The other day I was scrolling twitter (now called X) when I came across a post discussing re-reading Asimov as an adult. In response, one commenter remarked "Even twenty years ago, it felt like reading Asimov was a duty that you had to fulfill, because everybody [...] crowed about how impressive his ideas were."

I ended up tossing out a joke post roasting Asimov, and followed up with roasts of other authors I have read and loved, and the thread gained a bit of traction over the weekend. Lots of people recognized the thread for what it was—playful commentary on authors we have known—and had fun in the comments.

Here, I wanted to dissect a little bit what my thoughts were in making this thread, and then collect and highlight some of the best responses.

On recommendations

If you ask for recommendations for anything online, the top answer is going to be suitably milquetoast. Most sites have a mechanism for determining what posts are the most popular, and the most popular response is usually going to fall smack-dab in the middle of the normal distribution. People upvote posts about things they like, or used to like, or have heard of; and the larger an products's pre-existing reach, the larger its future reach. "For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away."

It's too easy to give an average recommendation for an average product and have it gain traction. After years of trusting, and then getting let down by, recommendations from the internet, I decided that I could add to the discussion in my own way, by developing a mental repertoire of comments to temper these overly effusive recommendations.

In the meantime, though, the demands of life and a long stream of sub-par recommendations had broken down my love of reading. But I remember what it was like to love reading, and a lot of that comes down to authors like Asimov.

On Asimov, himself

With books in particular, it's easy to fall into a nostalgia trap.

Many readers discovered Asimov in their teens and haven't bothered to revisit him since; by contrast, according to one source the median Twitter user is 40 years old. It's quite possible that recommending Asimov will do both him and the recommendee a disservice; some books you read too early, and some you read too late.

Here's the trick: Asimov is a great author, if you know what you're signing up for. Were he alive today, Asimov would be a tremendous QA Engineer; most of his stories (or plot points in his larger books) start with him contemplating a puzzle, and then following it to a conclusion; or, alternately, start with a punchline and work backwards to build the setup. For example:

In other cases, having earlier followed a premise to its conclusion, he then challenged himself to undermine his own conclusion.

But, I come to roast Asimov, not to praise him.

In the fiction section, by volume, Asimov was mostly a writer of short fiction; at this he excelled. But short fiction doesn't make the same demands of characterization or world-building that long-form fiction does. Famously, at his peak, Asimov was able to write one of his most anthologized stories in two hours, from the time he opened the solicitation to the time he posted the draft back to the publisher. At such a tremendous pace, it should come as no surprise that Asimov's characters often feel like toys pulled from the toy box, archetypes chosen for a tiny stage play, only to be put cleaned up and saved for later as the curtains close.

Asimov was a relentless anthologizer, and in these he often added value by offering some little bon mot about either the story you just read, or about his life circumstances around the time the story was written. If you're lucky enough to read these editions (and not the later, modern, stripped down anthologies that have become so common since his death), you can come to know the man, as the man knew himself.

In these, he admits his weaknesses; points out which characters are author-inserts; and laughs along with the reader about his inability to write women. He also credits, time and time again, Campbell with having developed him as an author, by providing him with ideas, pushing back on his excesses, and, at the extremes, adding text that would go on to become some of Asimov's most famous.

So when I act not as hagiographer but rather as a Speaker for the Dead, let it be known that the author himself precedes me.

On loving scifi, again

I recently had my first child, and I've been questioning what kind of environment I want to raise her in. One of the things I remember from growing up is that we had books everywhere around me: books in the living room, books in the bedrooms, books at school (in both the library, and the classrooms), books at my friends' houses.

After accidentally discovering Anne McCaffrey in the third grade, I was hooked. I started seeing the books around me differently, less as background and more as objects of desire. I sourced books and stories from wherever I could find them: from the school library (until those ran out), then from my friends' shelves, then from my dad's shelves, then from the local library, the county library system, the bookstore, sff magazines, and on and on...

At the same time as I've been contemplating our home environment, I've also been having a number of thoughts about my personal relationship with media:

  • After having an ebook change out from under me (only the cover, but still), I realized that digital "ownership" means nothing at all if the thing you buy can change out from under you.
  • When observing me, how does my daughter know the difference between me scrolling twitter and me reading a book? What lessons do I teach her by not visibly reading around her?
  • When did I stop reading for fun and only read things I'm "supposed to"? (There is a time and place; scifi does not tell us all we need to know about the human condition.)

