He’s using you as his external, aftermarket conscience.
By the time the Somnambulist had set her creaking bones to rest on their assigned landing pad, Holden had lost all patience with human stupidity.So, of course, it came out to meet him.
The messages coming back flooded the comm buffers with rage and sorrow, threats of vengeance and offers of aid. Those last were the hardest. New colonies still trying to force their way into local eco...
Aw, you goddammed bastards! They're shootin' him while he's down! Son of a bitch!The ship stopped moving, and Alex said in a quiet voice, Suck on this, asshole.The ship vibrated for half a second, the...
Nothing wrong with a little optimism, long as it doesn’t set policy....
It felt like waking up over and over without falling sleep in between.
The sex, he said. I just wanted to make sure that we were okay. That things were all right between us.Well, she said, orgasm does release a lot of oxytocin, so I’m probably more fond of you than befor...
The closest analogy, the one her brain reached for and rejected and reached for again, was splashing into a lake. It was cold, but not cold. There was a smell, rich and loamy. The smell of growth and...
That seemed to be the human pattern—reach out to the unknown and then make it into the sort of thing you left in the first place. In Holden’s experience, humanity’s drive out into the universe was may...
No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work.
And somehow, that changed everything about sex. The movements might all be the same, but the desire to communicate affection rather than demonstrate prowess changed what everything meant.
And ... and what is civilisation if it isn’t people talking to each other over a goddamned beer?
The fact had become as invisible to him as someone on Earth thinking about being held to a spinning celestial object by nothing more than mass, shielded from the fusion reaction of the sun by only dis...
Prologue: Manéo M
Hello, James Holden. My name is Fred Johnson.
God save us all from good-looking men.
After dinner, Holden took a long, slow tour of his new ship. He opened every door, looked in every closet, turned on every panel, and read every readout. He stood in engineering next to the fusion rea...
Later," Amos said, "when you're wishing we had this stuff, I am going to merciless in my mockery. And then we'll die.
The problem, of course, with the idea of nature versus nurture was that it posed a choice between determinisms.
See, this is why I can’t ever be in command, she said. Don’t like making tough calls with incomplete information? More I’m not suicidally irresponsible, she replied,