Did that make him a bad man? Perhaps, though if so then arguably all men were bad. A proposition his wife would probably agree with, as would most of the women Holse had known, from his poor mother on...
Can’t machines build these faster? he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell.Why, of course! she laughed.Then why do you do it?It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doo...
But just because something does not have an ending doesn't mean it doesn't have a conclusion.
But in the end, it’s still just cleaning a table. And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events? the man suggested. He smiled in response to the man’s grin, Well, yes. But then,...
Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered twinkling fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out toward the...
Because I do enjoy winning, because I do have something nobody can copy, something nobody else can have; I’m me; I’m one of the best.
Almost every developing species had a creation myth buried somewhere in its past, even if by the time they’d become space-faring it was no more than a quaint and dusty irrelevance (though, granted, so...
All very melodramatic. Your feud may inspire a not terribly good screen presentation at some point in the future, hopefully distant. I look forward to missing it.
Ah, we’re the infection, Sma.’ He turned and sat down on the steps, looking back towards the city and the sea. ‘We’re the ones who’re different, we’re the self-mutilated, the self-mutated. This is the...
A very patient voice. Concerned, somehow, but a hopeful voice; a cheerful, even loving voice. He tried to remember his mother. ‘Cheradenine?’ the voice said again. Trying to get him to wake up. But he...
A guilty system recognizes no innocents.
Silence)This from that very pit of night, naked in the wasteland, the ice-wind moaning his only covering, alone in the freezing darkness under a sky of chill obsidian:)
You needed ear defenders, and the swirling slipstream caused total havoc to any hairstyle worth the name.
The Fate had moved, or had been moved, thirty light years in less than a picosecond.
Obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion call determination.
No matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if...
It was good for games. What seemed complicated became simple; what appeared insoluble became soluble; what had been unknowable became obvious. A utility drug; an abstraction-modifier;
It had been briefed that when Culture people didn’t speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other...
Individual is obsolete. That’s why life is so comfortable for us all. We don’t matter, so we’re safe. No one person can have any real effect anymore.
Bob-nodded toward the open module door. After you.