AHA! I have asked a scientist, and the consensus is that the ice on the moon can be filtered, unless there are little bugs that live in it that will suck out your eyeballs, which is my theory, and I'm told is as good as any.
Willow ,'Showtime'
The Minearverse 3: The Network Is a Harsh Mistress
[NAFDA] "There will be an occasional happy, so that it might be crushed under the boot of the writer." From Zorro to Angel (including Wonderfalls and The Inside), this is where Buffistas come to anoint themselves in the bloodbath.
Nah, people around here call anything frozen "ice."
I mean, if you put it on a stick, frozen methane would still be a methanesickle.
Oh, sorry for doubting you, DX. I will still insist that you drink it first, and if you live, we can all go live on the moon.
The eyeball suckers have not bee disproven yet.
I'd have no qualms about drinking it at all. Probably a lot cleaner than some of the river water around here. Actually, it would probably be easy enough to distill it. One thing the moon has is plenty of energy.
Hi. I love Crichton. Sorry.
So, in this context, just for fun:
P.K. Dick, love him or hate him?
Crichton is one of those authors whose stories are better on the the screen than they are on the page.
Dick is the god of idea-men, with a writing style that drives me bats. I don't mind if every science fiction ever made is loosely or directly based on his works, though, because his ideas are gold.
I like Jack McDevitt. And would like to offer up James P. Hogan as somebody I think of as "hard" and Greg Egan as somebody who's so hard it hurts. of course, he can't write endings, which is unfortunate, but everything before the ending is one heck of a hard SF journey!
I really liked The Andromeda Strain, enough so that I've reread it several times. I've enjoyed a lot of his other books. The "said" thing doesn't bother me at all.
Journalistic style is to use "said" for everything.
I rewrote one of my stories using it a few years ago and I plan to someday go back and undo it.
English major chime-in:
The golden rule of Show, Don't Tell dictates use of "said" whenever possible. "Asked" and "replied" are pretty much the only accepted alternatives. Dialogue tagging ought to be as simple and unobtrusive as possible; I prefer to see "said" everywhere, because when that's all you see, your brain tunes it out and all you see is the dialogue, which is the way it should be. The idea is, if you can't get across in the dialogue itself that Jim whined his lines, tagging it ..., Jim whined isn't going to do the legwork for you. I've had teachers refer to it as an admission of failure.
End English major chime-in.