And in its sky was such a sun as no opium eater could ever have imagined in his wildest dreams. Too hot to be white, it was a searing ghost at the frontiers of the ultraviolet, burning its planets wit...
One day, somebody had predicted, Earth would have a ring like Saturn’s, composed entirely of lost bolts, fasteners, and even tools that had escaped from careless orbital construction workers.)
Like all material things, they were not immune to the corruptions of Time and its patient, unsleeping servant, Entropy.
Fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few millise...
Any man, in the right circumstances, could be dehumanized by panic.
All the world’s religions cannot be right, and they know it. Sooner or later man has to learn the truth:
This was the fundamental problem with rockets—and no one had ever discovered any alternative for deep-space propulsion. It was just as difficult to lose speed as to acquire it, and carrying the necess...
They would never know how lucky they had been. For a lifetime, mankind had achieved as much happiness as any race can ever know. It had been the Golden Age. But gold was also the color of sunset, of 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...
Like every human being, Alvin was in some measure a machine, his actions predetermined by his inheritance. That did not alter his need for understanding and sympathy, nor did it render him immune to l...
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.
It was good to be alive; it was better to be young; it was best of all to be in love.
It is not easy to run a shipping line between destinations that not only change their positions by millions of kilometers every few days, but also swing through a velocity range of tens of kilometers...
It had been virtually shattered by two inventions, which were, ironically enough, of purely human origin and owed nothing to the Overlords. The first was a completely reliable oral contraceptive: the...
In my life I have found two things of priceless worth: learning and loving. Nothing else—not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake—can possibly have the same lasting value.
In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when y...
In Lys, it seemed, all love began with mental contact, and it might be months or years before a couple actually met. In this way, Hilvar explained, there could be no false impressions, no deceptions,...
However much the universe and its mysteries might call him, this was where he was born and where he belonged. It would never satisfy him, yet always he would return. He had gone half-way across the Ga...
Faith in one’s own destiny was among the most valuable of the gifts which the gods could bestow upon a man,
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...