I am Friend to Carrion Crows and Wolves. I am Carry Me and Kill with Me, and Die with Me Where the Road Ends. I am not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come, I am the Iron Promise of...
He picked one at random, a luridly violent far-future crime novel about a detective who could seemingly exchange bodies at will, but the subject matter was alien to him and his attention drifted. It a...
Half the things we dig up, we have no idea what they are, and we still sell them as fucking coffee-table trinkets. Right now, someone back on Latimer has probably got the encoded secret of a faster-th...
Do I look like a fucking slave to you? he asked them. And though, finally, they would bring him down with sheer weight of numbers, none who heard him ask that question lived to see the dawn.
And for the moments that the embrace lasted, and a little while after, I felt as clean as the breeze coming in off the sea.
The sweat and bloodstained wood of the cross he died on. He kicks in the frosted-glass door of a coffee franchise off Wall Street and beats seven shades of damnation out of the money changers gathered...
You’d think, given a planet nine-tenths covered in water and a solar system with no other habitable biospheres, that people would be careful with that real estate.
You don’t trust me?’ ‘Now you come to mention it, no. But that isn’t it.
What you feel is not yours. You need not own it. Creatures like these breed the fear in you as we fatten a buffalo calf, and with similar intent.
They’d spit in your eye and walk away if you called them victims, but somehow that same grit never found its way into any built form better than hardscrabble endurance and nonspecific rage.
They killed us twenty thousand years ago with their crops and their craven connivance at hierarchy.
There were always the stories, of course, the war legends, but who— other than himself, in Jhesh's tavern, increasingly wearily—still told those?
The priest I didn’t talk to at all, because I didn’t want to have to hide his body afterwards.
The lawyers I saw there had about as much in common with the man who had defended me at fifteen as automated machine rifle fire has with farting.
The laugh tagged on the end of it is forced as well. I smile fractionally. Edged with old pain, but there’s a strange comfort to the way it hurts.
The echo of the first shot, like the first sip of whiskey, burning...
Perspective.’ He nodded and swung an arm out over his property. ‘You see that tree. Just beyond the tennis courts.’ I could hardly miss it. A gnarled old monster taller than the house, casting shade o...
Overhead soft-bellied clouds panic toward the horizon like whales before the harpoon, and the wind runs addict's fingers through the trees that line the street.
On Harlan’s World, streetlife has a stripped-back elegance to it, an economy of motion and gesture that feels almost like choreography if you’re not used to it. I grew up with it, so the effect doesn’...
Men were like blades, they would all break sooner or later, you included. But you looked around at the men you led, and in their eyes you saw what kind of steel you had to hand, how it had been forged...