From where Kassad hung, twisting with the lurch and tumble of the ship, he could see a score or more of bodies, naked and torn, each moving with the deceptive underwater-ballet grace of the zero-gravity dead. Most of the corpses floated within their own small solar systems of blood and tissue. Several of them watched Kassad with the cartoon-charact

The Shrike pilgrims were subdued, as if still contemplating Colonel Kassad’s grim and confusing tale.

Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered. My three local years on Heaven’s Gate, almost fifteen hundred standard days, allowed me to see, to feel, to hear—to remember, as if I litera

Tyrena Wingreen-Feif was my first editor at Transline. It was her idea to title the book The Dying Earth (a records search showed a novel by that name five hundred years earlier, but the copyright had lapsed and the book was out of print).

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

had been ripped free of the ship as easily as Beowulf had torn the arm from Grendel’s body.

“Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without