Sublime

Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Gene Wolfe, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and Stanisław Lem.

tossing out all the logic circuits, he replaced them with self-regulating egocentripetal narcissistors.

Consciousness, it seemed, formed a deadly trap, in that one could enter it, but never leave.

Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.

They had no way of knowing yet whether the population of Quinta was made up of living creatures or, possibly, nonbiological automata: the heirs of an extinct civilization. One could not rule out the grim hypothesis that the arms race, having exterminated life (with perhaps a few remaining souls huddled in shelters or caves), was being carried on by