Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the spee...
Julia Bliss Flaherty, as Ivy now realized, was of the same stripe. Pinned down and obliged to justify herself, she would explain her actions in terms of some altruistic plan. And she might even believ...
Jack could sound them out only through carousing with them over a period of weeks. Jack had long since lost interest in carousing per se, but he recalled how it was done, and could still put on a perf...
I’m surprised at you! If it will take ten years to make the machine with available technology, and only five years to make it with a new technology, and it will only take two years to invent the new t...
It was difficult to sustain the illusion that education was of value for kids who would not live long enough to use it. They’d never take the standardized tests that they were prepping for. In a way,...
It is inherent in the mentality of extramuros bulshytt-talkers that they are more prone than anyone else to taking offense (or pretending to) when their bulshytt is pointed out to them. This places th...
It had a quaint twentieth-century feel and made Nell oddly nostalgic for the days when dangerousness was a function of mass and bulk. The passives of that era were so fun to watch, with their big, stu...
In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Cafe for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next t...
In a manner familiar to anyone who had ever packed a car for a family trip, genial confusion gave way to impatience, then furious ultimatums, then ill-advised snap decisions.
If he had thought about this, it would have bothered him, because sigmaself > sigmaother has troubling implications—particularly if the values of these quantities w.r.t. the all-important sigmac are n...
I was discussing it with my teacher, over the jeejah—no pictures, just our voices. We had this long talk about this nerve and the muscles and ligaments around it and how I should manipulate them to he...
I have devoted much effort, during the last decade or so, to the systematic encouragement of subversiveness.
I don't even want you to nod, that's how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up.
Hygiene isn’t really about dirt. It’s about germs. It’s to prevent the spread of sequences that are dangerous if they are allowed to propagate. We don’t think the Ita are dirty in the sense of not was...
Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between t...
His real job—the job that the Owners paid him for—was to be an observer of the human condition as it was so richly displayed from day to day within these walls.
Hiro looks up, focuses his gaze on Earth, zooms in for a look. As he gets closer, the imagery he's looking at shifts from the long-range pictures coming in from the geosynchronous satellites to the go...
Hiro and Y.T. have eaten a lot of junk food together in different joints allover L.A. -- doughnuts, burritos, pizza, sushi, you name it -- and all Y.T. evertalks about is her mother and the terrible j...
Hey, Hiro, the black-and-white guy says, you want to try some Snow Crash?A lot of people hang around in front of The Black Sun saying weird things. Youignore them. But this gets Hiro's attention.Oddit...
Her coverall darkens, the colors shimmer through the electropigment like an oil slick, and then it’s black.