Under Heaven
{5/5} “They were not travelers, the Kitan. The occasional exception, a far-farer who returned, was celebrated as a hero, his written record of the journey widely copied and read, pondered with fascination and disbelief. He was often regarded, privately, as more than slightly mad. Why would a sane man choose to leave the civilized world?” […]
Star Trek: TNG — A Rock and a Hard Place
{4.5/5} “I’ve seen suns going nova and suns being born. I’ve stood on planets with life just beginning to crawl out of the primordial ooze. knowing that millions of years into the future, something great and majestic might be there, and I’ve rejoiced. I’ve stood on planets where the only things remaining were vast radioactive […]
Noumenon Infinity
{4.5/5} “Caznal hated the idea of hurting her girls, of upending their world — of shattering their convictions in a regimented, thoroughly planned life. She’d introduced an element of chaos, of change, that she never could have prepared them for. The entire convoy had been set up to fight furiously against uncertainty, yet, in reality, […]
Talking to Strangers
{4.5/5} “We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy.” Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell, published in 2019 This book starts out with the […]
The New Springtime
{4.5/5} “She was desperately eager to relive with this stranger her time in the Nest. To speak with him of Queen-love and Egg-plan and Nest-strength and all those other things that she had barely had a chance to experience in her too-brief captivity: things which had shaped her soul.” The New Springtime by Robert Silverberg, […]
At Winter’s End
{4.5/5} “But in that moment it seemed to Hresh that he himself was a citizen of the Great World. He was in the midst of all its surge and vigor. He saw himself striding down the throbbing streets of Vengiboneeza, moving through the turmoil and frenzy of a marketplace where members of the Six Peoples […]
The Gameshouse
{4.5/5} “Ask yourself this, my lady: you play now to crown a king in Venice, and this is, I think, your very first game. Imagine the stakes that more experienced players must work for. Imagine the scale of their ambition.” The Gameshouse by Claire North, originally published in 3 parts in 2015 In the 17th […]
Noumenon
{4.5/5} “I had no desire to follow the strict regimen that had been set up for us, but I also didn’t want to see the mission flounder and fail. It was a strange dichotomy of concepts that somehow lived harmoniously within me. I simultaneously supported and denied our collective rebelliousness.” Noumenon by Marina J. Lostetter, […]
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
{5/5} “He had painted me at the center of the canvas, my hair flowing in ripples, my eyes direct and my expression as if I had just given a confidence that would not be repeated. And yet, there was something more underlying the image: Edward had captured in this beautiful face — far more beautiful […]
Existence
{5/5} “It’s been seventy years that ai-builders have promised to surge beyond human ken. Their list of tricks keeps growing. Ai can sift and correlate across all of human knowledge, in seconds. Yet, each decade reveals more layers of unexpected subtlety, that lay hidden in our own packed neuron-clusters all along. Skills we simply took […]