More Hugo ranting, etc.

Apologies for leaving out a crucial detail in the previous post-- it's not Assassins Guilds as such that I find so implausible, it's Assassins Guilds which aren't owned by a government or possibly some very organized crime, and my impression is that the guild in ASoIaF is independent.

Also, I assume that Martin's assassins are very good at recognizing people by their build and how they move, and at ignoring faces as a method of identification.

I've read _Deadline_, almost all of _A Dance with Dragons, and am about 150 pages into _Leviathan Wakes_, and my feeling is "Would you like some death with your death? Perhaps a plate of maggots with death sauce?"

I'm also reading Digger, and it's a considerable relief.

I've complained that the body count among the main characters in LOTR is implausibly low. I might not be complaining about that again.

Which reminds me, I've also complained that the way Saruman damaged the Shire seemed weirdly modern. I was rereading Shippey about characterization through rhetoric in "The Council of Elrond" because of Visualizing English Word Origins, and he mentions that Saruman talks like a modern politician-- so I could still argue that it's anachronistic, but my feeling that it came out of nowhere isn't fair.

I wonder whether politicians in dictatorships slither the way democratic politicians do-- Saruman was definitely in a dictatorship, but his way of saying a number of smoothly contradictory things seems more as though he was trying to be electable.

Trends in when sf is set

An article which suggests that there's some interesting variation



This seems worth kicking around-- I don't think there's a lot of far future sf these days, though perhaps I'm just not finding it.

Does anyone know when the main plot (not the stuff about galaxies colliding or the modification of the human race) of the Lensmen books is set?