Recently, a friend's husband published his first novel, Theft of Fire. (Hi, Christine!) I bought it in support, but once I got into it I started having "those nights" again. Perhaps you know the kind I mean: those nights that follow a day of looking forward to getting back to the story you have rattling around in your head; the nights where you hide your reading light under the covers and keep telling yourself "one more chapter" until it's far too late, and you know you'll pay for it in the morning, and you don't care.

And I thought to myself, this man, Devon Eriksen, writes like Gold- and Silver-Age scifi (where the men are real men, ...), and there is still a lot of stuff from that time I never read. Maybe what I need is to stoke the fires of excitement again, to read anything, no matter how easy or fun or junk-food-y, to make reading an enjoyable habit instead of a dreaded chore.

And maybe others need that, too.

On poking beehives

Like so many other sites, Twitter encourages E N G A G E M E N T. It doesn't care if people are agreeing with you or wishing ill on you and your family; when people interact with your output, more people see it.

Cunningham's Law (which dates back to the 1980s) tells us that the best way to get a correct answer online is to post false information.

By extension, the best way to get people engaged with a thread on scifi authors is to say something inciteful (sic). What you say doesn't have to be wrong; there are many ways to drive engagement. For instance, you can also be novel, or humorous, or incendiary.

Another thing to keep in mind about online discussions is that you can't control how the audience chooses to read you. Even if you post things in a spirit of the fullest love (in the spirit of ribbing your closest friends in a way that draws you together), once your words escape your circle of friends, anything goes: The Death of the Author, in real time.

Through calculation and chance I hit on a time of day and day of the week where my little joke could find an audience that mostly understood the spirit in which I was writing, and a good number of people joined in the fun.

This led to a delightful conversation of the kind I had mostly only been a participant in in the past, but this time with me as the nexus. As such (due to some of twitter's UX limitations), many readers weren't able to locate their fellow fans, and so a number of threads, often on the same authors, sprung up throughout the weekend.

The authors

Some final notes before I get into the meat of the roasts:

  • I'm editing lightly across the board; feel free to visit the links to see more.
  • Some fantasy authors slipped in.
  • If you're interested to see what others have said about your favorite author(s), search "(author name) @caesararum" on twitter to find replies to me about the author. I'm not compiling everything here, just the funniest stuff, and there are a number of fan conversations in the threads.
  • Almost everything that I perceive as being in a mean spirit has been removed. I may make reference to the overall gestalt of the takes on a particular author at my own discretion.
  • I only wrote about authors whose work I know, in a deep sense, personally. Here, I'll include some roasts of authors I don't know, so long as those feel like they're in the same spirit as the rest.
  • The saddest thing I felt in this thread was not when an author was roasted, but when they were forgotten.

And, if you want to read a more succinct summary of why I started the thread, you can find it here.

All that said, here's the list:

Roasts

Neal Asher

Asher saw a few 80s flicks and decided he could make a career publishing like 5 of those a year. Ever year. Forever. (link)

Isaac Asimov

Asimov was barely an author in the ways we usually think of them; he was more of a creator of logic puzzles. Annoying stuff like "characterization" and "setting" were just speedbumps he had to surpass to write what he wanted (link)

Asimov was a polymath who could write mysteries so well-constructed they could only be solved by carefully examining the clues he had left scattered throughout the title. (link)

Asimov is a great short story writer, who, unfortunately, got tricked into writing novels. (link)

What is missing in the characters of the Foundation series? Or in the Robot novels? (link)

Realism, identifiability, memorability, charm. (link)

Ian M. Banks

On the Culture

Banks was wise to not spend too much time looking inward at his Culture, because the existential horror would probably drive readers to the brink (link)

Banks created an awesome setting but then was unable to imagine how this scarcityless society would actually live a normal life always reverting to [Special Circumstances] for story lines (link)

The Culture is a techno-utopia where all can live lives of leisure, and in every one of the novels the plot is about the Culture’s problematic foreign policy (link)

On minds

I kinda like the idea that a warship capable of obliterating a star system on a molecular level while contemplating every individual mote of dust it blasts into nothingness on a plane of consciousness a dozen orders of magnitude more complex than any human is just some guy. (link)

