case_when
Excession, by Iain M Banks.
Genar-Hofoen felt the Diplomatic Force officer’s kiss through the few millimetres’ thickness of the gelfield suit as a moderately sharp impact on his jaw followed by a powerful sucking that might have led someone less experienced in the diverse and robust manifestations of Affronter friendliness to conclude that the being was either trying to suck his teeth out through his cheek or had determined to test whether a Culture Gelfield Contact/Protection Suit, Mk 12, could be ripped off its wearer by a localised partial vacuum. What the crushingly powerful four-limbed hug would have done to a human unprotected by a suit designed to withstand pressures comparable to those found at the bottom of an ocean probably did not bear thinking about, but then a human exposed without protection to the conditions required to support Affronter life would be dying in at least three excitingly different and painful ways anyway without having to worry about being crushed by a cage of leg-thick tentacles.
Gorgeous.
As someone who’s spent a lot of time working in a lab, the ability to control static electricity would be a godsend! There’s really nothing like spending weeks preparing a new material as a fine powder, carrying it over to the weighing scales, placing a glass sample vial onto the scales, taring it, then a scooping up some of your powder with a spatula, careful not to lose a single particle, then carefully, CAREFULLY carrying the scoop of power to the sample vial – then seeing the static blast your powder out of the spatula to coat the OUTSIDE of the sample vial, plus the scales, plus your nitrile glove…
I have trauma.
Margaret Atwood with a flamethrower is, by far, the best thing I have ever seen.
The new Dune film.
This is poetry.
My favourite part is that he uses the modulo operator in his Python script to generate the C code.
