The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who recognizes it more readily than his own mother's date of birth: It happens to be a power of 2—216 power to be exact—and even the...
The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia way. And the Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of personal relationships. So, for example, when you were a pi...
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.
The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from livi...
The cloud, in other words, became not just a physical cloud of flying objects in space but a computational cloud as well, a free-floating, self-regulating Internet.
The barriers placed in his path (working his way through the Cryptonomicon, breaking the Nipponese Air Force Meteorological Code, breaking the Coral naval attache machine cipher, breaking Unnamed Nipp...
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated...
That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see, Orolo told me. Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defens...
Spiders can tell from the vibrations what sort of insect they have caught, and home in on it. There is a reason why the webs are radial, and the spider plants itself at the convergence of the radii. T...
So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the sa...
She’s not a shy person. Her body language is eloquent enough: I am aware that men are in the habit of looking at whatever women happen to be nearby, in the hopes of deriving enjoyment from their physi...
She was going to get to stay alive. At the same time, she and the others got very little information from the planet, and had to piece things together from a jumble of clues. She'd compared notes on...
Shall we then say, like Newton, that all such truths are made arbitrarily by God? Shall we seek such truths in the occult? For if God has laid these rules down arbitrarily, then they are occult by nat...
Shaftoe opens his eyes just as the tarp is being peeled back from the open top of the truck. He stares straight up into a blue Italian sky torn around the edges by the scrabbling branches of desperate...
See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,
SF does possess at least two of the classic markers of genrehood, namely intellectual disreputability and moral salaciousness. SF thrives because it is idea porn.
Ronald Reagan has a stack of three-by-five cards in his lap. He skids up a new one: What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have...
Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And s...
Readers of this memo will be disappointed to know that Bong-Bong Gad (sic), designer/owner/driver/proprietor of the vehicle, anticipated the inevitable there but for THE GRACE OF GOD go I witticism by...
Randy grinds his teeth for about a mile, and then says, If there is any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselv...