No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.
Kings were always the last to feel the famine.
It was a real book—onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decad...
I like the backup plan better, Amos said. Backup plan? Prax asked. The backup plan is I grab the first guy we see, and beat him until he tells us where the kids are. Prax
High-functioning sociopaths, Dresden said with a nod. He seemed pleased to explain it. And extremely curious ones. As long as we kept them supplied with interesting problems to solve and unlimited res...
Gah, Prax said, and curled up into a floating fetal ball.
Frederick Lucius Johnson. Former colonel in Earth’s armed forces, Butcher of Anderson Station. Thoth Station now too. Unelected prime minister of the OPA. He had faced his own mortality a dozen times,...
Ferns can be very aggressive
Evolution was a paste-and-baling-wire process that came up with half-assed solutions like pushing teeth through babies’ gums and menstruation. Survival of the fittest was a technical term that covered...
Drinking coffee was one of the activities that didn’t make the transition to microgravity well, but at half a g, it was fine.
Don’t think about the odds, Bobbie said. Think about the stakes. Think how much we lose if we take the risk and it goes wrong.
Do we have a plan? A couple, Jim said. Either of them good? Oh, no. Not at all. Just different flavors of terrible.
And what is civilization if it ain't people talking over a goddamned beer?
Rest of
You're the predator right up until you're prey.
You take care of your tools, your tools take care of you.
What astounded me was that the cutting edge of human knowledge was so close. Before I educated myself, I assumed that there was a great depth of science, that every question of importance had been cat...
We’ll forget how to do this, Holden thought. Humanity had only just started learning how to live in space, and now they’d forget. Why develop new strategies for surviving on tiny stations like Medina...
The thinking behind each decision was lost now in a tangle of database hierarchies and complex reference structures. Finding something interesting was easy. It was all interesting on some level. Findi...
The best scientific minds of the system were staring at the data with their jaws slack, and the reason no one was panicking yet was that no one could agree on what they should panic about.