Jack was finally going mad, and it was a small comfort to know that he’d picked the right city for it.
He has a kind of exaggerated politeness that is kind of like a military man.
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, into the shared language of geometry. That’s what a brain is. That’s what it is to be conscious.
Einstein followed her as if his eyes were connected to her butt cheeks with fishhooks.
That was his youngest. Hadley, the girl in the middle, was in Berkeley; she’d been doing volunteer work for an organization in Oakland and had a lot of free time.
Native Americans had tricksters – creatures full of cunning – like Coyote and Raven in their mythologies, but they didn’t have technology yet, and so they hadn’t coupled the Trickster with Crafts to generate this hybrid Technologist-god.
You have multiple core competencies with surprisingly minimal Venn.
And when horny, well-paid American flyboys are dropped into a culture defined half by cannibals and half by Frenchmen, you get a hell of a civilian economy.
Everything from the brim of this hat to the hem of her dress was too complex for Daniel’s eye to comprehend – he was like an illiterate savage staring at the first page of an illuminated Bible – but.
I hate e-mail,” John says. Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. “What do you mean?” “The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don’t observe any security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they believe it’s really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it.
My colleague Bruce Sterling has defined a thriller as a science fiction novel that includes the President of the United States.
The West-march of the Walmart Held all the food in the world, Bottled beer by the boatload, Frost-kept food, milk and meat. Setting up for a siege behind barricades The Norsemen fetched food, collected clothing, Turkish trousers with flies in the front Kept closed with clever contraptions, Tiny.
It is easy to be eyes and ears. It is harder to be fists and feet.
A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist’s mind before he or she begins to do science.
He raised his eyebrows briefly. Since this was the only plausible way of moving something that huge, he didn’t consider it worthy of an extended answer.
So now, when the people of Earth looked up into the night sky at the place where they ought to have seen the moon, they saw instead this slowly tumbling constellation of white boulders.
Microsoft is ten times smarter, a hundred times more aggressive, and bound by no particular rules. It gives Randy a little frisson just to imagine Harvard Li’s situation: being chased across the planet by Microsoft’s state-of-the-art hellhounds.
The Japanese Mafia. Tell me something, Jason, you ever hear anyone describe our thing as ‘The Sicilian Yakuza’? Huh?
To be in a habitat – even a quite large and cosmopolitan one – when the Eye came around was, in pre-Zero terms, a little bit like being in a small town on the prairie and having a mobile Manhattan suddenly roll over the horizon, surround you, have a hundred kinds of intercourse with you, and then move on.
The place was empty ‘cause of the Hanging. I didn’t want to stay and – ” “And what?” “Get more ahead of the others than I was already.” “If you are ahead, the correct thing is to get used to it – not to make yourself into an imbecile. Come, you belong in school.