The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism bef...
He lay, often, looking at her sleeping face in the new light that fell in through the open walls of the strange house, and he stared at her skin and hair with his mouth open, transfixed by the quick s...
Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.
Escape is a commodity like anything else.
And suddenly it knew what it had to do.It de-coupled its engine fields from the energy grid and plunged those vortices of pure energy deep into the fabric of its own mind, tearing its intellect apart...
The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously.
They speak very well of you.- They speak very well of everybody.
You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter's place was, and I looked across it and there was a little notice...
It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these und...
What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient th...
[H]e was one of those people who got to the top of an organisation through luck, connections, the indulgence of superiors and that sort of carelessness towards others that the easily impressed termed...
Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying all this wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.
Now, quite apart from the fact that, from the point of view of the Earther, socialism suffers the devastating liability of only exhibiting internal contradictions when you are trying to use it as an a...
But then, as she knew too well, the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be.
The only sin is selfishness.
You mean, if you lose a game… you have… these things done to you? Exactly. One might bet, say, the loss of a finger against aggravated male-to-apex rectal rape. Gurgeh looked levelly at the machine fo...
This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game. The man is a game-player called Gurgeh. The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game tha...
The point is: what happens in heaven?''Unknowable wonderfulness?' 'Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn't re...
I have a story to tell you. It has many beginnings, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginnings and endings are contingent things anyway; inventions, devices. Where does any story really begin? Th...
…[Changers] were a threat to identity, a challenge to the individualism even of those they were never likely to impersonate. It had nothing to do with souls or physical or spiritual possession; it was...