Dr. Brown considered all engineers to be nothing more than glorified carpenters and plumbers.
Discovery was no longer a happy ship.
Because politics is the science of the possible, it only appeals to second-rate minds. The first raters only interested in the impossible
Because Nature always balances her books, the Sun lost some velocity in the transaction; but the effect would not be measurable for a few thousand years.
Astronomy was full of such intriguing but meaningless coincidences. The most famous was the fact that, from the Earth, both Sun and Moon have the same apparent diameter.
As to the nature of that drive, one thing was now certain, even though all else was mystery. There were no jets of gas, no beams of ions or plasma thrusting Rama into its new orbit. No one put it bett...
As a matter of interest, he said,
And eventually even the brain might go. As the seat of consciousness, it was not essential; the development of electronic intelligence had proved that. The conflict between mind and machine might be r...
After all, it wasn’t science that had transformed the world, but the marriage of technology and capitalism. The ignorant might blame science for the ills and evils of the modern era, but that was a ca...
A major part of his job was deciding when warnings could be ignored, when they could be dealt with at leisure—and when they had to be treated as real emergencies. If he paid equal attention to all the...
There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed cir...
No need to go to the dolphins, interjected Max Brailovsky. One of the brightest engineers in my class was fatally attracted to a blonde in Kiev. When I heard of him last, he was working in a garage. A...
My dear Rikki, Karellen retorted, it’s only by not taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess! Despite himself, Stormgren smiled...
Ladies and gentlemen, those flames from the port engines are perfectly normal. The stewardess will be coming around in a moment to serve coffee, tea, or milk. I’m sorry we don’t have anything stronger...
He did not wander aimlessly, though he never knew which village would be his next port of call. He was seeking no particular place, but a mood, an influence—indeed, a way of life.
Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong; it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actually happened.
Faith in one’s own destiny was among the most valuable of the gifts which the gods could bestow upon a man,
Don't forget, as you enjoy your mild spring days and peaceful summer evenings, how lucky you are to live in the temperate region of the Solar System, where the air never freezes and the rocks never me...
But he knew well enough that any man in the right circumstances could be dehumanised by panic.
And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one how he had wakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious still echoing in his brain: The Ramans do everything in...