AssHattery: Fuck you, [http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_04.htm Dan Simmons].

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<[alan]> wow, where on earth did you ever find this dan simmons fellow. i didn't know they stacked shit that high.


<[brennen]> amazing, isn't it?

he's best known for the _hyperion cantos_ and its sequels, big-concept space opera stuff. the first two books were good, especially the first one which was kind of a traveler's tales (chaucer, boccacio, that sort of thing) with its various framed plots glosses on a bunch of sf subgenres. a little cyberpunk, some blowing shit up, the network of teleportation-linked worlds, the starfaring stranger who falls in love with a local girl and gets sucked into the rebellion, some quasi-religious horror. the fucked politics might've been latent somewhere in there but i wasn't paying too much attention my jr. year of highschool or whenever it was.

since then the gravitational attraction of his own asshole seems to have become altogether too much.


<[alan]> "You're shitting me," I said.
"I am shitting you not," said the Time Traveler."

...and there's a whole section of the site entitled "writing well." i am shitting you not.


<[brennen]> he also has a lengthy-ish [http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_05.htm defense] of the piece, in which he namechecks martin buber. i got roughly as far as

:Elsewhere in The Enemies of Civilization, Lee Harris suggests that the true enemies of civilization tend to be�intellectuals. Those individuals within even the most ethically advanced societies who see things in terms of black and white, those men and women who are incapable of pragmatism and compromise but who deal in absolutes. They are the men and women, so frequently the privileged elite in each era, who see the need to transform the world for the better. And the instrument of that transformation is, invariably, blood and more blood.

and then i decided that i've given mr. simmons too much mental bandwidth already.


<[brennen]> also, just for good measure, [http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=282 esr heartily recommends] the simmons all knowing time traveler bit.