Hi Kate,
Lusefrous is beyond despicable - but he gets his in the end.
Excession is also one of my favorites as well!
Hope your feeling better.
Hi FallibleFriend,
I tend to agree with you about the Well. The idea of intelligent rocks and pond scum are from hard core SciFi that I have read. I can't remember the titles or authors. The one about intelligent rocks was a story about a pair of worlds that orbit each other while orbiting their common star. The intelligent inhabitants aged and turned into rock-like but living creatures. The one about hi IQ pond scum was also a sraight up SciFi story. Maybe pond scum is a bit harsh. The idea was that these beings were a film on a water surface more like an oil slick rather than pond scum. The idea is that these beings were two-dimensional or nearly so. It is an interesting idea.
Just for the record when I speak of Hard Core SciFi I am thinking along the lines of Hugo Gernsback's
Ralph 124C41+. This short novel is a one of those "day in the life of" tales. It is about an ordinary guy that has an interesting day. What makes it Hard Core is that it shows how science, technology and related things impact people and human events. This, of necessity, must be speculative, but it is not pure fantasy. I'm not dropping on fantasy, but as a scientist I prefer the hard core stuff science fiction.
Here are a couple of wikis on Gernsback and the award named for him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Gernsback http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award Dr. R.
