What he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans wass that they could al...
Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn’t give a damn. Pretty soon he’ll probably start being proud of it.
Today I: smoke/am overweight/have a shitty attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put his thumb up my butt/my dad hit me with a razor strop seems kind of overly deterministic to...
Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled o...
This was governed entirely by Newtonian mechanics. Each piece of the moon attracted every other piece more or less strongly depending on its mass and its distance. It could be simulated on a computer...
They walk into the hop field. Carefully. There is an enveloping smell, a resiny odor not unlike marijuana, the sharp smell that comes off an expensive beer.
That was his youngest. Hadley, the girl in the middle, was in Berkeley; she’d been doing volunteer work for an organization in Oakland and had a lot of free time.
THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT reason.
THE MONASTERY GATE was as weak as Finn surmised, the timbers splintering after three strong kicks from Finn’s boot. Using his spear as a wedge, he ripped and tore the rotted wood away until there was...
Sergeant Major, Arjun said quietly, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Yur snorted. Is that a fancy way of saying it’s above my pay grade, sir?
Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, USMC, pours some beans into the grinder and starts to belabor the crank. A black flurry begins to accumulate in the coffeepot below. He has learned to make this stuff the Swedi...
Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bomc,' I said. 'We have a protractor.'Okay, I'll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.
Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but a...
No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge, Dr. Waterhouse reminds him.
Nell, the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has...
Microsoft is ten times smarter, a hundred times more aggressive, and bound by no particular rules. It gives Randy a little frisson just to imagine Harvard Li’s situation: being chased across the plane...
L1, by process of elimination, Luisa said drily, and laughed. You space people love to count down, I know your ways. It’s
It was humanly impossible to extend to seven billion people the full sympathy that each of them deserved.
It is miserably clear that the video has been shot by a third conspirator who is burdened with a consumer-grade camcorder and reeling from some kind of inner-ear disease that he or she would like to s...
In most of the world, Magellan is thought of as the first guy who went around the world. Here, everyone knows he only made it as far as Mactan Island, where he was killed by Filipinos.