Now he asked, his voice as careful and unslurred as only a true alcoholic’s can be, whose turn it was to tell a tale.
Nothing had ever been so welcome by its absence.
Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities.
Jehovah had not simply been testing Abraham, but had communicated in the only language of loyalty, obedience, sacrifice, and command that humankind could understand at that point in the relationship.
It seemed that Abraham had offered to murder his son to test a phantom. It seemed that Sol had brought his dying daughter through hundreds of light-years and innumerable hardships in response to nothi...
It isn’t hard being a hack writer. Between Dying Earth II and Dying Earth IX, six standard years had passed relatively painlessly. My research was meager, my plots formulaic, my characters cardboard,...
I was getting used to the caustic voice in my head. It and I had made a peace when I realized that it wasn’t urging me to lie down and die, just critiquing my inadequate efforts to stay alive.
I hope that on the morning of my forty-ninth birthday, in Hemingway’s last moments, he might have been thinking, if his sorrow and depression allowed him such a luxury as coherent thought, not only of...
Her head was on my shoulder and her breathing was so deep and regular that I thought her to be asleep. I was almost asleep myself when her warm hand slid up my leg and lightly cupped me. I was startle...
Having sex or a domestic quarrel with the house monitors on is like undressing in front of a dog or cat … it gives you pause the first time, and then you forget about it.
Francis Bacon once said, There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.
Entropy is a bitch,
Dying Earth II sold nineteen million copies. Not bad, said Tyrena. It takes awhile to build an audience. The first Dying Earth sold three billion copies, I said. Pilgrim’s Progress, she said. Mein Kam...
Crawford reacted in the fashion of small towns immemorial – some tongues wagged constantly, some people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone else’s misfortune out of their voices and gazes...
Context is to data what water is to a dolphin
But this is human life: the war, the deeds, The disappointment, the anxiety, Imagination’s struggles, far and nigh, All human; bearing in themselves this good, That they are still the air, the subtle...
Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.
Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality…and the inevitable disillusionment is just as pa...
And it was one of these observers who designed the tests and simulations carried out on Old Earth during the last three centuries of its exile in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud to better explain our spec...
All this natural misery, Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then ma...