Andrew Smith

When I review my travels among the astronauts, my mind's eye goes first to the Houston shopping mall where Alan Bean sat for hours after returning from space, just eating ice cream and watching the people swirl around him, enraptured by the simple yet miraculous fact they they were there and alive in that moment, and so was he.

Apollo has something to teach us as we enter a new century of genetic modification, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology. It's a cautionary tale about that most fundamentally human of human tragedies .. wanting something so badly that you end up destroying it.

Readers of history may decide that joking while two guys are driving around through a town that has recently been slaughtered by six-foot-tall praying mantis beasts with shark-tooth-studded arms is in poor taste.It is.But that is exactly what real boys have always done when confronted with the brutal aftermath of warfare.

We made this stupid rule and this stupid rule.Boys are not allowed to love each other.Then we painted a bison on the wall.

Worry and regret are both useless weights that provide no drag. They never did anything to slow down the planet for one goddamned second.

It's no wonder I became a monster, too.

I love how, whenever you tell me a story, you go backwards and forwards and tell me everything else that could possibly be happening in every direction, like an explosion. Like a flower blooming.

It was so pleasant, chaotic, emotionless, nameless-everything vibrating so beautifully in the universe without words.

I was certain about this: In the best new language, there would be no words for me or you. Those words have caused all the trouble started by the old languages. In any new language, there should only be we.