#mongoliad

The unfortunate antique-sword-fan-hive-mind composed of otherwise interesting people like Stephenson and Eagan and Bear is a terrifying funhouse-mirror version of the Sterling-Gibson-Shirley-Rucker Cheap Truth dynamic, and it makes me think twice about banging good SF authors together to see what comes out. I fear that those guys will end up producing only masturbatory historically-inaccurate swordplay narratives for decades and that history will remember the period 2010-2030 as the time when the broadsword replaced the rocket ship as bad SF's phallic icon.