Seems to lack a little gravitas, doesn't it? (link)

Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter is like if you took an undergrad physics exam question and turned it into a book. (link)

Ray Bradbury

Bradbury gets enormous credit as a thinker for being ahead of the curve in seeing that his age cohort would never figure out how to open a PDF because it scares them. (link)

There were not many attempts at roasts for him, despite the frequency his name came up. --ed

Lois McMaster Bujold

Bujold added so many fetishes to her books that she could be a voodoo priest (link)

Lois Bujold is becoming more grandmotherly/doting as the Vorkosigan saga progresses. The series really devolved into a romance paperback for a women’s retirement home. I am expecting Myles to taken on crochet anytime now (link)

What if I mess with readers and other writers by not sticking with any particular genre over 15+ books from the same literary universe, way before people start fanboying over The Expanse? -Lois McMaster Bujold, probably. (link)

Edgar Rice Burroughs

John Carter is about perpetually rescuing hot redskin women who, as the reader is reminded every few pages, don’t wear clothes. (link)

Jim Butcher

Very little of Jim Butcher's recent output would change if you crossed out "Harry Dresden" and wrote "Goku". (link)

Orson Scott Card

The book Orson Scott Card was best known for was an upbeat, heartwarming story about a bullied smart kid with homicidal tendencies committing a genocide while we rooted for him.

He later turned out to have some problematic political views, to people's surpise. (link)

Orson Scott Card is Jack Chick without the artistic talent, he's only successful because Ender's Game scratches the same itch as Starship Troopers for people who read the latter and wanted more [private account]

C. J. Cherryh

Cherryh makes sure the reader is just as in the dark as her protagonists (link)

Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang: What if Greg Egan, but less rigorous? (link)

Greg Egan: what if Ted Chiang, but he thought Borges focused too much on the characters? (link)

Has never written a character worth remembering, but is lucky that you're too distracted with the strangely true to life setting too notice (link)

Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke is an answer to the question "what would tpot look like if it were a scifi author?" (link)

The vibe I was looking for here was: sci-fi, with plenty of woo. If You Know You Know. If you don't know what TPOT is... don't worry, it's a private joke. --ed

James S. A. Corey

james a corey's books read like a wikipedia entry about the TV adaptation (link)

Philip K. Dick

On the volume of his writing

Philip K. Dick wrote so he didn't have to starve, and a lot of times it shows. (link)

PKD wrote the most extraordinary novellas, but for some reason felt compelled to make them book length. In some, you can almost viscerally feel the moment he lost interest. (link)

I love pkd but I'm so aware that in between the grand ideas theres a lot of "dystopian corporation headed by space Blofeld wants to archive your thumbs to sell you plasma thumbs that steal your memories for profit" cause that sells in the next issue of dorkzine and rent is due

Dorkzine was only published from mar-aug 1962. The 2007 compilation of his short stories for them is 850 pages (5 essays from scholars of his work and a later addition to one of the stories that's 400 pages and was written in one sitting while blasted on bathtub lsd) (link)

Philip K. Dick liked to take copious amounts of amphetamines and type out entire manuscripts in one long sleepless session. Believing he never needed to reread or revise his work, he published prolifically. Unfortunately as he never reread or revised he produced prolifically. (link)

On drug use / mental illness

PKD's oeuvre makes an argument in the debate on drug use, but I can't tell if it's pro or anti (link)

Philip K. Dick is one of the few authors who would actually be more interesting if he did less drugs (link)

PKD sometimes hated himself, sometimes found himself brilliant, sometimes both, and in any case decided to make it his readers’s problem. (link)

Miscellany

Phillip K. Dick just wanted to be an android so bad so he had something other than him to explain his poor life decisions. (link)

Philip K. Dick's stories were just ideas where the story is left as an exercise to the reader (link)

PKD is if Kilgore Trout were a real person (link)

David Drake

David Drake is great, but in the same way as getting toasted on a long weekend and watching five consecutive Jason Statham action movies [private account]

Greg Egan

Egan is what it looks like when you try to give your phd thesis a plot (link)

this is why I love him don't @ me if you novel doesn't have at least 10 pages of spacetime diagrams (link)

I like that he apologised for a 5-dimensional planet having a 2-sphere rotational pole, and corrected it in the e-book. Took me right out of the story, that one. (link)

