What entity aboard this ship exhibits all the personality traits of a cold-blooded killing machine, combined with the monstrous, overweening vanity and laziness of a convalescent war god lounging in t...
Very good, Mr. Howard. They were the ones who didn’t try to second-guess their commanding officer. Can I suggest that in future you take a leaf from their book and refrain from poking your nose into t...
To put it bluntly, there are too many humans on this planet. Six-billion-plus primates. And we think too loudly. Our brains are neurocomputers, incredibly complex. The more observers there are, the mo...
There’s an unexpected lull in the traffic about two-thirds of the way to Darmstadt, and I make the mistake of breathing a sigh of relief. The respite is short-lived. One moment I’m driving along a see...
There will be plenty of backup and support, but she’s still going to have to do heartbreaking things to people who probably don’t understand why the pale woman with the bone-white violin and blood dri...
The widespread belief among some politicians that government can’t do anything right—that the private sector is always better—becomes a corrosive, self-fulfilling prophecy. Government isn’t allowed to...
The male ego is a curious thing. It’s about the size of a small continent but it’s extremely brittle.
Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in furious sleep remember a tiny starship launched years ago, and pay attention.
Nobody ever imagined a bunch of Orcs would steal a database table…
Let’s see.’ She fiddles with her terminal and the room card reader. ‘You’re in 403 and 404. Have a nice day.'I hand Persephone the Forbidden Room card and keep Room Not Found for myself. She looks at...
I’m going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsches and Mercedes.
It has so much character that it’s probably being hunted by a posse of typographers.
Imagine, Sir David, the end of all you ever wanted brought about because an idiot banker did not prioritize highly enough a simple request from their master . . .
Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.
Horror fiction allows us to confront and sublimate our fears of an uncontrollable universe, but the threat verges on the overwhelming and may indeed carry the protagonists away. Spy fiction in contras...
For instance, I never wrote to my MP to express my displeasure at the widespread deployment of sleeping policemen around the capital. It never occurred to me to do so: Mo and I don’t own a car, and sp...
Finally, they began to investigate the prime minister, Harold Wilson. Wilson, Wright was convinced, was a KGB agent. I’m nodding along like a metronome at this point. There was a group, a cabal if you...
Everything – the entire 400-megabuck investment, ten years of Company black operations – depends on what happens in the next few hours.
Emma has switched from sanguine to sanguinary in a matter of seconds,
Cat. No doubled vision: it’s a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it...