The Galaxy, and the Ground Within
{4.5/5} “Our species — no, forgive me, our cultures — aren’t the same at all. Quelin fear outsiders because we use them as scapegoats for the things we fear about ourselves. We bar cultural exchange because change frightens us. Whereas your people… You fear outsiders because they gave you no choice in the change they […]
Black Wine
{4.5/5} “I cannot keep thinking in the language of cruelty in which I was born… But here in the mountains they have names for the things I want to become: happy, secure, gentle, kind, good. I will will learn the subtle words, the nuances of meaning, and I will be able to think thoughts I […]
Memory Wire
{4.5/5} “I think they simply wanted to make us whole… to cure what they saw as our tragic failure. Failure of memory. Which is failure of conscience. They were surprised, I would guess, by our capacity for aggression. For ruthlessness, for inflicting pain. Conscience is memory… and the stones would restore it.” Memory Wire by […]
Legacies
{4.5/5} “‘I want to stop feeling evil,’ Thovalt said. ‘That is our legacy, the taint of evil, of being part of a terrible, terrible wrong. We are all stained by it. You have built a little Burdania and try to pretend it is the world, and maybe most of you can, and if you can, […]
The Gaslight Dogs
{4.5/5} “‘Sometimes,’ Sjenn said, ‘the Dog must kill.’ It was the thing that had brought her here to this Kabliw world. It was the anger that had proven to be shallow soil in their conversation, anger that now seemed distant on the Land, unmarked even by the stones of memory. The captain now understood what […]
The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway
{4.5/5} “What I took mostly from these events was what I tried to tell Seven of Nine later, that a single act of compassion can transform us. Having met Tret Rekheny, however briefly, it was not so easy, in future, for me to think of all Cardassians as cruel, as murderous, as vicious. Some of […]
Red Moon
{4.5/5} “Spinning slowly around, trusting I can recover my balance if I lose it, or just get back up, I see the hills look odd too. Not tectonic action, nor rain, nor riverbeds, nor glaciers, nor wind shaped these hills. They are uncanny. You can see something is different here, and it’s hard not to […]
The Midnight Library
{5/5} “The glacial landscape reminded her that she was, first and foremost, a human living on a planet. Almost everything she had done in her life, she realised — almost everything she had bought ad worked for and consumed — had taken her further away from understanding that she and all humans were really just […]
Star Trek: Voyager — To Lose the Earth
{4.5/5} “There are things we cannot know until we are ready. And we, as we are, may never be. But we are not at the end of humanity. I hope we aren’t even its midpoint. Sometimes the best we can do is offer those who will come after us a glimpse into their own potential […]
Star Trek: Voyager — Architects of Infinity
{4.5/5} “He found himself suddenly grateful that Patel, whatever her other faults, was so ridiculously conscientious. No matter how benign this place looked, like every unknown environment, it could probably kill you fifty different ways. He had forgotten that. She hadn’t. She had come here prepared to keep her team alive, and he could respect […]