science-fiction

No, Sarah. There's more. There's always more. I won't give you up. I won't! It's not just a game. Midgard is real for many people and it's real for what they've experienced. It's real. We don't doubt the way they feel or what they've seen or how they spend their time, so you must be real too! You have to be real, Sarah, because if you aren't, how can I justify any of it? You are a few scraps of code. I'm a few liters of blood and some bones in a bag of skin. If I'm real, you're real too!

Fantastic accomplishments seem like something unattainable and everyone doing the extraordinary seems to be unlike you until YOU do something amazing. Then you realize those talented, heroic leaders are not different from you in any important way." Clara Branon, Ph.D., "This Is/Is Not the Way I Thought Things Would Change," Volume III, "The Spanners Series

By definition, you can__ experience your own death. Death is the end of consciousness. And consciousness persists. In the language of physics, consciousness is conserved.I am the one who wakes up in the morning.Always.Every morning.I don__ die.I just become increasingly unlikely.

It__ a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator__ experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist__

My relative examined you, observed a few of your normal body cells, compared them with what it had learned from other humans most like you, and said that you had not only a cancer, but a talent for cancer.

Red, orange and green geometric designs painted its body as well as the flimsy collar around its neck. The creature flicked its tail and blinked its deep-set eyes, apparently oblivious to their presence."That's a yraglian lizards," Deven whispered. "We need to stay back. They smell really bad if you upset them. I mean, really, really bad."Dirck nodded, unsurprised that the first native creature he encountered on Cyraria represented it so well.

For the first time in his life, Michael understood why real soldiers coming back from real wars often had a hard time getting over the things they'd seen and done. And had done to them. If Michael had a soul, it was starting to leak out of his hopes.

If you love someone, if someone loved you, if they taught you to write and made it so you could speak, how can you do nothing at all? You might as well take their words out of the dirt and try to snatch them from the wind.Because once you love, it is gone. You love and you cannot call it back.

It__ a violent galaxy filled with cutthroat pirates, cyber-mercenaries and star messiahs. If peace comes, it will have to steal in like a thief.

The main reception foyer was almost empty but Ford nevertheless weaved his way through it.

Don__ stay with someone who drives you crazy. Find someone who keeps you sane.

Well one tiny poisonous spider can kill a very large man if it bites him in the right place.

I__e never liked urban myths. I__e never liked pretending to believe in them; never understood why everyone else doesn__ see straight through them. Why is it they__e always happened to a friend of a friend - someone you__e never met? Why does everyone smile and nod and pull the right faces, when they must know they__e not true? Pointless. A waste of breath. So I sneered at the myths about Scaderstone Pit. It was just an old quarry _ nothing more. I never believed in the rumours of discarded dynamite. It had decayed, they said. It exploded at the slightest touch, had even blown someone__ hand off. I shrugged off the talk of the toxic waste. It was dumped in the dead of night, they said. The canisters rusting away, leaking deadly poisons that could blind you, burn your lungs. I laughed at the ghost stories. You could hear the moans, they said, of quarrymen buried alive and never found. You could see their nightwalking souls, searching for their poor crushed bodies.I didn__ believe any of it _ not one word. Now, after everything that__ happened, I wonder whether I should__e listened to those stories. Maybe then, these things would__e happened to someone else, and I could__e smiled and said they were impossible.But this is not an urban myth. And it did not happen to someone else, but to me. I__e set it down as best I can remember. Whether you believe it or not, is up to you.

The best sci-fi stories use the fantastical to remind us of the reality of who we are today, the hope of who we may become tomorrow, and the shame of who we were yesterday.

Humans had spent thousands of years climbing out of caves and building technology so they could reach the moon and live in caves again.

I never really had control over my life because no one does. We're all tossed into this loop because there is only 'life.' There is no 'my life this, my life that.' I take part in what life actually is, singular and myriad, warping and stagnant. Life is only itself, and it stretches so much farther beyond who I am that I'm lucky to take part in it for the small amount of time that is given to me. That's all.

We__e a nonviolent collective working to undermine the Trust and free the Badlands. Once the Trust is exposed as lying and corrupt, we believe Edenites will do the right thing. Open the borders. Save the Badlands._ Ling lowers her voice with deliberate control. __udzu is going to destroy something called Aevum.

...You believe that the kind of story you want to tell might be best received by the science fiction and fantasy audience. I hope you're right, because in many ways this is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-minded and intelligent. They want to think as well as feel, understand as well as dream. Above all, they want to be led into places that no one has ever visited before. It's a privilege to tell stories to these readers, and an honour when they applaud the tale you tell.