Why Mary Robinette Kowal and I Should Not Be in the Same Vehicle of Any Sort
Posted on June 11, 2012 Posted by John Scalzi 11 Comments
She explains why on her site. It involves fire.
Whatever
FURIOUSLY REASONABLE
WHATEVER
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Does the SFWA make you travel separately anyway, so that a single terrorist attack does promote the Secretary of Terraforming to King of Imaginationland, or whatever?
(I may be a bit fuzzy on how the speculative fiction’s magna carte works.)
Could have been worse. I’ve been in a car that caught on fire. Wasn’t my car. Wasn’t the car of the guy driving it. The actual owner of the car had only owned the car for a week.
@ Erik Harrison
Don’t you mean the manga carta?
More importantly, did you put on her hat and sunglasses again? THAT was a picture.
Ummm…yikes.
Yes, I agree with her, do not ever fly together. It’ll be like the real-life version of LOST, complete with supernatural deaths
Manga Carta?
Am I the only one who thinks this just means they shouldn’t have ENDED their hanging out together so soon? If she’d waited another couple of hours (or a day), the fire would have been out.
@ bjschild
Aw, c’mon, it wasn’t that bad a pun, was it?
Longshot, possibly, but are you aware of an obscure 1975 science fiction novel by Gene DeWeese and Robert Coulson called “Now You See It/Him/Them” and its 1977 sequel, “Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats”? I ask because the protagonist had a similarly weird psi power: he was irresistibly, instinctively drawn towards places that news was about to happen. No matter where he went, or no matter what he was trying to do, news would break out. (If memory serves, he learned at an early age why it’s not a good idea to stay home a lot.) Frequently he’s the only one who can understand what really happened at these news stories, because they involve rare psi powers even weirder than his. Both stories are set in science fiction fandom in the 1970s, and are hilarious for that reason alone. But when she mentioned your “weird travel karma,” it was the kind of weird psi power that DeWeese and Coulson would have written for that series.
Wow. I haven’t heard of that story before, but the situation does have a strangely familiar ring to it.