Sublime

Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny.

Empire unchecked might be inevitable, but Darj Tarats has within him a quiet, determined, and conniving optimism that unchecked is not the only option available, and has not been for some time.

vanguard

A million people here already, with more on the way. And no police, and crime—or rather, crime without police. A million people and no law, no law but corporate law. The bottom line. Minimize expenses, maximize profits. Run smoothly on ball bearings.

And then it was ringing midnight, and they were in the Martian time slip, the thirty-nine-and-a-half-minute gap between 12:00:00 and 12:00:01, when all the clocks went blank or stopped moving. This was how the first hundred had decided to reconcile Mars’s slightly longer day with the twenty-four-hour clock, and the solution had proved oddly satisfa

I thought about J. G. Ballard’s novel High Rise, where a state-of-the-art London tower block is the vertical stage for civilization to unpeel itself until nothing but primal violence remains.

Nadia stared at her. “Well. Ann. It’s radiation keeping us underground more than anything. What you’re saying in effect is that you want the radiation to go away. Which means thickening the atmosphere, which means terraforming.” “I know.” Her voice was tight, so tight that suddenly the careful matter-of-fact tone was lost and forgotten. “Don’t you

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

ending the age of weather-dependent food.