A man dressed in a radiant white uniform stands below the ragged maw of the jetway holding his hands downwards with fluorescent orange sticks in them, like Christ dispensing mercy on a world of sinner...
A honeybee cruising for nectar is pretty despite its implicit threat, but the same behavior in a hornet three times larger makes one glance about for some handy swatting material.
A gazebo on top of a welding rig was how Yul might have described it, if only he had been here.
A causal domain is just a collection of things linked by mutual cause-and-effect relationships. But isn’t everything in the universe so linked? Depends on how their light cones are arranged. We can’t...
In the background she can hear the shopping carts performing their clashy, anal copulations.
Spoken like a true Nipponese, Enoch says bitterly. You never change. Please make me understand what you are saying. What of the man who cannot get out of bed and work, because he has no legs? What of...
Sline: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a slang word formed by truncation of baseline, which is a Praxic commercial bulshytt term. It appears to be a noun that turned i...
She had grown tired of the pouffy floating hair of zero gravity and, after a few weeks of clamping it down with baseball caps, had figured out how to make this shorter cut work for her. The haircut ha...
Most of the people around the entrance were, of course, bellhops and taxi drivers. Guests went in and out. Some were dressed in business suits, others in casual tourist attire. He did not see any comm...
Most of the information on this topic is crap. What do you mean by that? Crade demanded. We all looked at him, because in an instant he had become markedly defensive. Sammann raised his eyes from the...
Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie were very strange men, and such is the nature of the written word that their personal strangeness shines straight through all the layers of Disneyfication like X-rays th...
Ivy passed by the same location a few moments later, slowed for a moment, and glanced down the length of the tube. It was possible to see straight down its length, across the spherical Pod, and throug...
It would be unseemly for me to beg for your succour so early in this letter, and so I shall divert you (or so I flatter myself) by relating my last conversation with my employer, Peter Romanov, or Pet...
If he would just work with pure ideas like a proper mathematician he could go as fast as thought. As it happens, Alan has become fascinated by the incarnations of pure ideas in the physical world. The...
I hadn’t known that, I said. I always tend to assume there’s an infinite amount of money out there. There might as well be, Arsibalt said, but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bo...
Dinah said, Ivy, you want to take this or should I? I’ll do it. You’re busy, Ivy said. Dinah could hear her twisting around in the pilot’s seat to look at Julia. She spoke as follows: Julia. Shut up....
Cut, the journalist says, turning into the camera. Just cut. The BabbleBrigade has started up again.The soundtrack now consists of a thousand people speaking in tongues under thehigh-pitched, shit-eat...
Babel is a Biblical term for Babylon. The word is Semitic; Bab means gate and El means Cod, so Babel means 'Gate of God.' But it is probably also somewhat onomatopoeic, imitating someonewho speaks in...
As we learned in Vietnam, high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar to psychoactive drugs.
And don't give me any sentimental nonsense about creativity. I believe that a Universal Turing Machine could show behaviors that we would construe as creative.