(note added )Ī message from SFWA’s President, Mary Robinette Kowal:

SFWA Middle Grade and Young Adult Writersįor updates on #DisneyMustPay and the writers who have and have not had their missing royalties and/or statements resolved with Disney, please visit the #DisneyMustPay Task Force’s website,.

Operating Policies and Procedures (OPPM).

They’re like a chronically recurring disease.

Just when you think you’ve got them licked they hit you all over again, sneaking up on you when you’re unprepared, when you’re completely relaxed and least expect them. Not a damn thing you can do about it, either. Can’t take any pills or potions, can’t ask for a retroactive injection. The only cure is good sound sleep, and that just feeds the infection. But in deep space you don’t have any choice. Avoid the cryonic chambers and the boredom on a deep-space transport will kill you. Or even worse, you’ll survive, dazed and mumbling after the sacrifice of ten, twenty, thirty years of useless consciousness. A lifetime wasted gazing at gauges, seeking enlightenment in the unvarying glare of readouts of limited colours. You can read, and watch the vid, and exercise, and think of what might have been had you opted to slay the boredom with deep sleep. Not many professions where it’s considered desirable to sleep on the job. Pay’s good, and you have the chance to observe social and technological advance from a unique perspective. Postponing death does not equate with but rather mimics immortality.Įxcept for the nightmares. They’re the inescapable downside to serving on a deep-space vessel. It’s their job to keep you under, slow down your body functions, delay awareness. Only, the engineers haven’t figured out yet how to slow down dreams and their bastard cousin the nightmare. So along with your respiration and circulation your unconscious musings are similarly drawn out, lengthened, extended. Under certain circumstances being bored to death might be the preferable alternative. The cold, the regulated atmosphere, the needles that poke and probe according to the preset medical programmes, rule your body, if not your life. When you lie down in deep sleep you surrender volition to the care of mechanicals, trusting in them, relying on them. And why not? Over the decades they’ve proven themselves a helluva lot more reliable than the people who designed them. Machines bear no grudges, engage in no animosity. The judgments they render are based solely on observation and analysis.

Emotion is something they’re not required to quantify, much less act upon. The machine that was the Sulaco was doing its job.

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