The final form of Egan is a book that takes a team of top tier physicists to decode, and when they do they find out that by performing a single Wick rotation the fictional world's rules turn into a functional complete unified theory of quantum gravity. (link)

Egan misheard “show, not tell” and did the reverse (link)

Harlan Ellison

I love how no one has the balls to roast Harlan Ellison. (link)

hey man, he fights back, and fights dirty (link)

Harlan Ellison was so obsessed with getting 1) paid 2) credit that he absolutely torpedoed his reach and inpact and will be mostly forgotten by history (link)

Harlan Ellison was a man of visceral talent and made grudges easily. Little did Harlan Ellison known his greatest foe was Harlan Ellison, and he lost. (link)

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this reaction so strongly to a dead author. I mean, even if his ghost walked the earth, he’d have such a long enemies list to go after that he’d never make it to any random commenters… (link)

Harlan Ellison is hard; there's not much love here. Included as a warning. --ed

Celia S. Friedman

horny to the point where reading her books becomes uncomfortable (link)

William Gibson

William Gibson built an entire career out of how amazing the first third of Neuromancer is, despite never reaching that height again. (link 1, link 2)

I think it's more accurate to say he built a career taking the Blade Runner esthetic, filing off the serial numbers and giving it a new coat of paint. (link)

SF takes a back seat to fashion criticism and enthusiasm for drugs (link)

Whilst rummaging through the deceased estates of Hemingway, Burroughs, and Chandler, William Gibson stumbled backwards down some basement stairs into the golden ghetto of science fiction and never looked forward. (link)

William Gibson books have incredible settings and fascinating characters which he refuses to explain directly, so you spend the first half of the book piecing it all together. Then in the second half the plot just kind of happens. (link)

Gibson has written one trilogy three times, many books in those series have the same ending (a desperate fight in a high-up location), and every one since Neuromancer has been structured primarily for movie adaptation. (link)

William Gibson is palette-swapped Cry Dctrw [private account]

Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman is successful because The Forever War scratches the itches of people who read Starship Troopers and wanted to keep being mad about it (link, private account)

Peter F. Hamilton

Peter F. Hamilton is The Bold and the Beautiful but in space. (link)

Every Peter Hamilton sci-fi novel is at least 30% some uninspiring flashback/side story that converges with the main plot at some point when the reader is maximally exhausted (link)

one could be forgiven for believing that peter f. hamilton has most of his wealth tied up in a startup researching self-healing concrete (link)

Peter F. Hamilton's books certainly leave you without any doubt whatsoever that they are Peter F. Hamilton's books (link)

I haven't read Hamilton, but his roasts come as close as I'm comfortable to feeling personal. Nevertheless, I'm including them here. --ed

Robert Heinlein

Heinlein had some good ideas, banked those, and then spent the second half of his career gratuitously masturbating onto his readership

some of them enjoyed that (link)

Heinlein: what if Libertarians were exactly who you thought they were (but hornier and in space) (link)

I still refer to early Heinlein as the uncle that can do everything and teach it to you, and late Heinlein as the uncle you warn your girlfriend about... (link)

I love Heinlein, but dear god, Time Enough For Love is the sort of book that makes you want to check the hard drive of the author. (link)

Heinlein is widely recognized as having two phases of his career; the first half, where he wrote books primarily for audiences, and the second (sometime around the time he divorced and remarried, and changed his politics) where he wrote for himself. --ed

Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert really is a modern day Herman Melville in that he probably would've been happier writing a book on ecology. (link)

Herbert is the modern day Melville (derogatory) (link)

Frank Herbert wrote a great book. Unfortunately, he kept on writing. (link)

Frank Herbert is a college freshman who finished his Intro to Philosophy elective, hit his THC vape, thought “whoa, I see it,” and started his novel. (link)

Brian Herbert

Brian Herbert is the textbook case of talent not being hereditary. (link)

Brian Herbert has spent two decades industriously squeezing every drop of money out of his father's legacy like a Fremen processing a corpse for its water, minus the respect and humility for its source or value. (link)

L. Ron Hubbard

L Ron Hubbard was just a combo pre-social-media influencer / cult leader who used the medium as a means to discover an audience for his non-literary goals (link)

