A feeling of foreboding, and, indeed, of physical as well as psychological discomfort, had come over him. He suddenly recalled—and this did nothing at all to help—a phrase he had once come across: Som...
There’s something fundamentally wrong with the wiring of our brains, which makes us incapable of consistent logical thinking. To make matters worse, though all creatures need a certain amount of aggre...
All that he had ever been, at every moment of his life, was being transferred to safer keeping. Even as one David Bowman ceased to exist, another became immortal.
Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?
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...
Though the man-apes often fought and wrestled one another, their disputes very seldom resulted in serious injuries. Having no claws or fighting canine teeth, and being well protected by hair, they cou...
They would probably never even know that the human race existed. Such monumental indifference was worse than any deliberate insult. When
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...
There was no evidence that the intelligence of the human race had improved, but for the first time everyone was given the fullest opportunity of using what brain he had.
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...
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.
So here, Floyd told himself, is the first generation of the Spaceborn; there would be more of them in the years to come. Though there was sadness in this thought, there was also a great hope. When Ear...
Now I can rejoice that I knew you, rather than mourn because I lost you.
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 some kind of cosmic switching device, routing the traffic of the stars through unimaginable dimensions of space and time. He was passing through a Grand Central Station of the galaxy.
His mind wandered, seeking other examples. People—particularly older ones—still spoke of putting film into a camera, or gas into a car. Even the phrase cutting a tape was still sometimes heard in reco...
He wanted to close his eyes and shut out the pearly nothingness that surrounded him, but that was an act of a coward and he would not yield to it.
He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.