Yes. His BS was from Georgia Tech. Moreover: “Chosen by Admiral Hyman Rickover for the nuclear submarine program, he was assigned to Schenectady, N.Y., where he took graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics, and served as senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the second nuclear submarine.”

President Carter was trusted by /Rickover/ to work on new-technology nuclear submarines. It took the rise of the know-nothing, don’t-bother-us Eloi to make fun of him and pretend he was stupid. He never did.

I just finally got my copy back from another friend who loved it… so I can reread it. Yay!

I think Cherryh does a consistently good job of finding the golden mean to make a good story. I find a respect for verisimilitude in her fantasy too. When Tristan & company go to war in the Fortress series, they actually have to pay attention to logistics & supply lines — how refreshing! (Seems to me that Tolkien paid attention to that in LOTR too… compare the travel of the Riders of Rohan from Rohan to Minas Tirith in the books as opposed to in the film.) But a friend of mine who likes quick action finds Cherryh quite boring.

Incidentally, I concur that much SF is actually fantasy with spaceships (most traditional space opera falls into this category with Star Wars and BSG as exemplars — although one of our common favorites, Cherryh, is grittier than most).

I agree with this for the most part… though I’m not sure of “the greater the restrictions.” If the restrictions are too great, there’s not room for imagination. I don’t think you were actually talking about that extreme — but some folks seem to take any rules at all as being that extreme.

I guess I feel that a complete disregard for the “rules” tends to make the writing pretty flaccid & dull. But it also depends on which rules you’re talking about. Rules of science? Rules of internal consistency? Any good writing is going to have at least the latter, I think.

I think a lot of what we call “science fiction” is really “fantasy” because of its disregard for the rules of science — witness some of what’s been said here about Battlestar Galactica & the Matrix. And yet both follow enough conventions of SF that they get labeled as such. But even the most science-aware SF misses out on some of the science, if only because science is continually evolving. And also no doubt because any writer no matter how science-aware can’t know the entirety of even state-of-the-art science, so might be completely on the ball in some areas of his/her story, but inaccurate in others. I know for a fact that the stuff I’m writing will suffer from that!