Now, now; that's just true. --ed

Sam Hughes (qntm)

qntm heard the phrase "kill your darlings" and didn't realize it was supposed to be figurative (link)

qntm is one of my favorite webfic writers today, and he has been one of the few people who's kept me excited about the genre the past ten years. --ed

Robert Jordan

what if I made a magic system based on BDSM? And then spent 10 having all my main characters spanked for increasingly contrived plot reasons? (link)

"tonight's episode: The Writer's Barely-Disguised Fetish" (link)

Is this not a Terry Goodkind take? Robert Jordan felt more like "What if I was the nerdy kid who studied the blade, but it was useful and I did get my anime harem when the world was on fire?" (link)

Tom Kratman

I would describe Tom Kratman uncharitably, but I don't want him to write me into one of his books (link)

Ursula Le Guin

Le Guin mostly wrote anarchist essays and Western Taoist sermons that happened to have plots. (link)

with the power of Friendship and Understanding, we'll discover my college politics were actually right (link)

LeGuin knew she was a superior craftsperson to other writers and wrote not for love of her works but to show everyone else what they were doing wrong. (link)

Anne Leckie

Of Anne Lecke's work, I've only read her Ancillary Justice trilogy, but to me it was reminiscent of this picture (link)

someone told ann leckie multiple POVs are hard to follow and she said "skill issue" (link)

Stanisław Lem

no one should have ever told stanislaw lem about "literature," he wrecked himself trying to write an astronaut herzog (link)

C. S. Lewis

CS Lewis thought alien societies were more likely than women wearing pants. (link)

Liu Cixin

Liu Cixin is to Xi Jinping as Heinlein is to Ayn Rand. (link)

Reading Liu Cixin should be an automatic diagnosis for autism (link)

Liu read read Asimov and said, "Hmm, tastes ok but needs more autism." (link)

H.P. Lovecraft

One, two, three:

Lovecraft’s love of words & their macabre powers spawned a cylopean panoply of multisyllabic anglophillic incantations thru a lexicon of ill-fabled Eldritch books & legendry of his own devising to bring the reader face to face w/ horrors that could not be … described in words. (link)

Shorten: Every Lovecraft story is about bringing the reader face to face with horrors that can't be described in words. So he fails every time. (link)

Yes yes … but you see the structure of my roast was emulating his structure. Overly verbose and then nothing at the big reveal.

Double roast.

🐙😅😱 (link)

Ken MacLeod

Ken MacLeod is what kids have waiting at home when the kids ask their mom if they can have Iain M. Banks. Conversely, Iain M. Banks is what kids have waiting at home if the kids ask for Ken MacLeod. (link)

John McRae (Wildbow)

Wildbow's fallback career if he didn't succeed in webfic was going to be running a slaughterhouse (link)

I totally understand that the gore is too much for some people (especially in Twig, Jesus Christ) but as someone who previously wanted to write comics, seeing the powers he came up with felt like that scene in Amadeus where Salieri hears Mozart play for the first time (link)

Wildbow's Worm is a marvel, and even though it seems that every Wildbow fan is on the fanfic sites writing Worm fanfic, I thought he deserved inclusion here. --ed

Anne McCaffrey

Anne McCaffrey is what happens when an author doesn't have enough self-respect to write proper smut (link)

Why is this the most accurate thing I've ever seen written about her, though? Lol. I was ready to be mad when I saw her name but, yah, no, that's pretty on point. Lol. (link)

China Mieville

China Mieville hates happy endings so much that he sometimes forgets to write any conclusion at all (link)

China Mieville is the smart kid in class who answers every question the teacher asks even when the teacher appears exhausted by him. (link)

Michael Moorcock

Moorcock is really just a fanboy who got a shot at the big leagues and no one has had the heart to tell him to stop. (link)

Tamsyn Muir

Tamsyn Muir heard about the “curtains are just blue” debate and decided to write a series where every detail was a metaphor for something. (link)

Tamsyn Muir finds it a little too easy to keep track of who everyone is in Russian novels (link)

There's got to be a happy medium between Greg Egan barely mentioning Australia at all and Muir having New Zealand conquer the Galaxy. (link)

Larry Niven

Niven didn't even wait until the second half of his career [ed: to masturbate onto his readership; see Heinlein] (link)

