It’s – my God – like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and crashed a 747 into it.
But blasting the drummer into the river, though it would have been easy at this range, was not a good way to be inconspicuous.
Arsibalt was horrified. “But how can you not be fascinated by – ” “I am fascinated,” I insisted. “That’s the problem. I am suffering from fascination burnout. Of all the things that are fascinating, I have to choose just one or two.
The problem with those honorable men,” Avi says, “is that they expect everyone else to be honorable in the same way.
Sir, if you ask a Marine if he wants another cigarette, or if he’s ready, the answer is always the same, sir!
The sand was hard-packed and solid and wet, speckled all over with cockle shells in colors and patterns of such profusion and variety that they must have given the first Dutchmen the idea to go out into the sea and bring back precious things from afar.
If she screws up this delivery, that means she’s double-crossing God, who may or may not exist, and in any case who is capable of forgiveness. The Mafia definitely exists and hews to a higher standard of obedience.
Just because the Panjandrums know how to run cheeseburg stands, they think they know how to run a Convox.
Fearless for oneself, fear for others – that must be what it means to be a hero.
But the basic premise of Eutropianism is that technology has made us post-human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is effectively a whole new species: immortal, omnipresent because of the Net, and headed towards omnipotence.
The story is everything, so it always begins with a story. Research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I’m writing about topics I find interesting, so I can’t gripe too much.
Any property that’s open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it.
Boredom is a mask frustration wears.
I feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun.
Most Kabbalists were theorists who were interested only in pure meditation. But there were so-called ‘practical Kabbalists’ who tried to apply the power of the Kabbalah in everyday life.
We see everything from the narrator’s point of view, so exposition about the world is limited to what impinges directly on him and the story he’s telling. Considering how old the world is, we learn very little about its history, which I think is a good thing.
The science fiction approach doesn’t mean it’s always about the future; it’s an awareness that this is different.
And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.
Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.
Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.