My experience of Aaronovich is only with one of his first books, "The Also People," which has something of a cult following: it's a BBC-authorized Dr. Who novel, but what makes it interesting is that it's set in Iain Banks' The Culture. Aaronovich manages to file off all the serial numbers, but it's so obviously The Culture, with its own extensions and Banksian "interest groups" and whatnot, that its fans consider it A Fine Culture Novel in its own right.

David Weber is another one who's big on "takers" slowly eroding the capacity of "makers" to make. His entire Honor Harrington series is predicated on this thesis: Manticore is a great capitalist kingdom of makers while the more socialist People's Republic of Haven is slowly decaying under the weight of takers. I've wondered what the life of someone destitute & disabled on Manticore is like. I bet the answer is "nasty, brutish, and short."

And Kessler's dismissal of the SEC filings as "mere boilerplate" doesn't add up, given his use of other SEC filings as prima facie evidence of responsibility and culpability in previous scandals: http://www.emptywheel.net/2012/07/14/glenn-kessler-didnt-used-to-treat-sec-filings-as-boilerplate/

Wil, Hugo: Thanks so much!

That's a fascinating take on it, so.... where do we find this list of beats? "Make an offer," "Ask for permission." This is the sort of sentence-by-sentence intensity that, as a writer, I'd really like to get a grip upon. Can you make any recommendations?

I think the Kos montage is okay, but its results are skewed by the omission of one full-sized picture of a person of color: http://pendorwright.com/lj.g/rpta/im-039_s.jpg