[Dragaera] If the Vlad books were made into a movie...

[Dorothy J Heydt]

>And I'm not buying the "other animals have short lifespans"
>argument, which I'd call a fallacy of composition. Here on earth,
>human lifespan, measured in heartbeats/lifetime, is a statistical
>outlier, as Stephen J Gould famously pointed out. 

And Isaac Asimov too.  I won't say "Asimov before him," though I
read it in one of Asimov's essays many years before I encountered
it in Gould: Asimov could easily have read it in Gould himself.

I'm not going to speculate about the lifespans of Serioli either.
Clearly they are an old *species* with an old *culture*, which
has entailed at least some individuals' being able to learn a
great deal about assorted forms of magic in however long or short
their lifespans may be.  But we haven't met most Serioli.  They
may be as short-lived as cats, and most of them may have the
attention spans of second-graders, and we've only met some of the
older, more seriously studious ones.

Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at kithrup.com