>Hey, I don't come up with this stuff. I just flip through the tech
>references and RPG books. And all of them give exactly the same
>description of lightsaber technology.

Well, that's nice and all, but I think I'm with George on this one - I don't particularly care how they work, any more than I care how warp drive supposedly works or what the electrophysical principles behind fluorescent lighting are. Oh, a little pseudotechnical detail can be fun, and gives the engineer characters something to say so they sound like they know what they're doing, but on the whole, it doesn't matter how this stuff works. And in the case of lightsabers, it's even less significant - they're semi-mystic artifacts from a mostly-forgotten civilization which most educated people in the galaxy think was a myth. They're not supposed to be explicable. It's like performing a spectrographic analysis of the Holy Grail.

A few days ago I received one of those puzzling pieces of email I get now and then, from one of those peculiar people who come up with conundra like "I dislike everything you've ever written, but I think you're a good writer - so change your milieu and everything will be hunkey-dorey." In it, the correspondent made the (I think unfounded) charge, "I think there's a good hard-SF writer inside you, waiting to get out."

I shudder to think. May the gods preserve me from such a fate, if this man is correct.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/