Guilt ripped into her like a rusty, serrated knife. It took up residence in her soul, settling in and getting comfortable so it could saw away ragged pieces of flesh and leave her to bleed.

He had seen many criminals in his years in Division. Dangerous men and even more dangerous women. Small-time hucksters and savvy crime lords. Spies, gangsters, assassins, insurgents and wannabe-revolutionaries. True believers and soulless mercs willing...

There’s a need, too, for a special name in order to distinguish between this present world and the former world in which the police carried old-fashioned revolvers. … 1Q84 – that’s what I’ll call this...

We bury our own. We take care of the ones we love.” He spoke softly, then placed a flower on her grave and made his way back to their dorm room.

Be Swag

I’ve never liked urban myths. I’ve never liked pretending to believe in them; never understood why everyone else doesn’t see straight through them. Why is it they’ve always happened to a friend of a friend...

What is it in humans that makes us so eager to believe ill of one another? … What makes us so hungry for it? Failed idealism, he suspected. We disappoint ourselves and then look around...

He holds her with the strength of a million-man army, but with all the tenderness of her heart lying naked in the palms of his hands.

Matter and energy are equivalent, according to the equation E=mc2, where E stand for energy, m for mass and c for the speed of light,’ ‘Merapa explained. ‘Matter can’t be transported at the speed of...

We believed we were safe. That was the big fantasy.

The thin girl was gulping down one of Richard’s bananas in what was, Richard reflected, the least erotic display of banana-eating he had ever seen.

What we’ve done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to...

If I could make people feel, just for a day or an hour, what it’s like to love with infiniteness, then they would be animals no longer, but some greater creature, deserving of that title...

It would be either a very skilled or very unwise man to steal from an assassin.” – Taliesin

I work my way through the rest of my dates, but I’m only there in body. The boys usually give up after the first hour; it’s difficult to have a conversation all by yourself. My...

She sends me coupons, Declan.

[…]How can a great civilization have destroyed itself so completely?””Perhaps,”said Apollo, “by being materially great and materially wise and nothing else.

Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on...

The truth is that Trout, like Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, writes parables. These are set in frames which have become called, for no good reason, science fiction. A better generic term would...

‘Now I lay me down to sleep…’” To me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in...

It’s better to die in pursuit of your dreams than to live a life without hope.

I maintain that cultural sensitivity should be replaced by cultural awareness. Awareness implies research, consideration, thought, and judiciousness….Sensitivity denies equal access to language. It segregates and censors based on the background of the writer rather...

Now I am their sword. And I do not forgive. I do not forget. So let him lead me onto his shuttle. Let him think he owns me. Let him welcome into his house, so...

The mind is the reality. You are what you think.

My purpose is to change the fact that you’re just food. If you learn the lessons well you will be able to have a happy long life. A lot of us believe that the human...

I’m afraid you’ll have to ask somebody else for that because if you die before me I won’t survive it.” He kissed the tip of my nose. I gazed at him with so much love...

You can use logic to justify just about anything, that’s its power and it’s flaw.

In other news, It’s seven sols till the harvest, and I still haven’t prepared. For starters, I need to make a hoe. Also, I need to make an outdoor shed for the potatoes. I can’t...

This has serveral consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms–translation: all your bank account are belong to us–

We never care for anyone for their own sake. We train them for the system. No one matters for their own sake. No one acts for their own sake. The system will always be bigger...

Fortran”. [M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that...

We don’t go in for that psychodynamic stuff around here. Those guys will talk you to death, clean out your bank account while they are doing it, and then invite you to come back and...

Essentially, in the model of strange fiction based in shifts in narrative modality, we are reversing the polarity, treating those ‘contents’ (errata, nova and chimera) as the end results of a literary technique of estrangement,...

Beware of more powerful weapons. They often inflict as much damage to your soul as they do to you enemies.

I come from a place where everyone has great power, by your standards, and they steadfastly refuse to use it for self-aggrandizement … anywhere … ever.

Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dream of...

A minute later the steam stopped. By then, I was soaking wet and, no doubt, my pores were open. Some people pay a fortune for this kind of beauty treatment. I got mine for free,...

A pulse. Beat-beating against her palm. Alive. Beat by beat the bottomless whirlwind of perceptions and data and images and sensations careening through her mind—so many how can this tiny skull hold them all—began to...

So that’s why I say ‘never have anything you can’t walk away from.’ Especially a woman. For them, because this is a dangerous life we lead and you never know if or when it will...

Everyone asks me how I got started into writing. I wish I had some cool story to tell, but the truth is pretty lame. My wife and I were having a drink on our back...

There is more important work to be done here. The strong must lead us into a new energy age before our world dies out. Who’s going to do that? You, Caleb? Your face bears new...

When we decided to have Julie, I couldn’t carry her. We sat down and the hard numbers stared back at us. I made twice as much as Fern. We wouldn’t have been able to feed...

In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.

A joke is a witticism or play on words that’s meant to be funny. I say ‘meant to be’ because most jokes aren’t funny. They range between mildly amusing and grimace-inducingly annoying.

She’s terse. I can be terse. Once, in flight school, I was laconic.

Struggling transforms her captor into a Chinese finger trap. She’s suffocating. Sucking in air without relief. Her lungs expand. Contract. Expand. They fill with lies and broken promises. With despair and lost hope. Each inhale...

If you ordered up a whore here, you’d probably get a theater major doing Joan Crawford as Sadie Thompson. I wonder what would happen if I ordered up a Hershey bar?” His eyes lit up...

Risk the risks.

In Sneffels Yoculis craterem kem delibat umbra Scartaris Julii intra calendas descende, audas viator, et terrestre centrum attinges. kod feci. Arne Saknussem

We both knew the place we were at and what that meant. We both felt the regret and the loss. We both knew that without me, none of it would have been possible. Without me,...