It is a total mystery how we evolved minds capable of piloting cars through wild maneuvers using a wrist to steep while shouting at a cell phone. The creationists are fools for focusing on animal...

While I have the floor, here’s a question that’s been bothering me for some time. Why do so few writers of heroic or epic fantasy ever deal with the fundamental quandary of their novels ....

As sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. But science fiction has not been forgiven for its crap. The reason is that science fiction inherently distrusts the ‘eternal verities’ on which...

The village is coming back, like it or not.

…where were answers to the truly deep questions? Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don’t look past this boundary, they told Galileo,...

Generalization is a natural human mental process, and many generalizations are true—in average. What often does promote evil behavior is the lazy, nasty habit of believing that generalizations have anything at all to do with...

When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.

Prison for the crime of puberty — that was how secondary school had seemed.

Cultural contamination that is directed outward is always seen as ‘enlightenment.

Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

Self-awareness is probably overrated. A complex, self-regulating system doesn’t need it in order to be successful, or even smart.

Beware of self-indulgence. The romance surrounding the writing profession carries several myths: that one must suffer in order to be creative; that one must be cantankerous and objectionable in order to be bright; that ego...

But there is one more reason to protect other species. One seldom if ever mentioned. Perhaps we are the first to talk and think and build and aspire, but we may not be the last....

The propensity of Earthlings to get into trouble, and to learn thereby, was the reason my owners agreed to this mad venture – although no one expected such a chain of unusual calamities as befell...

The three basic material rights — continuity, mutual obligation, and the pursuit of happiness.

The species greatest harvest ― words.

Even in dying, a Thennanin ship was reputed to be not worth putting out of its misery. In battle they were slow, unmaneuverable—and as hard to disable permanently as a cockroach.

Alex felt the words wash over him. He had the strange fantasy the things were seeking places within him to lay their young.

… science demands a terrible price – that we accept what experiments tell us about the universe, whether we like it or not.

Your neighbors are not all sheep. Your political opponents are not all evil or fools. Try talking to those you despise. They are your fellow citizens. And together, we are not lesser than any “greatest...

If there are still honest-smart men and women within those old and noble traditions, they should think carefully, observe and diagnose the illness. They should face the contradiction. Discuss the conflation. And then do as...

Your faith in Homo technologicus -the Tinkering Man- has one fatal flaw. It offers you no escape clause.

Indeed, the maligned American pastime of baseball may be by-far the greatest and best sport by one criterion, when it comes to emulating and training for genuinely useful Neolithic skills! Think about it. The game...

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

It was a strange trek — the sullen leading the apathetic, followed by the confused, all tailed by the inveterately amused.