James D. Nicoll

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James Davis Nicoll (born March 18, 1961^[1]) of Kitchener, Ontario, is a former role-playing game store owner, a freelance game and SF reviewer, and a noted Usenet personality. He is perhaps best known online for two things. First, his nearly single-handed rescue of the newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written from descending into noise through his "Nicoll Pledge", in which he promised to refrain from off-topic posts and to start multiple new on-topic threads regularly. This pledge was spectacularly successful, inspired some imitators, and increased the signal-to-noise ratio by a dramatic amount. Second, James Nicoll is known for having had possibly more life-and-or-limb threatening events happen to him (and to those in his family) than anyone else, and for casually recounting the most bizarre sequences of near-fatal events with a dry, understated wit which has made the term "Nicoll Event" a by-word on all SF-related newsgroups. He is also the creator of the phrase "Brain Eater", which refers to a decline in quality of science fiction writers' works late in their careers, and a simultaneous increase in focus on the writers' obsessions and eccentric opinions. Writers suggested to have been Brain Eaten include James P. Hogan and Larry Niven.

The following epigram first written by James D. Nicoll is from 1990 and has been attributed to everyone from Booker T. Washington to a nineteenth-century painter also named James Nicoll:

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle [sic] their pockets for new vocabulary.^[2]

James Nicoll is also known as the inventor of the Nicoll-Dyson laser concept, where all the satellites of a Dyson sphere act as a phased array laser emitter capable of delivering their energy to a planet-sized target at a range of millions of light years.