Every culture can be kind of defined by what they drink in order to avoid dying of diarrhea. In China it’s tea. In Africa it’s milk or animal blood. In Europe it was wine and beer.
Diax said something that is still very important to us, which is that you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that ‘Diax’s Rake’ and sometimes we repeat it to ourse...
Conflict, acted out openly and publicly, was a male mode of social interaction—the foundation for patriarchal society which brought with it the usual litany of dreadful things. Regardless, Randy decid...
Chester nods all the way through this, but does not rudely interrupt Randy as a younger nerd would. Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences,...
An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other object...
Jack had wondered how geometers could be so inventive as to produce so many types and families of curves. Later he had come to perceive that of curves there was no end, and the true miracle was that p...
Veering cars holding their horn buttons down in long Dopplered howls of protest. Another
Fought a Chinese long-sword instructor on a Hong Kong rooftop—he never thought the experience would help him write battle scenes. In addition to being a member of the Mongoliad writing team, Cooper ha...
Could jab my thumb with it and draw blood. The brown smear across the top of this page can be tested in any twenty-first-century DNA lab. Compare
But the great thing about traveling with Pluto was that he only cared about you to the extent that you were interesting to him now. In that way he kept you on your toes. No aspect of the relationship...
We don’t believe in anything as simple as metempsychosis—the movement of an individual soul from one body to another. That’s not what we mean by reincarnation at all. What
War did not just level, it plowed the field, raising the muck and sinking the stubble.
To the extent that Blue had a definable culture, it tended to view technological aids with some ambivalence, a state of mind boiled down into the aphorism Each enhancement is an amputation. This was n...
This is why he hates business. He wants to tell everyone everything. He wants to make friends with people.
The last ship home has sailed. From now on, launch vehicles will rise up into orbit, but they will not go back for ten thousand years.
The human race might be about to disappear, but not before putting on a two-year frenzy of recreational sex.
The difference between stupid and intelligent people -- and this is true whether or not they are well-educated -- is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambigous or ev...
The belief in the magical power of language is not unusual, both in mysticaland academic literature. The Kabbalists -- Jewish mystics of Spain andPalestine -- believed that super-normal insight and po...
The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I
The Templar and Hospitaller commanders had argued with Calpurnius, the master of the Shield-Brethren company, as to the membership of the team that would lead the upper-floor assault. Calpurnius had l...