The rich just bribe their way out. So yes, as far as the rulers are concerned, it works.
Humming to himself and looking for the flat wafer. He heard a sudden intake of breath, then what sounded like a rather embarrassed cough, just behind him. He turned round to see Mr. Dreltram behind hi...
A recently made entertainment he’d heard people talking about. It concerned a planet whose intelligent inhabitants were sentient glaciers and their iceberg children. He had expected to despise its pre...
[A]ll her hardships had been self-inflicted and recreational in the past.
Vos vaisseaux se croient intelligents et conscients ! gloussa Hamin.C'est aussi une erreur assez communément répandue parmi certains de nos compatriotes humains.
Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain. And what the Idirans
Ulver Seich woke up in the best possible way. She surfaced with a languorous slowness through fuzzy layers of luxurious half-dreams and memories of sweetness, sensuality and sheer carnal bliss… to fi...
They spend time. That’s just it. They spend time traveling. The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives. They persist in hoping that something th...
They are. But in Special Circumstances we deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal laws — the rules of right and wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe —...
There was something comforting about having a vast hydrogen furnace burning millions of tons of material a second at the centre of a solar system. It was cheery.
The breaks and the times when he slept were irrelevant; just the intervals between the real life of the board and the game. He functioned, talking to the drone or the ship or other people, eating and...
The Mind rescued from the tunnels of the Command System could remember nothing from the period between its warp into the tunnels and its eventual repair and refit aboard the GSV No More Mr. Nice Guy,
The Idirans themselves had evolved on their planet Idir as the top monster from a whole planetful of monsters.
Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop hi...
Part of the training of a Special Circumstances agent was learning a) that the rules were supposed to be broken sometimes, b) just how to go about breaking the rules, and c) how to get away with it, w...
Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We've spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refini...
Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,
It seemed to him to be an unbearably vivid tangle of contradictions; at the same time pathologically violent and lugubriously sentimental, startlingly barbaric and surprisingly sophisticated, fabulous...
In the old days people died and that was that; you might hope to see them in heaven, but once they were dead they were dead. It was simple, it was definite. Now … He shook his head angrily. Now peopl...
In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it.