[T]here is an osmosis from fiction to reality, a constant contamination which distorts the truth behind both and fuzzes the telling distinctions in life itself, categorizing real situations and feelin...
He saw that which cannot be seen; a concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can be reached to that end, and to remove and to add and to smash and to create so that...
It hung above the livid, bruised land like an admonition
That was a tough position to hold when at the back of your mind was the niggling doubt that you really might not be saved when the time came, while at the back of everybody else’s mind was a little de...
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...
All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.
Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for 'Mr David Bowie's Space Oddity for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This fr...
But if you’re God, Sharrow said to Elson Roa, why do you need the others? What others? Roa said. Sharrow looked exasperated. Oh, come on. Elson Roa shrugged. My apparences? They are the sign that my w...
Concerned, somehow, but a hopeful voice; a cheerful, even loving voice. He tried to remember his mother. ‘Cheradenine?’ the voice said again.
Darkness came like a black flag waved over the canyon, drawing back the grayness from the shores of the city, then pushing forward the individual specks of street and building lights as though in reco...
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...
Don’t you have a religion? Dorolow asked Horza. Yes, he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. My survival.
Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot,
Empires are synonymous with centralized—if occasionally schismatized—hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through...
Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.
Even the most urbanely sophisticated, scrupulously empathic and excruciatingly polite civilisation, it had been suggested, was just a hegswarm with a sense of proportion.
First person singular obtaining colloquial orgasm within a Caledonian sandwich,’ it said, then looked annoyed, and spoke incoherently into a grille set in its belly, which replied. It looked up and sa...
For are women not supposed to resist even those they would happily surrender to, so that when they resist a more brutal violation how can the man be sure that any struggle, any protestation is not mer...
He became aware, very slowly, very gradually, that he held some impossibly complex model of the contest in his head, unknowably dense, multifariously planed. He looked at that model, twisted it. The g...
Holse wasn’t about to get involved in any theological arguments. He looked serious and nodded, hoping this would do.
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