When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.
Generalization is a natural human mental process, and many generalizations are true—in average. What often does promote evil behavior is the lazy, nasty habit of believing that generalizations have an...
Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.
Even in dying, a Thennanin ship was reputed to be not worth putting out of its misery. In battle they were slow, unmaneuverable—and as hard to disable permanently as a cockroach.
We have earned our peace. It is, by now, more precious than honor, or even pity.
While I have the floor, here's a question that's been bothering me for some time. Why do so few writers of heroic or epic fantasy ever deal with the fundamental quandary of their novels . . . that so...
Prison for the crime of puberty -- that was how secondary school had seemed.
If humanity has one majestic talent, it’s an almost infinite capacity to get used to the Next Big Thing … then take it for granted.
Science demands a terrible price - that we accept what experiments tell us about the universe, whether we like it or not.
Beware of self-indulgence. The romance surrounding the writing profession carries several myths: that one must suffer in order to be creative; that one must be cantankerous and objectionable in order...
The three basic material rights -- continuity, mutual obligation, and the pursuit of happiness.
Leaving was out of the question, of course. A combination of pride, obstinacy, and simple gonadal fury rooted him in his tracks. Here he would do battle, and that was that.
If there are still honest-smart men and women within those old and noble traditions, they should think carefully, observe and diagnose the illness. They should face the contradiction. Discuss the conf...
Today you meet more folks than your ancestors could imagine … some in passing. Some for a crucial instant. Others for tangled decades. Biology can’t keep up. Our overworked temporal lobes cannot know...
Self-righteousness is an especially heady condition that all of us have experienced at one time or another. Those who are honest will admit there is something sickly-sweet and alluring about knowing y...
Indeed, the maligned American pastime of baseball may be by-far the greatest and best sport by one criterion, when it comes to emulating and training for genuinely useful Neolithic skills! Think about...
The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal.
The dream is so pleasant: to extend a limited sub-portion of yourself into a simulated world and pretend for a while that you are blissfully less. Less than an omniscient being.
It was a strange trek — the sullen leading the apathetic, followed by the confused, all tailed by the inveterately amused.
The health of an enlightened and progressive society is measured by how vibrant is its science fiction, since that is where true self-critique and appraisal and hope lie.