There was a Chinese belief that demons liked to travel only in straight lines. Hence the bridge zigzagged no fewer than nine times as it made its way to the center of the pond. The bridge was a demon...
There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the inte...
The wind here is a glinting abrasive thing, a perpetual, face-shredding, eyeball-poking tendency in the fabric of spacetime, inhabited by vast platinum-blond arcs of fire that are centered on the low...
The virus of irony is as widespread in California as herpes, and once you're infected with it, it lives in your brain forever.
The two forms became intermingled as they struggled and writhed at the brink; then, with the slowness of a great tree that has been cut through at the root, they toppled into the Chasm and disappeared...
The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically Nipponese level of politeness.
The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. Hiro's avatar is now on the Street, too, and if the c...
The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code—but their children believe it for entirely different reasons. They believe it...
The kind of woman who could pleasantly instruct you to fuck off, dear, and you immediately would because you’d just hate to disappoint her.
The first time he saw her, he formed an impression that did notchange for many years: She was a dour, bookish, geeky type who dressed like shewas interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral p...
The expenditure of paper and printer ink had been somewhat lavish. Two generations from now, if any humans survived, they would look on this heap of documents with some combination of disgust and amaz...
The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they’re constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders...
The Præsidium stood on four pillars and for most of its height was square in cross-section. Not far above the dials, however, the corners of the square floor-plan were cleaved off, making it into an o...
That is a very odd thing to see on the Thames, Daniel remarked. What flag does she fly? For van Hoek had unlimbered his prospective-glass. The double eagle. She is a war-galley of the Russian Navy, va...
THE RUSSIAN INVASION BEGAN A WEEK LATER, WITH A SPATE OF flights producing what NASA described as mixed results and Roskosmos termed an acceptable fatality rate.
THE ROUGH TIMBERS of the monastery wall were aged and warped, and there were numerous gaps and holes in the wood. Covered in pitch, they were a poor defensive barrier, if they had ever been intended a...
Sometimes, if you want to live and breathe tomorrow, you have to dive into the black depths today, and that is a leap of faith - faith in your U-boat, and your crew - beside which the saints' religiou...
Sometimes I wonder who'll come after me, he says. Oh, we have plenty ofexcellent people in the next generation. But after that -- well, I don't know.I guess all old people feel like the world is comin...
So now, when the people of Earth looked up into the night sky at the place where they ought to have seen the moon, they saw instead this slowly tumbling constellation of white boulders.
So it was possible to look at actual smartphones and tablets and laptops that had been manufactured on Old Earth. They did not work anymore, but their technical capabilities were described on little p...