Marriage, Swan repeated, marveling at the word. To her it was a concept from the Middle Ages, from old Earth--an idea with a strong whiff of patriarchy and property. Not meant for space, not meant for...
Life itself is a moment like this, the soul beat down and held to knowledge: you keep on trudging upward, the goal shifts in and out of sight, always further away than you expected, and the work is ha...
It’s not so bad to be a prisoner, if you’re working on an escape.
Indeed, it has to be said that the percentage of old human sayings and proverbs that are actually true is very far from 100 percent. Seems it may be less important that it be true than that it rhyme,...
Indeed I now think that the Indian and Chinese description of the afterlife, the system of the six lokas or realms of reality – the devas, asuras, humans, beasts, pretas, and inhabitants of hell – is...
In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself. Human
If you want to write a novel about our world now, you’d better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain con...
If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling
If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like,
I say only this! Arkady said, staring at her bug-eyed. We have come to Mars for good. We are going to make not only our homes and our food, but also our water and the very air we breathe—all on a plan...
I mean it’s obvious any new place is going to be either alive or dead. If it’s alive it’s going to be poisonous, if it’s dead you’re going to have to work it up from scratch. I suppose that could work...
How you think about what you're doing makes a huge difference
How many cameras do you have deployed now? It’s a few million. The limiting factor these days is the analysis. I’ll
History is humankind trying to get a grip.
Hikes in the winter forest, so surreal—Emerson knew about them. He had seen the woods at twilight. Never was a more brilliant show of colored landscape than yesterday afternoon; incredibly excellent t...
Here they were, on the only planetary surface on which you could walk freely, naked to the wind and the sun, and when they had a choice, they sat in boxes and stared at littler boxes, just as if they...
Guerilla climatology. What do you call that, climatage? Attack meteorology?
Genius is not a matter of intelligence, but of spirit; and we cannot speak accurately of the spirit in any language but music.
For that world out there we just saw. For humanity. What’s it been, about fifteen thousand people, and a couple hundred years? In the big scheme of things it’s not that many. And then we have a new wo...
Existence is the experiment itself.