Problems seldom go away if they’re ignored.
Now they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike p...
No group can survive, let alone thrive, unless what is good for the overall community is more important than individual freedom. Take, for example, resource allocation. How can anyone with any intelli...
Manual control, please.Are you sure, Frank?Quite sure, 'Falcon' ... Thank you.Illogical though it seemed, most of the human race had found it impossible not to be polite to its artificial children, ho...
Man was, therefore, still a prisoner on his own planet. It was much fairer, but a much smaller, planet than it had been a century before. When the Overlords abolished war and hunger and disease, they...
Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget.
It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.
In particular, as was pointed out by Isaacs et al. almost a hundred years ago (see Science, Vol. 151, pp. 682–83, 1966), diamond is the only construction material which would make possible the so-call...
He was only aware of the conflict that was slowly destroying his integrity—the conflict between truth, and concealment of truth.
He lifted the telephone receiver and pressed it against the plastic of his helmet. If there had been a dialing sound he could have heard it through the conducting material. But, as he had expected, th...
Hal in full control of the ship. The
Even on Earth, the first steps in this direction had been taken. There were millions of men, doomed in earlier ages, who now lived active and happy lives thanks to artificial limbs, kidneys, lungs, an...
Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he...
Dying in an exciting situation is much better than living in a boring one.
You can’t have action without reaction.
While there was life, there was hope;
They found it hard to imagine the smog-choked cities of the Twentieth Century, and the waste, greed, and appalling environmental disasters of the Oil Age.
The extraordinary meeting of the Space Advisory Council was brief and stormy. Even by the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occu...
Soon after her beloved young brother was killed, she asked me, What is the purpose of grief? Does it serve any biological function?
So this, thought Jan, with a resignation that lay beyond all sadness, was the end of man. It was an end that no prophet had foreseen – an end that repudiated optimism and pessimism alike.Yet it was fi...