Trouble on Triton

He turned away to listen to an intense, polysyllabic discussion of the vast difficulty of performing pre-twentieth-century theatrical works for a twenty-second-century audience: “You mean because of the length?” “There’s that. Primarily, though, it results from the peripetia’s invariably pivoting on sexual jealousy; that’s just so hard for a contem

He thought: If you reach a conclusion validly, you don’t store all the work notes and doodles you’ve amassed on the way. Those are just the things conclusions are there to dispense with! (He crumpled a piece of paper that, looking at its gray, graphed corner sticking from the black-gloved knot, he realized he probably would need again.) She doesn’t

(Unlicensed sector people, Bron reflected, went on about the families they’d come from. Licensed sector people went on about the families they had.

Charo turned her chin on her fist: “Well, we were brought up to think of taxes as simply a matter of extortion by the biggest crooks who happen to live nearest to you. Even if they turn around and say, all right, we’ll spend the money on things you can use, like an army or roads, that just turns it into glorified protection money, as far as we’re c

Somewhere, in your sector or in mine, in this unit or in that one, there it is: pleasure, community, respect—all you have to do is know the kind, and how much of it, and to what extent you want it. That’s all.” He had almost cried coming back to his licensed sector co-op that morning. He almost cried now. “But what happens to those of us who don’t

Let me tell you a secret. There is a difference between men and women, a little, tiny one that, I’m afraid, has probably made most of your adult life miserable and will probably continue to make it so till you die. The difference is simply that women have only really been treated, by that bizarre, Durkheimian abstraction, ‘society,’ as human beings

Your problem, you see, is that essentially you are a logical pervert, looking for a woman with a mutually compatible logical perversion. The fact is, the mutual perversion you are looking for is very, very rare—if not nonexistent. You’re looking for someone who can enjoy a certain sort of logical masochism. If it were just sexual, you’d have no tro

I had to leave. No logic or metalogic could have made me stay. It was all perfect, beautiful, without a crack or a seam. Any blow you struck was absorbed and became one with the structure.

Language is parametal, not perimetal.