Beyond the queues, the vacancy screens listed jobs in a multitude of languages. Invariably, they were low-paid and short-term dead-ends. Nearby, people in headphones sat at a bank of machines: the blind and the illiterate...

Music took her somewhere, and I used to wonder where. I thought it was dumb, the way she lived for a collection of sounds, for someone else’s words and notes.

He spent the afternoon alone in the streets.

So much American science fiction is parochial — not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same...

The screech of tyres, an almighty bang and a car exploded through the playground wall like a high-velocity bullet through a watermelon.

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

can’t even face his marriage problems full on.

It’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator’s experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist’s

In turkle time a lin is the briefest moment that can just about be measured. Ninety lins make a tikk, one hundred tikks make a lod, thirty eight lods make a yan, the time it...

A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.

Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this...

You crave winning and fear losing instead of just doing. To succeed you must remove your self-imposed limitations.

Doubt is what keeps the heart and mind of every man alive. It ‘s what makes us think twice.

[P]eople only make decisions based on what they know. You can have everyone in the country vote freely and democratically and still come up with the wrong answer – if the information they base that...