Quote:All of them? Years back. I've read at least one within the last year, I think within the last six months, and I've read most of them several times each; I think I'm fairly familiar with the series.
Edit: Missed Wanderer's response, but my response to that is merely "When was the last time you read the books?"
Quote:What do you mean by "absolute"?
The universe of the Lensman stories IS absolute in every concept.
I don't think I argued that the Lensman universe doesn't involve absolute good-and-evil archetypes. I was arguing that that is not all there is. By nature, the more ordinary and/or less extreme-end-of-the-spectrum people wouldn't tend to do anything which would need to appear in the story being told; also, I would find it highly implausible (even on a different-rules-for-different-universes level) for every single random man-on-the-street to be absolute good or absolute evil, or even necessarily absolutely neutral. A universe of absolute concepts does not in my mind imply that nothing in that universe is not absolute.
I could provide examples (though not many) of initial bad guys who wind up good, and at least one solid example of an ordinary person who doesn't seem to be strongly one thing or the other, but I didn't manage to fit them into the previous post without making it more awkward and bulky than it needed to be.
Quote:He didn't say that "The Philosophical Strangler" was bad. He said that its sequel, "Forward the Mage", was bad.
Hey, I liked Philosophical Strangler. I liked it the same way I liked the Discworld books. It was fun.
From the little I've read of the latter, that being the teaser chapters available through the Baen Website (I severely lack money), it didn't seem bad to me, and in fact I was disappointed in not being able to read more... but opinions can validly differ on such matters.
Kokuten? How does it come to be legal to distribute those copies of those books? I know that a couple of the Baen authors have included complete do-with-as-you-please collections of their previous works on CD with their latest novels, but I didn't think Eric Flint was one of them...