Epithets like that are an attempt to dehumanize a group so that you won't feel as bad about killing them.
Easy to make rules, Emma said. Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it...
During his time as a graduate student, he had done data collection for a study of Pinus contorata. Of all the varieties of pine to rise off Earth, lodgepole pine had been the most robust in low-g envi...
Downtime’s easier to enjoy when I know it’ll end.
Doors and corners are always dangerous, because you’re moving into something without being sure what’s there. By the time you see the enemy, you’re exposed to them. Sir? Havelock
Don’t have them to spare, and that galley doesn’t have crash couches. Everyone in there is pasta sauce, but the El Tee says look anyway.
Desperate psychotic people do desperate psychotic things when they’re exposed. I refuse to grant them immunity from exposure out of fear of their reaction. When you do, the desperate psychos wind up i...
Could we please not assault the patient with the crushed spinal cord, she said as she did, because this makes me very uncomfortable.
Computers, it seemed, could be programmed to do almost anything but sense when someone was up to no good.
Clanking softly through the massive space, that was the thing that haunted him. Not his sins, not even the people he’d killed, but the thought that if he’d killed just one or two more it might have be...
Change should be watched, moderated, and questioned. But that conservative view shouldn’t rein in progress or put a damper on hope.
But always there was the voice at the back of his head telling him that by joining the Rebellion he’d become less of a rebel than he’d ever been. Flying off to assault yet another impossibly well-defe...
But all the stories about the devil making a deal and then cheating missed the point. The real horror was that once the bargain was struck, the devil didn’t cheat. He gave you exactly and explicitly a...
But Holden suspected there was a lot more to Prax than that. There was a relentless forward motion to the man. The universe might knock him down over and over again, but unless he was dead, he’d just...
Burton’s misfortune was to be born where and when he was, in a city of scars and vice, in an age when the division in the popular mind was between living on government-funded basic support or having a...
Brother. If I call you sister, you call me brother, see, because –
Becca found something, and it is sufficiently weird to make my balls creep up. We’re getting the hell out of here.
As long as you always see the next step, you can walk the whole way. She
And that’s the point I keep trying to make with her, my friend. In a fight like this, unless you’re willing to lose everything to win, you lose it all by losing.
An unshakable faith in humanity. It’s true, he said, shaking his head. Or maybe nuzzling a little. Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers.