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...
Labor, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property for B. —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
It was hard for her not to feel that a person loving her was making a big mistake, because she knew herself better than they did, so knew their love was given in error, and thus they must be some kind...
It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person
In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing.
If you can’t afford housing then the right to vote is a bad joke.
I was told that one senior person at NSF finished reading the trilogy and immediately sold his house and moved into a camper in a trailer park. That’s taking things too far, probably, but I like the i...
I believe the twenty-first century can become the most important century of human history. I think a new reality is emerging. Whether this view is realistic or not, there is no harm in making an effor...
He pulled back his head warily; like many of the children in the neighbourhood, this one had come into the world in the avatar of a complete maniac, and it would not be unlike her to whack him on the...
Frank recalled a fire from his youth: two climber gals slightly buzzed had come bombing into Camp Four around midnight and hauled him away from a dying fire, insisting that he join them in a midnight...
For paralyzed people the fitting and integration of an exoskeleton was a complicated affair, they told him, stretched out over months of tests, and a certain amount of surgical fusion of electrodes an...
Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and ther...
Esmerine go out briefly to relieve herself, then return and pull off her shift again, her breasts silvery raindrops spilling down her ribs in the moonlight, over Bahram’s hands as he warmed them, in t...
Each reality is followed by one stranger than the last.
Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire... Life is wanting.
Chinese Buddhism was the natural study of reality, and led to feelings of devotion just from noting the daily leaves, the colors of the sky, the animals seen from the corner of the eye.
But sometimes it seems to me that people just like to hold on to their grievances. Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.
But of course no one was listening. No one understands us, not ever.
But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet’s wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world’s wealth. For them it wasn’t so bad.