• Clarke Award Finalists 1993

    From James Nicoll@21:1/5 to All on Mon Apr 14 13:55:18 2025
    1993: Durham Coalfield closes, ending seven centuries of mining coal
    there, the Chunnel is traversed by its first high speed train, and
    the Labour Party begins the arduous task of becoming the Conservative
    Party.

    Which 1993 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
    Body of Glass (variant of He, She and It) by Marge Piercy
    Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
    Correspondence by Sue Thomas
    Destroying Angel by Richard Paul Russo
    Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
    Hearts, Hands and Voices by Ian McDonald
    Lost Futures by Lisa Tuttle
    Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick

    This was a bit of an off-year for me. I've only read the Piercy,
    the Robinson, the Willis, and the Swanwick.

    --
    My reviews can be found at http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
    My tor pieces at https://www.tor.com/author/james-davis-nicoll/
    My Dreamwidth at https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/
    My patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/jamesdnicoll

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  • From Garrett Wollman@21:1/5 to James Nicoll on Mon Apr 14 15:30:55 2025
    In article <vtj446$22t$[email protected]>,
    James Nicoll <[email protected]> wrote:

    Which 1993 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
    Body of Glass (variant of He, She and It) by Marge Piercy
    Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
    Correspondence by Sue Thomas
    Destroying Angel by Richard Paul Russo
    Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
    Hearts, Hands and Voices by Ian McDonald
    Lost Futures by Lisa Tuttle
    Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick

    This was a bit of an off-year for me. I've only read the Piercy,
    the Robinson, the Willis, and the Swanwick.

    1993 was my last calendar year of college, and I was (cough) rather
    impecunious and having difficulty with my studies. I was buying used paperbacks if anything.[1] Probably spent more time reading flamewars
    in this very newsgroup[2] than I did actually reading SF.

    I have at least *heard* of the Robinson, the Willis, and the Swanwick.
    Haven't read any of them.

    -GAWollman

    [1] I was living three blocks from the main public library, much
    closer even than the university library, but I was spending most of my
    time in the CS "fishbowl" and have basically no memory of ever
    visiting the public library at that time.

    [2] And figuring out how to download porn from the nascent copyright
    violation newsgroups that would go on to kill Usenet for all but the
    most dedicated users a decade later.
    --
    Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can, [email protected]| act to remove constraint from the future. This is Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
    my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)

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  • From Christian Weisgerber@21:1/5 to James Nicoll on Mon Apr 14 17:39:36 2025
    On 2025-04-14, James Nicoll <[email protected]> wrote:

    Which 1993 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

    Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

    ... where I learned that English geologic vocabulary is full of German.

    --
    Christian "naddy" Weisgerber [email protected]

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  • From Stephen Harker@21:1/5 to Christian Weisgerber on Tue Apr 15 17:13:10 2025
    Christian Weisgerber <[email protected]> writes:

    On 2025-04-14, James Nicoll <[email protected]> wrote:

    Which 1993 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

    Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

    ... where I learned that English geologic vocabulary is full of German.

    I understand that is because when in the Medieval period they wanted to
    exploit mineral resources they did the usual invite specialists who were
    from Germany. Probably with incentives.

    --
    Stephen Harker [email protected]

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  • From James Nicoll@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Tue Apr 15 14:34:11 2025
    In article <[email protected]>,
    Stephen Harker <[email protected]> wrote:
    Christian Weisgerber <[email protected]> writes:

    On 2025-04-14, James Nicoll <[email protected]> wrote:

    Which 1993 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

    Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

    ... where I learned that English geologic vocabulary is full of German.

    I understand that is because when in the Medieval period they wanted to >exploit mineral resources they did the usual invite specialists who were
    from Germany. Probably with incentives.

    My engineer grandfather once mentioned MIT encouraged him to learn
    German. That would have been the late 1920s, early 1930s.
    --
    My reviews can be found at http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
    My tor pieces at https://www.tor.com/author/james-davis-nicoll/
    My Dreamwidth at https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/
    My patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/jamesdnicoll

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  • From Christian Weisgerber@21:1/5 to Stephen Harker on Tue Apr 15 14:28:45 2025
    On 2025-04-15, Stephen Harker <[email protected]> wrote:

    Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

    ... where I learned that English geologic vocabulary is full of German.

    I understand that is because when in the Medieval period they wanted to exploit mineral resources they did the usual invite specialists who were
    from Germany. Probably with incentives.

    What it suggests to me is that when geology took shape as the modern
    scientific discipline, presumably in the 19th century, leading
    research happened in Germany ~ Central Europe and was published in
    German.

