If you ever want to feel like you’re on the verge of total, abject bowel-releasing terror, try making your way a klick or two out of a forest, at night, with the certain feeling you’re being hunted. It makes you feel alive, it really does, but not in a way you want to feel alive.
Stupidity is the unwillingness to appreciate the consequences of your actions.
But everyone knows you need fireworks to make independence official.
You have five minutes,” I said. “Of course, because any more time would make this too easy.
Apparently you don’t have to understand physics to protest.
What’s messed up here isn’t that this guy thinks we’re on a television show. What’s messed up here is that as far as I can tell, at this point, it’s the most rational explanation for what’s going on.
The Yherajk were a less immediate but infinitely more complicated problem – alien globs who want to befriend a humanity that, if asked, would probably prefer to be befriended by something with an endoskeleton.
Picking you to have your brain plucked out of your body is not my idea of a favor, some part of my brain said. Good point, brain, I thought, ignoring that I was now speaking to myself.
Victor Frankenstein had assembled from the bodies of the dead and then jolted into life. Jared saw how Frankenstein felt pride in creating life, but how he feared and rejected the creature once that life had been given; how the creature lashed out, killing the doctor’s family and friends, and how creator and created were finally consumed in a pyre, their fates interlocked. The allusions between the monster and the Special Forces were all too obvious.
His progress was more lateral than forward.
Well, ‘explode’ maybe isn’t the most accurate term. What actually happens is much more interesting.
One day I’d like to visit this planet without having to toss myself down its atmosphere.
I’m sorry,” the groundskeeper said. “Usually the kharhn we feed to the kingsflower are already dead. I never get to see anything live fed to it. This is exciting for me.
That’s what I’d ask you to do: Hope for peace. Because I know that I would love to be able to lay down my weapon and get to being a colonist. Just like you are. Just like I want to be.
The Jenna Situation, as you recalled it now, had been fraught with fraughtiness.
How did you get here, anyway?” “It’s classified.” “I’m close enough to stab you with a fork.
I worked in marketing,” Rachela I said. “Before I was a prophet. After, too, but we didn’t call it that after that point.
You can be happy anywhere, if you have the right point of view. And the ability to ignore the smell of an entire planet.
It’s conspiracy mongering.” “I agree. But not all conspiracies crop up because someone forgot to adjust their tinfoil hat, ma’am. Sometimes they’re part of a disinformation campaign.
If memory serves, the last time we met there were also exploding starships,” I said, to Wilson. “That’s odd,” Lowen said. “The last time I saw Harry, there were exploding starships, too.” “It’s coincidental,” Wilson said, looking at Lowen and then at me.