James Nicoll
64 quotes
Biography
James Davis Nicoll is a Canadian freelance game and speculative fiction reviewer, former security guard and role-playing game store owner, and five-time Hugo nominee, who also works as a first reader for the Science Fiction Book Club. As a Usenet personality, Nicoll is known for writing a widely quoted epigram on the English language, as well as for his accounts of suffering a high number of accidents, which he has narrated over the years in Usenet groups like rec.arts.sf.written and rec.arts.sf.fandom.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
"Romeo and Juliet *died*. I always liked that in a teen romance story."
"[F]olks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid [nitrogen] and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It would not surprise me if reading that book causes birth defects."
"This is the sort of book that justifies fatwahs. If WWIII occurred right now, we could die happy knowing Baxter would never write again. If a dinosaur killing asteroid was headed for Earth and I knew Baxter had another book coming up, I would campaign for letting the rock hit, since it is obviously the work of a benevolent deity trying to save us from another Titan."
"I can't help but notice that everytime I fly somewhere, other people's planes fall out of the sky."
"A lot of my stories end with "And when I regained consciousness, there was a crowd standing around looking at me.""
"You may have trouble getting permission to aero or lithobrake asteroids on Earth."
"Before it exploded one night, I went to a four grade, two room schoolhouse and we had textbooks from the 1940s."
"John Barnes is incredibly variable. Pete's Rule (Never buy a Barnes with sodomy in it) is a good one but unfortunately the publisher does not put that kind of stuff on the cover."
"Aha! The Alien Planet Canada series, where the planet the characters are marooned on seems to be Manitoba. Bad bad world building."
"I have hated every Kress I read, especially this one, but the Bear is a standard Bear and if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like."
"After enough concussions the head injuries blur together."
"Hell, Chuck Yeager could do it in his sleep while on fire, I'm sure."
"I find this varies considerably from near-death experience to near-death experience. For example, having a wandering loonie break down the door of my game store to look for women was so funny the entire concussion and pools of blood thing was a minor footnote. Being sucked out into the Atlantic by an undertow was deeply irritating. Having a snowba[n]k collapse on me was alarming because of the claustrophobia issue. The car wreck was over almost before I had time to realise what was happening."
"I think once you start eating people you should stop claiming to be a vegetarian, even if you only eat bad people."
"My grandfather for example only died twice, once during the war and once in the 1980s."
"Nothin'g sa'ys q'uality fantas'y l'ike misuse'd apos'tro'phes."
"All gone. Zelazny was one of the first times I looked at something I had had familiarity with to find the spot where the memory should have been empty, replaced by a scrawled "Moved South for the Fishing" sign. Calculus was another loss. It was quite upsetting to reach for a skill and find nothing."
"Someday I'd like to read a story about competent people on Mars."
"I wonder if he's planning a book called SRS? Or F'lu?"
"Yes, I was surprised how easy it was to cut the door off my cat."
"In point of fact, the meteor was something like 30 km when it exploded. It was over north Waterloo and I was north of St Agatha. Two spherical clouds, and two explosions. Unfortunately, I was dealing with a goat that was trying to eat an oil truck's fuel line, goats having this optimistic 'Well, maybe it has become edible since they last time I tried this' worldview, and I missed seeing the explosions."
"As I've often said, I'm a fan of hard SF. No, it's more like I am addicted to it, even the stepped-on 20 times and cut with pow[d]ered milk and rat-poison sort of hard SF. This gets us to Stephen Baxter's Mayflower II, published last year in a limited edition from PS Publishing. In one of the great tragedies of publishing, it was not a limited enough edition and so I have read it."
"It's true that the average human in the Xeelee universe can't eat Jell-O with a straw without accident[al]ly removing an eye but these particular humans start off no stupider than than any other human of their era and proceed to breed themselves into imbecility. Well, farther into imbecility."
"We discovered at one point that the brick wall of the pillar would hold up a sock pretty well. This led to sorting socks by putting them on the wall, which in turn led to mosaics built entirely of socks. Mission drift is a hazard in all pursuits, including doing the laundry."