And this other evening light, rainy, rose and silver, and to her left a river the color of cold lead. Dark tumble of city, towers in the distance, few lights.
The factory might have given us the millionfold productivity increases that yielded the Industrial Revolution, but it achieved those gains by chaining us to machines, deskilling the artisan and turning him into a cog in the factory, stripped of judgment and dignity and disconnected from the rhythms of his spirit and the world around him.
Like when you’re young, you figure you’re unique. I was young.
A few stray bits of Lego edged fitfully about among lower strata, like bright rectilinear beetles.
Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.
Neighborhoods that mainly operated at night had a way of looking a lot worse in the morning.
I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling. – H. G. WELLS.
The child saw things that were too evident, too obvious for the trained eye.
He robbed a bank in Wichita.
Even the delusionally paranoid have enemies.
I am no spy.” “Then start being your own. If Tokyo’s the frying pan, you may just have landed in the fire.
Heidi’s room looked like the aftermath of a not-very-successful airplane bombing. Something that blew open every suitcase in the luggage compartment without bringing the plane down.
Music was strange that way though; there were people into any damned thing, it seemed like, and if you got enough of them together in one bar, she guessed, you could have a pretty good time.
Mary Shelley may well have invented science fiction. I think she did! But after that it seemed to be a boys’ game.
She wondered how powerful money could actually be, if one had enough of it, really enough. She supposed that only the Vireks of the world could really know, and very likely they were functionally incapable of knowing; asking Virek would be like interrogating a fish in order to learn more about water.
Are you familiar with the strategic concept of competitive control areas?” Ash asked. “Yes,” Stets said.
His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.
So Hosaka’s built a regular little neurosurgery and staffed it with three hotshots. Two of them are company men, the third’s a Korean who knows black medicine from both ends.
History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome.
Ash and Conner are silent. Our three locals have their phones out and seem to be catching up on the news.” “How is the news?” “They strike me as gravely concerned, but not speechless with horror.