Niven is just the Smeagol to Pournelle's Gollum (link)

Annoying stuff like "plot" was just a speedbump Larry Niven had to surpass to write the settings he wanted (link)

Engineer or dirty old man?

niven just wanted to show you all his fun astrophysics thought experiments the characters and story were just obstacles in the way of doing that (link)

I think you forgot a major component of his work

slides you a pamphlet about Rishathra (link)

Nah Steven is right there’s no weird fetish stuff that isn’t absolutely necessary in Niven’s work let’s just glance at my bookshelf oh Ringworld hmm never mind I take it back. (link)

Hannu Rajaniemi

Hannu Rajaniemi heard the complaints about SF using too many weird words for basic things, and took that as a challenge (link)

Alastair Reynolds

Reynolds is the answer to the unasked question, "What if Lovecraft wrote physics papers?" (link)

Kim Stanley Robinson

KSR is really just a frustrated travel writer. Or maybe not frustrated - he wanted to be frustrated by not being able to go to places but wrote about them in excruciating detail anyway, mostly geological. (link)

KSR's erotica isn't very good, but that won't stop him from putting 20 pages of it in the middle of a book about industrialization of space (link)

KSR was a wide-eyed technological optimist, then he grew up. (link)

Brandon Sanderson

Sanderson: spend a thousand pages creating an intricate magic system then solve the plot like a 5 year old when the main character becomes God (link)

Don't forget the time a side character became god (link)

It shows Sanderson's depth as an author. When my 5 year old tells stories it's always the MAIN character who ends up with cannons, lasers, invisibility, speed, prescience, limb regeneration, and invisibility. (link)

Sanderson's books will all make sense in just 32 more volumes; you just gotta give him 5 years to tie it all together (link)

Sanderson is going somewhere by making all his characters gods; you have to go to the fan wiki that you have no reason to know exists to realize this. --ed

John Scalzi

Scalzi mostly writes fan novels about the franchises he loved when he was eight. (link)

John Scalzi is like Haldeman, except instead of Starship Troopers he is very active on social media [private account]

there's no one left on twitter to roast Scalzi because they're all on bluesky having increasingly vicious holy wars over minor differences in ideology (link)

No one felt fit to mention Scalzi for almost a full day after I started this thread, then I realized his true fans probably left twitter after the Elon Musk acquisition. --ed

Masamune Shirow

Masamune Shirow revolutionized the Cyberpunk aesthetic by drawing one-handed. (link)

Dan Simmons

Simmons is like a clueless tourist who on his dream round-the-world tour, & his photos are stunning, Pulitzer-worthy 8K stills of landscapes so perfect & exotic you doubt you could have imagined them, and when you ask what he did there he says “Not much. Took these photos I guess” (link)

Finds ONE good technobabble and overuses it to death. (link)

Dan Simmons is the disgusting, self-absorbed poet Martin Silenus (link)

Loves to write description of bizarre imaginative future societies to distract the reader from how boring his real politics are (link)

Dan Simmons? More like Damn Sermons, amirite? (link)

Simmons is just Gene Wolfe but with greek plays instead of religious texts. (link)

Norman Spinrad

Norman Spinrad is a time traveller pretending to be a writer (link)

Neal Stephenson

On endings

neal stephenson’s books don’t have endings, they just sort of run out of book (link)

neal stephenson writes publisher’s deadline reached and bailiffs breaking down the door to collect (the manuscript) kind of endings (link)

Cryptonomicon just sort of runs out of WWII. (link)

Snow Crash gets closest [to having an ending], but only because the book it began as ends a couple chapters in and becomes a second book also named Snow Crash (link)

Stephenson’s books are better the worse their endings are. The ultimate Stephenson novel would end in a river of borscht. (link)

His ideal audience

What if there were a video game based on my favourite Wikipedia articles but it was a book instead of a video game? (link)

Stephenson writes for the sort of person who loses weeks to wikipedia, SCPs, TVtropes... (link)

Uncharitable? His publisher called and asked if they could blurb this. (link)

His penchant for action sequences

Stephenson lacks the courage to publish a purely cerebral novel, so, once he finishes his first draft, he cuts the manuscript like a deck of cards and inserts an action sequence (link)

"action sequences"; do you mean "quick time events?" (link)

