I like both Manuel and Wyoming.

I finally finished the book. It certainly is a product of its time, isn't it. I found the treatment of women, casual racism, and the lack of certain technological innovations (like cell phones, which are now so ubiquitous) hard to get past. Still the plot was interesting. I'm intrigued to see what Tim will do with it. So, Tim, if you can say and would like to, will you be modernizing the story from the book?

My sense of Cordelia's potential was that she would be, you know, Cordelia, in the Shakespearean sense. The one who calls power on its nonsense.

Exactly. This was the girl who respected both Buffy and Angel, and chose to help both for a mix of noble and selfish reasons, but had absolutely no illusions about either of them. Every flaw stood out under her withering gaze, and got commented on—a bursting of the martyr/messiah bubble that both characters sorely needed as their shows' runs went on.

If I ever double back and do 5-minute recaps of Season 4 prior to the reveal of Cordelia's possession by the Big Bad, I'm going to call her Regan.

High School Cordy would have stomped on High School Dawn.

Tru Dat.

Of course, I love High School Cordy as much as anyone else, but on Angel, she got a lot more screen time to be fully developed as a character, and a lot of that development includes change. Cordelia matured into St. Cordelia, and I didn't really miss her old snarky self too much because the new character served a different purpose.

Unfortunately, that purpose seemed to be to drive me into a nigh-homicidal rage.

I would have enjoyed that. Dawn brought out my inner bully...

It's inner ?

Cordelia matured into St. Cordelia

If that's maturity, I'll be in the corner playing with my legos.

will you be modernizing the story from the book?

Not Tim, nor do I play him on teevee, but I would guess that Tim wouldn't give us silly fucktoy Wyoh. I think that the Loonies as a poor prison mining colony wouldn't so much have much more than the luxuries found in a poor Appalacian farm community.

the lack of certain technological innovations (like cell phones, which are now so ubiquitous) hard to get past.

Kids today.... In my day we had two tin cans and a string. And we liked it!

Out of Minearverse solidarity, I have been listening to Moon is a Harsh Mistress on tape over the last couple of weeks. The basic framework, moon colony develops its own culture and wants to break away, certainly offers plenty to work with, but let's hope that Tim doesn't borrow any character development or dialog from the book, because it is terrible. These people are neither believable nor interesting.

I'm almost done with the book now, and I'm convinced that the big surprise at the end is going to be that it is 'science fiction,' written about human beings by an alien species that has had only brief encounters with humans, so they had to make a bunch of stuff up that doesn't seem much like humans at all. Either that, or the book was written by an adolescent male who was surreptitiously reading Tom Swift novels during his Western Civ class and got the two topics confused.

Ha! Rick wins the prize for expressing his disdain so eloquently. I am told Allyson similarly hated MIAHM, and I'm only sorry I missed examples of her fulminating rage. I, I was the reader with a fatal case of political ennui. Oh please, Bobby, not the joys of market capitalism again! You know how that always messes up the topcoat on my nail polish.

I would have been able to laugh off the political crap if the novel itself had had any redeeming narrative features. But it didn't.

One sort of wants to lock Heinlein and Ayn Rand into a squash court, armed with nothing but silly string and matches, and see who kills whom.

[edited to prove I can spell]