Zombies never made as much sense to me as revenants do. I can buy the idea of a spirit taking control of its old body and piloting it with the, ah, detachment of the grave more than I can really believe in a shambling zombie with a hunger for brains and warm flesh. The latter just seems to require more steps, I guess.
Anyway.
I cannot counsel that enough. Let Sleeping Djinni Lie. Wishes are dangerous.
He provides a necessary and valuable service for the community. He does not overcharge for his services. He is scrupulous in adhering to local law, customs, and moral codes. So, indeed, what he does with the fruits probably Ain’t Your Business.
“When elephants fight, the grass suffers.” The conceit of “Beneath Their Notice” is that the grass has an opinion about that. And possibly even a response.
‘Up Above’ would have been an interesting novel for me to have written, twenty years ago. Oh, well, I was kind of busy at the time. Besides, twenty years ago I wasn’t as good a writer.
‘Deep They Delved, Once’ is a Fermi Resolution story, but it hasn’t jelled yet. Maybe this week.
Alas for the hero of ‘Keep Your Distance,’ humanity can understand aliens that hate them. Humanity can understand aliens that love them. What it has difficulty grasping is the idea that there may be aliens who simply couldn’t care less.
Yeah, ‘Rationalization’ works as a title on several levels. You gotta feel at least a little bad for that entity, though. The situation is obviously not optimal, only nobody involved and making dumb decisions particularly wants it fixed. They just want somebody to blame. We’ve all been there.
One of the things about makes me sad about not being physically immortal is that I’m going to miss out on what happens to interstellar spaceships once they get cheap enough for the hobbyists to play around with them. The universe of “A Stellar Aesthetic” is full of them. It’s always these incredibly old dudes with a blowtorch, a cigar, and no protective gear, too. You encounter a guy like that working on your ship, you’d be bizarrely comforted by the sight…
…Look, it’s not like he’s sacrificing people, right? Death is a part of life, so it’s a part of magic, and there’s gonna be market forces at play encouraging the cost of resurrections to go down. You don’t make your pile raising one person for a thousand gold: you make it by raising fifty people for a hundred each. There’s simply more of them who can afford that fee, as long as you make sure that Death is Cheap…