Misc

Neal Stephenson was only good when he was forced to rewrite the first chapter of Snow Crash 1000 times by a demanding editor, then spent the rest of his career proving the editor completely correct. (link)

S. M. Stirling

S.M. Stirling loves 3 things:

  1. Lesbians,
  2. Denying he's a fascist,
  3. Writing EXACTLY how anyone who ever pondered the possibility of a fascist SF/F author thinks that one would write. (link)

Charles Stross

Stross' Laundry makes a great case for having science fiction writers rounded up and put in a government facility where they can't bother anyone. (link)

Charlie Stross: Accelerando is what happens if roon opens a google doc and then takes a bunch of speed (link)

roon is a twitter personality. --ed

we're living in a charlie stross novel so any complaints about the current thing should go to him (link)

Yoshiki Tanaka

yoshiki tanaka had space warfare be simultaneously too much like naval warfare and too much like land warfare (link)

J. R. R. Tolkein

Tolkien: if you find yourself bored with the luxury afforded to the British aristocracy, it's fun to go start a war. Your peers might think it's disreputable, but it's definitely something to try at least once. (link)

Tolkien is the Bob Ross of writing. He paints beautiful pictures, but his voice will put you to sleep (link)

Harry Turtledove

Turtledove has limitless imagination for alternate history. I never realised WW2 could have ended so many different ways. (link)

A. E. van Vogt

A.E. Van Vogt is when an author believe reading basic philosophy gives you deep thoughts, and then superpowers as long as you stay sufficiently vague about them. (link)

Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff Vandermeer really, really, really likes mushrooms, and would like to tell you a story about them. (link)

Jules Verne

Jules Verne is what happens when a sci-fi author cares too much about making their work scientifically plausible H.G. Wells is what happens when they care too little (link)

Vernor Vinge

Vernor Vinge lost interest in writing once he realized the "singularity" probably wouldn't happen in his lifetime. In 1995, he predicted we'd have extremely fast to use full AR user interfaces in 2017. Instead, we got VR that makes you shoot at a keyboard to enter your password. (link)

More a burn on us than on Vinge. --ed

Vinge thought he was predicting the future, and we have all let him down (link)

V. Vinge isnt really space opera it's more space libretto. (link)

How would incomprehensibly strange aliens communicate? Obviously they would invent Usenet, pinnacle of all technology. (link)

Peter Watts

Peter Watts just really wants to get the most value out of his Zotero bibliography

alternatively, "what if research papers had narratives, and could give you depression?" (link)

Goddamn, this is so apt. “I know writers who build worlds without PubMed and they’re all cowards.” (link)

Peter Watts is always two drinks away from going on a rant about "biotruths". (link)

David Weber

David Weber was a special project developed to help airport bookstores answer the question of what to do with embarrassing empty shelf space (link)

Early Weber didn't understand his world building and it's amazing. Late Weber did and it's bloody awful. (link)

That man needs not AN editor, but EVERY editor. (link)

David Weber is what happens when someone wants to write a military encyclopedia keeps trying to write novels. (link)

David Weber is David Eddings but also store-brand C.S. Forester but also store-brand Tom Clancy and I cannot believe he got me to read the same series twice AFTER Eddings got me [private account]

David Weber is also store brand David Drake (the one actually good Baen Books milsf author) (link)

Andy Weir

Andy Weir writes in a way that only a career in software engineering can teach you to (link)

Charles Stross also writes in a way that only a career in software engineering can teach you to, but better (link)

H.G. Wells

HG Wells wrote etiquette primers in which the main characters survive incredible odds while still calling each other by their last names. (link)

Martha Wells

Someone told Martha Wells that scifi short stories weren't economically viable anymore, and she took that as a challenge (link)

Connie Willis

Connie Willis isn't smart enough to write about technology, or lesbian enough to write historical fiction. (link)

Connie Willis is a treasure and deserves to be much more widely read. --ed

Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe: mad Catholic accepts bet that he can't get every single word in the dictionary into one novel. (link)

Wolfe basically just made porn for people who want to argue about obscure translation errors in religious texts but have too much engineer brain to not do that in space. (link)

Requests / Omissions / Under-roasted

Names that were mentioned at least once that didn't get a roast (or only attracted mean-spirited comments, or only worn clichés) are listed below.

Of particular mention is the lack of non-English authors.