    --
    Christian "naddy" Weisgerber [email protected]

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  • From Ahasuerus@21:1/5 to James Nicoll on Tue Apr 15 12:32:10 2025
    On 4/15/2025 10:34 AM, James Nicoll wrote:
    In article <[email protected]>,
    Stephen Harker <[email protected]> wrote:
    Christian Weisgerber <[email protected]> writes:

    On 2025-04-14, James Nicoll <[email protected]> wrote:

    Which 1993 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

    Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

    ... where I learned that English geologic vocabulary is full of German.

    I understand that is because when in the Medieval period they wanted to
    exploit mineral resources they did the usual invite specialists who were >>from Germany. Probably with incentives.

    My engineer grandfather once mentioned MIT encouraged him to learn
    German. That would have been the late 1920s, early 1930s.

    John W. Campbell, Jr. studied at MIT, where he was advised by Norbert
    Wiener, who would later become known as "the father of cybernetics", in 1928-1931. He then had to leave due to his failure to learn German.
    Campbell took a break, then moved to Duke, where he was finally able to
    pass German and became involved with Joseph B. Rhine, the ESP guru.

    Although neither relationship was particularly deep, one wonders how SF
    would have developed if Campbell had been better at German and stayed at
    MIT...

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  • From Garrett Wollman@21:1/5 to James Nicoll on Tue Apr 15 17:26:40 2025
    In article <vtlqp2$sqo$[email protected]>,
    James Nicoll <[email protected]> wrote:

    My engineer grandfather once mentioned MIT encouraged him to learn
    German. That would have been the late 1920s, early 1930s.

    German was the common language of mathematics and the physical
    sciences in the pre-war period: major journals (like Annalen der
    Physik and Angewandte Chemie) were published in German and you needed
    to be able to read it, if not necessarily speak or write it. For
    physics and chemistry in particular this lasted into the 1960s and the requirement at many universities to learn German lasted into the
    1980s. These days most of those journals now publish in English even
    if they have kept their German-language titles.

    -GAWollman

    --
    Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can, [email protected]| act to remove constraint from the future. This is Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
    my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)

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  • From Scott Dorsey@21:1/5 to James Nicoll on Tue Apr 15 17:13:22 2025
    James Nicoll <[email protected]> wrote:
    In article <[email protected]>,
    Stephen Harker <[email protected]> wrote:
    Christian Weisgerber <[email protected]> writes:

    On 2025-04-14, James Nicoll <[email protected]> wrote:

    Which 1993 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

    Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

    ... where I learned that English geologic vocabulary is full of German.

    I understand that is because when in the Medieval period they wanted to >>exploit mineral resources they did the usual invite specialists who were >>from Germany. Probably with incentives.

    My engineer grandfather once mentioned MIT encouraged him to learn
    German. That would have been the late 1920s, early 1930s.

    Yes. And German was required for chemistry students well into the fifties, because all of the papers were written in German.
    --scott

    --
    "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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  • From Joy Beeson@21:1/5 to James Nicoll on Fri Apr 25 00:53:04 2025
    On Tue, 15 Apr 2025 14:34:11 -0000 (UTC), [email protected]
    (James Nicoll) wrote:


    My engineer grandfather once mentioned MIT encouraged him to learn
    German. That would have been the late 1920s, early 1930s.

    In 1960, my college advisor told me that a math major must
    learn German. I did well, but not well enough to read math
    papers.

    Today, I can't even read de.alt.fan.aldi


    --
    Joy Beeson
    joy beeson at centurylink dot net
    http://wlweather.net/PAGEJOY/

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  • From Christian Weisgerber@21:1/5 to Joy Beeson on Fri Apr 25 13:54:59 2025
    On 2025-04-25, Joy Beeson <[email protected]d> wrote:

    In 1960, my college advisor told me that a math major must
    learn German. I did well, but not well enough to read math
    papers.

    Sorry, but evidently you did very poorly, because textbooks or
    science papers in one's area of expertise rank near the top for
    easiest to read foreign language texts.

    Today, I can't even read de.alt.fan.aldi

    That is a lot harder than math papers, language-wise.

    --
    Christian "naddy" Weisgerber [email protected]

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  • From Scott Dorsey@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Fri Apr 25 12:04:25 2025
    Joy Beeson <[email protected]d> wrote:
    On Tue, 15 Apr 2025 14:34:11 -0000 (UTC), [email protected]
    (James Nicoll) wrote:


    My engineer grandfather once mentioned MIT encouraged him to learn
    German. That would have been the late 1920s, early 1930s.

    In 1960, my college advisor told me that a math major must
    learn German. I did well, but not well enough to read math
    papers.

    Math papers should be easy because they are mostly equations and all
    you need to understand are phrases like "and therefore by reduction"
    and "by the mathod of Langrange we can see" and "which can be easily
    proven."
    --scott

    --
    "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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