Patience can be a means of letting matters mature to a proper state for action, not just a way of letting time slip away.
She was one of the unfortunates trying to get some sort of human grasp of Earth’s economics, and deserved all the light relief she could get. I recall that all through that year you could tell the eco...
She'd asked him what it was like to be in there, doing nothing but then being woken up to speak to somebody you couldn't see. He'd said that it was like being woken from a deep and satisfying sleep, t...
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 drone told him one in ten of the people he passed on the street would be treated for mental illness at some point in their lives. The figure was higher for males than for apices, and higher for fe...
The smell was that of a sewer under an abattoir.
The way to a man’s heart is through his chest!
There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.
They also, [the drone] said, refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value — carbon fascists.
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...
Up to this point, the story of the Gzilt and their holy book was, to students of this sort of thing, quite familiar: an upstart part of a parvenu species/civ gets lucky, proclaims itself Special and w...
Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain. And what the Idirans
Vos vaisseaux se croient intelligents et conscients ! gloussa Hamin.C'est aussi une erreur assez communément répandue parmi certains de nos compatriotes humains.
Well, the voice said, seemingly oblivious, one thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the s...
[...] there was a relief in not being listened to, sometimes. Power meant responsibility. Advice unacted upon almost always have been right
Just doing nothing is a statement, don’t you understand that? What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what i...
At sunset above the plains of Kwaalon, on a dark, high terrace balanced on a glittering black swirl of architecture forming a relatively microscopic part of the equatorial Girdlecity of Xown, Vyr Coss...
Even as a raft, of course, it could have been made from gold, or any element with a molecular number lower than mercury. Lead would still sink in mercury, but gold shouldn’t. It was one number down th...
Gurgeh felt grateful and cosseted, and both important and foolish, all at once.
I have a feeling it is not a happy story.’ ‘Indeed. Anything but. It is just that of women, especially young women, caught up in a war.’ ‘Ah.’ ‘You see? A story that scarcely needs to be told. The ing...
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