go ask alice when she's ten feet tall

( Hole? What hole? )

quick ... pass me another magazine ... i'm out

It appears that Baen Books is going to produce an electronic magazine as well as their electronic webscription and advance download service. Probably would be interesting except I'm currently rather turned off by the incredibly jingoistic natures of the new Baen mainstream authors. And to make it worse, to borrow David Drake's Vietnam war nomenclature, most of the new authors are "turtles" rather than "snakes." Which I find very off-putting. Although I have to admit one of my favourite military science-fiction authors is Robert Frezza, who only served as a JAG officer in Germany. However this gave him the opportunity to see every bit of inanity when you combine young undereducated men away from home for the first time and give them lethal weaponry, which gives his works a distinct ... edge. Come to think of it, most of my other favourite military SF authors (such as Dave Freer [1] and Keith Laumer [2]) who also served, also tend to also specialize in SF comedy. [1] In South Africa. I highly reccomend his Rats, Bats, and Vats series. [2] David Drake once got to ask Keith Laumer if he ever served with an armoured unit, because his (famous) Bolo stories so captured the feeling of armour. He replied he never served (he was an Army Pilot in WW2), but as part of basic training he got to lie in a trench while a tank drove over the top of him. David, who served as an intelligence officer attached to an armoured unit in Vietnam, admitted that this probably would give Keith a better idea of the capabilities of a tank than riding around in one. Incidentally, his (more famous) Retief stories, concerning the Corps Diplomatique Terrestienne, were apparently similiarly influenced by his attachment to the US diplomatic corps in Burma...