In the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince.
Flame within them gets dim with the passage of time. So, if you have the fire, run, since you never know when it may be doused, leaving you stranded in darkness. —John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine A...
Can’t say I mourned my failure overmuch, as it meant I’d get a free trip to New Orleans out of it, and that would rock be most excellent. I DROVE BACK to the office late in the day to find Tristan col...
And two cats. He teaches medieval fighting techniques to members of the armed forces. The Mongoliad is his first published fiction. Erik Bear lives and writes in Seattle, Washington. He has written fo...
Young, lavishly bearded tech entrepreneurs were trudging forlornly down the hallways, laden with computers, printers, high-end coffeemakers, and foosball tables. Like digital Okies they loaded their s...
You have criminals? Of course. But the mere fact that Quin responded in this way caused Orolo to jump to a new leaf of the questionnaire. How do you know? What?! You say of course there are criminals,...
You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin, and our feeble university men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. That’s how the popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long,...
When later generations come to read about our history they will think they are reading a romance, and not believe a word of it.
What are you doing? Dengo would ask him. Observing, father would say. But how long can you observe the same thing? Forever.
Well, ‘vacuum with a sparse dusting of probability waves’ is an accurate description of just about everything in the universe,
Well, it seems that this process you call consciousness is somewhat more complex than you perhaps gave it credit for at first, Orolo said. One must be able to take in givens from sparse dustings of pr...
We say of some Nations, the People are lazy, but we should say only, they are poor; Poverty is the Fountain of all Manner of Idleness. —DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce
We gotta come up with a plan, Shaftoe says. The plan: You live, I die, Goto Dengo says. Fuck that, Shaftoe says. Hey, don’t you idiots know you’re surrounded? We know, Goto Dengo says wearily. We know...
We can’t run this experiment a thousand times to see the range of different outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don’t ex...
Virgil returned to the Operator’s Station and entered a single command. Its effect was to draw together the reins of the eighteen sham programs, to lift out, as it were, all those long machine code se...
The suspect had experienced a ballistic interlude earlier in the evening, Miss Pao said, regrettably not filmed, and relieved himself of excess velocity by means of an ablative technique. (describing...
So it's not an architectural masterpiece. When Da5id and Hiro and the other hackers wrote The Black Sun, they didn't have enough money to hire architects or designers, so they just went in for simple...
Shut up. For the rest of this conversation, you don't say anything. When I tell you what you did wrong, you don't say you're sorry, because I already know you're sorry. And when you drive outta here a...
Passing through the utility section she considered getting herself a cup of coffee. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fir...
Our brains are flies, bats, and worms that clumped together for mutual advantage. These parts of our brains are talking to each other all the time. Translating what they perceive, moment to moment, in...