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 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...
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...
You judged your own attractiveness - physically, psychologically and in terms of status - then you knew your level and could either raise or lower your sights accordingly, risking rejection but with t...
That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your Off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome.
Hey, Wrobik; cheer up, yeah? You're going to shoot down a fucking starship. It'll be an experience.
Their history wasn’t so far off the mean track, they were going through what a thousand other civilizations had gone through, and no doubt in the childhood of each of those there had been countless oc...
The Sublime. The almost tangible, entirely believable, mathematically verifiable nirvana just a few right-angle turns away from dear boring old reality: a vast, infinite, better-than-virtual ultra-exi...
He had to treat him as the maniac he obviously was. The fact that his insanity was dressed in religious trappings meant nothing.
Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.
It meant something to climb, to haul this sack of bones and flesh all this way, and then look, then think, then be. She could have taken a flyer here any time when she'd been recovering, but she hadn'...
Somehow, later, exhausted and dismayed by these sapping, abrasive, attriting episodes, they came to a sort of truce; but it was at the expense of any closeness.
Just because that was the start of a thousand sentimental stories didn’t mean that it didn’t actually happen.
You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing.
Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves
Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you’re not doing it right.
Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot, muttered
Unbelievable. I’m in a fucking Outside Context situation, the ship thought, and suddenly felt as stupid and dumb-struck as any muddy savage confronted with explosives or electricity.
Where do you keep your memories of love, past lovers? QiRia looked at her. In my head, of course. He looked away. There are not so many of those, anyway, he said, voice a little quieter. Loving become...
It is especially important to remember that the ownership of humans is possible too; not in terms of actual slavery, which they are proud to have abolished, but in the sense that, according to which s...
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