Pebble in the Sky
{4.5/5} “To the rest of the Galaxy, if they are aware of us at all, Earth is but a pebble in the sky. To us it is home, and all the home we know. Yet we are no different from you of the outer worlds, only more unfortunate. We are crowded here on a world […]
The Currents of Space
{4.5/5} “There he met friends of his, who looked at him with secrecy in their eyes and who met him at work later with bland glances of indifference. He listened to what they said and found that many seemed to believe what he had been hoarding in his own mind and honestly he had thought […]
The Stars, Like Dust
{4.5/5} “Of course, someday we will beat the Tyranni. It is fairly inevitable. They can’t rule forever. No one can. They’ll grow soft and lazy. They will intermarry and lose much of their separate traditions. They will become corrupt. But it may take centuries, because history doesn’t hurry.” The Stars, Like Dust by Isaac Asimov, […]
The Wall Around Eden
{4.5/5} “Tunneling the Wall, disobeying the Pylon, potshots at angelbees — the only result was the whole town got put to sleep for three days. After that happened, the Town Meeting forbade any more resistance.” The Wall Around Eden by Joan Slonczewski, published in 1989 Doomsday was 20 years ago. The angelbees, or their masters, […]
Up Against It
{4.5/5} “The feral was in danger. Executioners had registered its protoconscious activity. The feral was made up of life-support routines, though, and imbued with high levels of system permissions. It outran its executioners, ran traces and saw that routines lethal to its continued function were triggering all around — computational landmines, algorithmic hails of bullets. […]
The Golden Enclaves
{4.5/5} “There’s not much democracy in enclaves; they’re run like a cross between a vicious international corporation and a village full of vexatious eccentrics. Most of the denizens don’t care what the council are doing as long as everything keeps running smoothly from their perspective, and the only people who gets a significant vote anyway […]
The Last Graduate
{4.5/5} “It’s never a good idea to get attached to freshmen, and doing it this early in the year was an invitation to misery, but after they’d saved me and Orion from blundering around almost choking ourselves to death, it had worn off enough of the cold-aloof-senior mystique I’d cultivated that they’d started talking to […]
A Deadly Education
{5/5} “People seem to have no trouble convincing themselves that I’m dangerous and evil even when they aren’t actively looking for reasons. Of course, I could have killed him just be draining his mana, but I didn’t want to actually become a maleficer and then go bursting out of this place like most monstrous butterfly […]
Dual Memory
{4.5/5} “Ships in port start to light up in the sunset, and at random their lights blink off and on. Machines are on our side, right? No, they’re on their own side, which happens to be ours. Our world isn’t ours, even if it’s the world we made. I know that. No one else does. […]
A Bridge of Years
{4.5/5} “He had come here from a world of disappointment and miscalculation; in its place he had discovered a pocket universe of optimists and cynical romantics… They believed in a future the couldn’t define, only sense — used words like ‘justice’ and ‘beauty,’ words that betrayed their own fundamental optimism. They believed without shame in […]