980s, 30 years after the Korean War.

The late Eric Flint updated James H. Schmitz, removing stuff smoking and old slang. After all, people in the future will talk and behave just like us.

3/n

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 2h

Anyway, from time to time books that passed through his field of influence would be adjusted for modern sensibilities. I think Not This August was one: it's a tale of Commiegeddon whose date got moved from the 1950s to the 1980s, as I recall.

2/n

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 2h

So, Jim Baen (founder of Baen Books) seems to have believed his core audience might perish of the vapours on reading an SFF novel that suggested it was of a different time. Maybe he was right. Maybe someone reading about the 180th millennium doesn't want to think about the passage of time.

1/n

stonehead @stonehead.bsky.social · 1d

Wouldn't this be a good reason to "update" some of those classic sci-fi stories?

We've had reprints of classic novels with extra introductions, with new illustrations and with zombies, why not just with newer tech?

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 3h

Herbert might be educationally bad. Read his crap and you can see stuff not to do.

James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 13h

Ah, sorry. PKD. My brain turns off at 10 PM. Philip K. Dick. Specifically, a scene from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 13h

From the surviving goons' point of view, they were quietly being criminal when someone shot the guards, tossed two poison grenades into the warehouse, shot the place up, and then left.

Those two grenades did 40 HP to "every enemy present on the scene". Does being in the warehouse count as present?

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 14h

Well, that was odd. Handed my PCs a PDK session--who's deluded, them or the other people who claim to work for the same Institute?--and what they did was shoot up a mob warehouse. Which, admittedly, the PCs know is connected to the guy who loves using imposters.

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 20h

"Skull morphology diverges between urban and rural populations of red foxes mirroring patterns of domestication and macroevolution"

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Skull morphology diverges between urban and rural populations of red foxes mirroring patterns of domestication and macroevolution | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Human activity is drastically altering the habitat use of natural populations. This has been documented as a driver of phenotypic divergence in a number of wild animal populations. Here, we show that ...

royalsocietypublishing.org

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 20h

Aw, people said don't adopt a bear and my friend did that without any problems right before they stopped answering their phone or their email and stopped showing up at work.

I have to say their Halloween diorama--bones on the front lawn--is on point.

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 22h

Ever know ahead of time you were going to regret a post? This is one of those.

My skull is hard to x-ray. Impervious. One might say thick.

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 22h

One of my head injuries involved me breaking someone's gun with my head. I expected it to hurt like heck it but it didn't. I couldn't do math in my head for about a week but otherwise OK.

Got a pre-MRI x-ray to look for metal, JIC. No metal but they had to do the x-ray a few times because (cont')

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 1d

He's been doing this about twice a century for one hundred and eighty thousand years.

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 1d

"I always marry, when I do marry, a girl as much younger than myself as possible, so the disparity will not become too great. Say I am thirty; I marry a girl of sixteen. Then when it is time that I must leave her, she is forty-six and I am still thirty."
(con't)

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 1d

If you're lucky, the guy is only 50. As recounted by the hundreds of millennia old, unaging protagonist of Letter To A Phoenix:

(con't)

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 1d

Hmmm.

Library entry for the ebook edition of Sangu Mandanna's A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping: wait time of at least six months.

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James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 1d

It was working 30 minutes ago. I think the issue is at the far end.

James Davis Nicoll @jdnicoll.bsky.social · 1d

James Arthur Hetley (August 15, 1947 - October 8, 2025)

Speculative fiction author dies in bike crash.

www.mainecremationcare.com/obituaries/j...

Application Error

www.mainecremationcare.com

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