You’re not a conventional man. No! He hooted. I never claimed to be! Except before certain selection committees of course. A conventional man! Ah, ha ha ha ha ha!—the conventional men get Maya. That i...
Yes, a busy space, the interstellar medium. Empty space, near vacuum: and yet still, not vacuum itself, not pure vacuum. There are forces and atoms, fields, and the ever-foaming quantum surf, in which...
Yeah, hey you know carbon sinks are so crucial, scrubbing CO2 out of the air may eventually turn out to be our only option, so maybe we should reverse those two clauses. Make carbon sinks come first a...
Without an observer at a twenty three degree angle to the light being reflected off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty t...
When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk...
Wheat is blond in the Steppe, yellow in the Prairie. Algae in the labs is many different brownish greens.
What was worry, after all, but a kind of fear? It was fear for the future. And in fact the future was bound to bring its share of bad things, there was no avoiding that. So worry was really a hopeless...
We’ll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it’s all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we’ll be here, and we’ll wonder why w...
We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. It is usually attention given to some other consciousness, but not always; the attention can be to something unconscious, even inanimate. But t...
We sense this, we aggregate that, we compress information to some new output, in the form of a sentence in a human language, a language called English. A language both very structured and very amorpho...
Thus when Hiroko came up and said, Nadia, this crescent wrench is absolutely frozen in this position, Nadia sang to her, That’s the only thing I’m thinking of— baby! and took the crescent wrench and s...
They were just like the Swiss on Mars, like Jurgen and Max and Priska and Sibilla, with their sense of order, of appropriate action well performed, with a tough unsentimental love of comfort, of predi...
There is just enough time to complete the preparation of a lander, we concluded after summarizing the situation, and the notable incidents of the past dozen years, which we had to confess were nearly...
There have been mass delusions larger than this, I said, following a fanatic leader.
Strangely enough, without names they were still things. He could see them and think about them in terms of shapes, or numbers. Formula of description. Various combinations of conic sections and the si...
Squatters. The dispossessed. The water rats. Denizens of the deep, citizens of the shallows. And a lot of them were interested in trying something different, including which authorities they gave thei...
Of course there was no such thing as a true repetition of anything; ever since the pre-Socratics that had been clear, Heraclitus and his un-twice-steppable river and so on. So habits were not truly it...
Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance for knowledge.
Nadia shook her head, marveling at the capacity people had for ignoring what they had in common, and fighting bitterly over whatever small differences existed between them. She
Meaning, Wahram thought, that right now somewhere in the system there could be machines in human form, escaped into the crowd, doing their best to stay free, perhaps, when any X-ray machine or other s...