City of Illusions
{4.5/5} “We hide from the Shing. Also we hide from what we were. Do you see that, Falk? We live well in the houses — well enough. But we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships between the stars, and now we dare not go a hundred miles from […]
Planet of Exile
{4.5/5} “They looked at her. She had heard that farborns would meet one’s eyes straight on, but did not put the story to test. At least none of them stopped her; her clothing was not unlike theirs, and some of them, she saw in her quick flicking glances, were not very much darker-skinned than men. […]
Rocannon’s World
{4.5/5} “The kind of ship Rocannon had come here on took years and years to ride the night between the worlds, those years to the men in the ship seemed only a few hours. In the City Kerguelen on the star Forrosul this man Rocannon had spoken to Semley of Hallan and given her the […]
Eon
{4/5} “That was where it began — the Library Beast, he thought of it, threatening to consume him — the knowledge that had every day taken a bit of his humanity and rubbed it thin, pushing him closer to some sort of personal crisis. There was no way — yet — to deal with what […]
A Sorcerer’s Treason
{5/5} “When he was with her, describing the place from which he came and telling her its legends and history, the proposed journey seemed as natural as taking the train to Madison or Chicago. But alone on the streets of Bayfield with the ordinary bustle and clatter of life around her punctuated by the church […]
Star Trek DTI: Forgotten History
{4.5/5} “Teresa remembered the DTI joke that all temporal investigations eventually led to the Enterprise. It was an exaggeration, and was meant to apply to all starships of that name, which tended to have a disproportionate involvement with temporal phenomena. But it mostly applied to the Federation’s first Enterprise, NCC-1701, whose captain — James Tiberius […]
Superman: Earth One
{4.5/5} “But there are things you can do that nobody else can. Important things. Things that can mean the difference between life and death for a whole lot of people.” Clark Kent has been struggling with what to do with his life — his parents always wanted him to do what makes him happy. He’s […]
Redshirts
{4.5/5} “Dahl weaved through the trees, screaming for Q’eeng and Taylor. Some part of his brain wanted to know if he was running in the right direction; another part wanted to know why he wasn’t using his phone to contact Q’eeng. A third part reminded him that he had a pulse gun of his own, […]
Star Trek DTI: Watching the Clock
{4.5/5} “One of the unackknowledged parts of the DTI’s job was to keep knowledge of temporal incidents from being any more widely disseminated than it had to be. The more rare and unlikely the public believed temporal displacement to be, the less chance there was of idiots trying to slingshot around their local suns to […]
The Lathe of Heaven
{4.5/5} “He’s not a mad scientist, George thought dully, he’s a pretty sane one, or he was. It’s the chance of power that my dreams give him that twists him around. He keeps acting a part, and this gives him such an awfully big part to play. So that now he’s even using his science […]