Yup! People will have no job because of this. The least they can do is be honest and unambiguous.

It tends to lead to hyperactive minds...

Citation need, I think.

A mention is not the same as an appearance, so the discrepancy for some characters could be even greater if you take that into account.

There is no precedence for the existence of deities.

For belief in deities, yes, but not for their existence.

That is all we need to say if we believe in the existence of deities; prior plausibility.

Staying in the middle ground of "maybe, we don't know" makes no sense, because it puts the plausibility one step further towards "yes" than is warranted based on the evidence we have.

Pre-Madonna, I think.

Looks like it's two separate projects.

Having read it again not too long ago, I was actually surprised by how much of it was not good.

The framework was interesting, but much of the actual writing wasn't nearly as good as I had thought.

Maybe it's because I had read it in a Dutch translation the first couple of times, and the translator had had improved the prose without intending to, or maybe it's because it was many years ago.

Whatever the reason, I felt like it needed another pass of the editor.

The movie, on the other hand, still thrills me every time I see it.

"The Parker's".

That is the worse crime.

Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks. Space opera at its best.

Intellectual property owners.

So do I, but I can see why someone would be put off the whole series after reading The Colour of Magic, so having some other books to recommend makes sense to me.

Scumbags. Let them pay the wages of sin.

And no, not literally. We've progressed from biblical morality.