You know why Wainwright and his kind fear me, don't you?.. They fear that we know the truth about the origins of their faiths. How long, they wonder, have we been observing humanity? Have we watched M...
When 2001 was written, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto were mere pinpoints of light in even the most powerful telescope; now they are worlds, each unique, and one of them—Io—is the most volcanicall...
We have had our failures. Yes, Karellen, that was true: and were you the one who failed, before the dawn of human history? It must have been a failure indeed, thought Stormgren, for its echoes to roll...
They would probably never even know that the human race existed. Such monumental indifference was worse than any deliberate insult. When
They were not in the least deterred when a celebrated Washington humorist claimed that his calculations proved that the world ended on December 31, 1999—but that everyone had had too much of a hangove...
There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments. Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various...
There were other thinkers, Bowman also found, who held even more exotic views. They did not believe that really advanced beings would possess organic bodies at all. Sooner or later, as their scientifi...
Then he [The Star Child] waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think o...
The world’s now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason’s obvious. There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too ma...
The outermost—Jupiter XXVII—moved backwards in an unstable path nineteen million miles from its temporary master. It was the prize in a perpetual tug-of-war between Jupiter and the Sun, for the planet...
The knowledge that [he] had passed a loveless, institutionalized childhood and had escaped from his origins by prodigies of pure intellect, at the cost of all other human qualities, helped one to unde...
The creation of wealth is certainly not to be despised, but in the long run the only human activities really worthwhile are the search for knowledge, and the creation of beauty. This is beyond argumen...
That suggested two possibilities. It was either too unintelligent to understand him—or it was very intelligent indeed, with its own powers of choice and volition. In that case, he must treat it as an...
Sometimes a decision has to be made by a single individual, who has the authority to enforce it. That’s why you need a captain. You can’t run a ship by a committee—at least not all the time.
Some immaterial pattern of energy, throwing off a spray of radiation like the wake of a racing speedboat, had leaped from the face of the Moon, and was heading out toward the stars.
Much of the colony’s musical experimenting was, quite consciously, concerned with what might be called time span. What was the briefest note that the mind could grasp—or the longest that it could tole...
Men had sought beauty in many forms—in sequences of sound, in lines upon paper, in surfaces of stone, in the movements of the human body, in colours ranged through space. All these media still survive...
I’ve just had an amusing flashback. All these creatures going in the same direction—they look like the commuters who used to surge back and forth twice a day between home and office, before electronic...
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but perhaps men were barbarians, beside the creatures who had made this thing.
It was such a nuisance that men were fundamentally polygamous. On the other hand, if they weren’t… Yes, perhaps it was better this way, after all.