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...
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 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...
This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.
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...
Strange to consider that these two linguistic operations, metaphor and analogy, so often linked together in rhetoric and narratology, and considered to be variants of the same operation, are actually...
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
Maybe that’s why we’ve never heard a peep from anywhere. It’s not just that the universe is too big. Which it is. That’s the main reason. But then also, life is a planetary thing. It begins on a plane...
Late in this quiet meal Ann looked around curiously at her companions, suddenly awed by the spectacle of human adaptability. Here they were eating their dinner, talking over the low boom from the nort...
Language is but a huge set of false analogies. There has to be a better way to make a point.
Labor, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property for B. —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary