The Princess Bride
{4.5/5} “Fool!… You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is ‘Never get involved in a land war in Asia,’ but only slightly less well known is this: ‘Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.’” Buttercup is the most beautiful woman in the world. Westley is […]
Sphere
{4.5/5} “Wear these at all times, even though they’re just a precaution: the alarms trigger automatically if life-support conditions go below optimum. But that won’t happen… Every single major system is redundant. We can lose power, we can lose air, we can lose water entirely, and we will be fine for a hundred and thirty […]
The Postman
{4.5/5} “All considered, it was amazing a man like him had lived this long. Everyone he had known or admired as a boy had died, along with all the hopes any of them had had. The soft world made for dreamers like himself broke apart when he was only eighteen. Long since then he’d come […]
Shadows in Flight
{4.5/5} “The human race had encountered only one alien species, ever, and had fought a war of extinction with them. According to a story told by the writer of The Hive Queen under the pseudonym ‘Speaker for the Dead,’ the Formics had not meant to wipe out the human race at all. But Carlotta wasn’t […]
Star Trek Typhon Pact: Brinkmanship
{4.5/5} “In many ways… Venetan culture is a better fit with the Tzenkethi than the Federation. Both civilizations are very stable and achieve that stability through a certain degree of conformism on the part of their members rather than encouraging individualism… Your Federation explorers and we Ferengi entrepreneurs are perhaps somewhat baffling to the Venetans. […]
Star Trek Typhon Pact: Raise the Dawn
{4.5/5} “In a career that had taken him from the lowest foot soldier to the supreme commander of the Romulan military forces, the admiral had learned to identify most of the real enemies in the galaxy: ego, arrogance, self-righteousness, a hunger for power, a lack of compassion and perspective, an unwillingness to understand. In his […]
Star Trek Typhon Pact: Plagues of Night
{4.5/5} “The idea of such obvious power, so distasteful to her in the way that it for so long had been applied in Romulan society, seemed to mock her. Though she did not crave leadership, neither did she wish to be deposed. Having risen to the office of praetor, she wished to fashion her government […]
Lord of Emperors
{5/5} “He is not an old man by any means, but he is sufficiently advanced in years to hear horses and chariots in the night: the distant harbingers of an end to mortal tenure. There is much to do before he hears — as all true and holy Emperors are said to hear — the […]
Sailing to Sarantium
{5/5} “To say of a man that he was sailing to Sarantium was to say that his life was on the cusp of change: poised for emergent greatness, brilliance, fortune — or else at the very precipice of a final and absolute fall as he met something too vast for his capacity.” The emperor summons […]
Ancient Shores
{4.5/5} “Look… it wouldn’t really matter whether you were building it out at Alpha Centauri. There are only a few designs for a practical sailboat. Somebody somewhere built this, and I can guarantee you it wasn’t anyone we’ve ever heard of.” Tom, a farmer, discovers a boat buried in his field. The boat, once it’s […]