How about, Yay said, magnetic fields under the base material and magnetized islands floating over oceans? No ordinary land at all; just great floating lumps of rock with streams and lakes and vegetati...
He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.
All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself.
There is always meaning. Or at least all things show a disturbing tendency to have meaning ascribed to them when intelligent creatures are present. It’s just that there’s no final Meaning, with a capi...
The right place; that was what he was looking for. The right place. Place was all important, place meant everything. Take this rock…Take you, rock, he said. He squinted at it.Ah yes, here we have the...
It was rude, insulting and frequently infuriating, but it made such a refreshing change from the awful politeness of most people.
I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was at the moment.
I had high hopes for that girl, but too much of that sort of nonsense and I think her intelligence will explosively dismantle
Hey, Wrobik; cheer up, yeah? You're going to shoot down a fucking starship. It'll be an experience.
An intelligence completely dissociated from the physical, or at least an impression of it, was a strange, curiously limited and almost perverse thing, and the precise form that your physicality took h...
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual examp...
One may be partially owned by another or others by having to sell one’s labor or talents to somebody with the means to buy them. In
[I]f I suffered only one fool gladly, I assure you it would be you.
[B]ecause of all his previous attempts to integrate with the rest of society and what he had learned about himself through them - he wanted to be who he was, not the person he would become if he lost...
You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence.
Yes, I said. Temudjin Oh. I'd long got used to the fact that my Mongolian-extraction surname could cause some amusement amongst English speakers determined to extract a toll of discomfiture from someb...
Which would you rather have, Lattens?’ UrLeyn asked his son. ‘Good giants and monsters, or bad ones?’ ‘Bad ones!’ Lattens shouted. He drew his wooden sword from its scabbard. ‘So I can cut their heads...
To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The w...
Then the machine started to reel off infant-mortality rates and life-expectancy figures, sex ratios, types of diseases and their prevalence in the various strata of society, average incomes, the incid...
That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your Off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome.