«Si riferisce ai loro poteri magici? Vorrei, lo vorrei tanto. Ma anche così questi scavi sono incomparabili. La cultura materiale non ha nessun senso. Non esiste nessun’altra parte al mondo in cui si...
Sometimes-guns, that violently assert the manchmal, this stuff, our everyday, against the always of the immer.
When I think of my age I think in years, still, even after all this time and travel. It’s bad form, and ship-life should have cured me of it. Years? one of my first officers shouted at me. I don’t giv...
What you up to, Isaac? They’re so egalitarian . . . well . . . Their society’s all based on maximizing choice for the individual, which is why they’re communistic. Grants the most uninhibited choice t...
Well, put simply, and as far as I understand it, they’re egalitarian because they respect the individual so much, right? And you can’t respect other people’s individuality if you focus on your own ind...
There was a hubbub in Billy's head all night. He would hardly call so raging and discombobulated a torrent of images a dream. Call it a vomit, call it a gush.He was back in the water, not braving but...
There are a thousand ways of inhabiting it, but the aether, that in-between, is always what it is; and ghosts, spirits, the souls of lucid dreamers squeeze past each other in complex asomatic ecology....
The boy went to the low-down part of the attic where he drew, and drew a lizard in a bottle between the stems of the wallpaper’s design. He came back the next day and, beside it, he drew a cat in anot...
So what’s your alternative?’ people say, as if that’s logic. We don’t have to have an alternative, that’s not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you’re welcome, but if we don’t that no more...
October, for an instant, brings a new kind of power. Fleetingly, there is a shift towards workers’ control of production and the rights of peasants to the land. Equal rights for men and women in work...
It’s a chain of whispers, he said. He leaned in and spoke quietly, ensuring that our conversation was private. When they tell you that I came from the world of the dead, you’re at the end of a chain o...
I was too abstract. I was not worthy of respect. There…was a madness…I was mad. I committed a heinous act, a heinous act… His words broke down into avian moans. What did you do? Isaac steeled himself...
His manager taught him that words change with time, by single letters or more, sometimes their whole roots switching—a y to an e in a name for power, sun-writing becomes light-drawing. The man eventua...
But I do think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books.
When I approached and told her the key-maker wasn’t there she cursed filthily and threw something hard against the step, shouting, What am I supposed to do with this now? It bounced away. I waited whi...
There were those Hosts who thought something better could have been said and better thoughts therefore thought, had I only been made to do other things than I had. That I could have been a better simi...
The early years of a Bes (and presumably an Ul Qoman) child are intense learnings of cues. We pick up styles of clothing, permissible colours, ways of walking and holding oneself, very fast. Before we...
So I would stand in that cupboard and see how the stores were decreasing. I knew we had weeks to go before all of it was gone but I knew also that it was depleting and that various staples would be fi...
Officers looked at the antique once-animals that eyed them back, at the no giant tank, at the nowhere anything so big and missing as Architeuthis could be.
My father didn’t look at me. He dropped more stones upon a random-looking cairn. The townspeople were slow to get out of our sight. He waited and watched them and didn’t look at me and kept adding to...