Only the good die young!

I absolve thee, I absolve thee, I absolve thee.

I stopped buying Analog six months ago. It's done wonders for my blood pressure.

I was wondering where this story might have appeared. I shoulda known.

Presuming the culprit is Analog -- I never read Analog; but now I'm beginning to wonder if I'm missing out, given "Aloha" and " The Strange Redemption of Sister Mary Anne"...

Pfaugh! You are WEAK, puny mortal! Any TRUE FAN would grit his (inevitably his) teeth and plunge forward through the hail of gadgets, knowing that SENSAWUNDA is the TRUE FAN's reward, no matter how much CLUNKY WRITING might stand in his way.

Either that or you should give up Analog for Lent. It's gotta be Lent somewhere, right?

So, are you going to tell us which story this was?

While I am most certainly not a fan of bad writing, do keep in mind that the combination of good writing and rigorous hard SF with a true paradigm-shifting conceptual breakthrough is but all too rare.

They almost seem mutually exclusive: I have seen competent to very good writing--present company _not_ excluded--where the scientific plausibility left something to be desired.

Really: this combination of skills is exceptionally difficult to acquire, and is therefore quite hard to find. That's why stories like "Blood Music", "Reasons to Be Cheerful", "Gene Wars", and "Wang's Carpets" are few and far between.

So while I also let out the occasional sigh when reading Analog, do ask yourself the question: "Is my scientific understanding on par with this person's writing abilities?", before starting the tirade.

After all, writing might be easier to learn than science...

yes, you are a bad person. But only because you didn't tell us what the story was.

You mean you're not keen to guess?

Jetse, I take your point, but that doesn't make it okay. I'd probably be satisfied (okay, significantly less dissatisfied, anyway) if the bar for hard SF was set at "competent by-the-numbers fiction" rather than just "correct in grammar and spelling".

And yes, my scientific understanding is in many areas at least on par with this person's writing ability. :) (At least, as demonstrated by the opening paragraphs of this story.)

I don't in fact know if this story had anything paradigm-shifting to say, because I didn't get that far. But the same criticism could easily be applied to many stories that adopt "hard SF" as a style without doing anything particularly novel — or even rigorous — on a conceptual level.

As for this particular story, all I’m going to say (in public, anyhow) is that it’s one that was nominated for a major award. It doesn’t even really matter what story it was, since it’s far from an isolated example.

Oh, and I do think it’s amusing that everyone keeps mentioning Analog.