phil ringnalda

For the most part, Glory Road isn’t very good Robert Heinlein. It uses Clarke’s Third Law as an excuse to write about magic, it has only a few not too fleshed out ideas, and worst of all the sex hasn’t held up over the years: it’s gone from racy to timid. Still, it has one fine idea, that’s left me tempted to send copies to Tim Bray, Paul Hoffman, and Sam Ruby. Star, the Empress of the Twenty Universes, rules by absolute fiat: what she says goes. Mostly, she doesn’t say, or do, but:

She might say: “This mess will clear up if you take that troublemaker there — What’s your name? You, with the goatee — out and shoot him. Do it now.”

After just a few months, 3% of my unimaginably huge 1GB GMail storage has been used up by atom-syntax. If you are among the people whose name I can search on and be shown “1-20 of hundreds” of messages, if your typical quote:content ratio is huge, if every single thread of a hundred or more messages (there’s at least one such burning all the time) prominently features you, you, you, you might want to consider whether this mess would clear up if someone took you out and shot you. Lord knows the rest of us are considering it.