Warwick Stubbs > Recent Status Updates

"Doomed every four years to disappointment when a demigod turns out to have feet of clay, when the most powerful man in the world turns out not to have much power to change the world, the American people none the less never lose faith in the presidential religion." (p.220)

"As with so much of modern life, the state has socialised the cost and privatised the reward." (p.116)

"The prescriptive habit has us all tut-tutting at the decline of language standards, the loss of punctuation and the debasement of vocabulary, but it's all nonsense. Language is just as rule-based in it's newest slang forms, and just as sophisticated as it ever was in ancient Rome." (p.80)

"Barbara Tuchman in her book 'A Distant Mirror' gives an example of a popular game in medieval France: people with their hands tied behind their backs competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it with their heads, risking the loss of an eye from the scratching of the desperate cat in the process." (p. 29)

And they say violent video games are bad for your children. Read books, learn things!

"There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters."

"He writes about Earthlings all the time, and they're all Americans. Practically nobody on earth is an American." - Eliot Rosewater

What started out with impeccable pacing of characterisation mixed with intrigue, has turned into a bit of a slog of rescue and discovery.