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"Most of you are too young to remember the term future shock. Back in the seventies, some people felt that technological progress was so rapid that people, normal people, couldn't cope with it; that they wouldn't have time to get used to the present before the future was upon them. A man named Toffler coined the term…
"The project was cancelled," said Nessus. "We found that the Man-Kzin wars put sufficient restriction on kzinti expansion, made you less dangerous. We continued to watch. "Six times over several centuries, you attacked the worlds of men. Six times you were defeated, having lost approximately two-thirds of your male…
Certainly dystopia has appeared in science fiction from the genre’s inception, but the past decade has observed an unprecedented rise in its authorship. Once a literary niche within a niche, mankind is now destroyed with clockwork regularity by nuclear weapons, computers gone rogue, nanotechnology, and man-made…
OF COURSE we were hardly all the similes the Ariekei spoke. Some were animal or inanimate: there was a house in Embassytown out of which, many years before, the Hosts had taken all the furniture, then put it back, to allow some figure of speech. The split stone, made so they could speak the thought, it’s like the…
More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness - but compared to a human, a horse is as…
figure out how to live with high technology, how to avoid nuclear war, then tehre are at this moment a million advanced civilizations in the Milky Way. This place was built to help get us through this dangerous time. it would be good to know if there are other civilizations out there, if their United Nations have…
As a child, I read Friday by Robert A Heinlein, which portrayed a future in which energy needs are addressed by energy storage devices called "Shipstones", which are described as a way to pack more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an…
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in…
Of all the creatures who had yet walked on Earth, the man-apes were the first to look steadfastly at the Moon. And though he could not remember it, when he was very young Moon-Watcher would sometimes reach out and try to touch that ghostly face rising above the hills. He had never succeeded, and now he was old enough…
Moses Maimonides, who lived nearly 900 years ago, wrote a book called The Guide for the Perplexed. In it, he said: "The human race contains such a variety of individuals that we cannot discover two persons exactly alike in any moral quality or external appearance. This great variety and necessity of social life are…
FIELDS OF STUDY Vunailar t'Orenaya In nearly all cases, it is easy to determine the Golic Vulcan name for a discipline or field of study in most of the scientific, technical and medical disciplines. In contemporary usage, all of these terms are formed from a descriptive root with "-tal" (meaning "study" or "-ology")…
Because of the possibility of influencing the past while time traveling, one way of explaining why history does not change is by saying that whatever has happened was meant to happen. A time traveler attempting to alter the past in this model, intentionally or not, would only be fulfilling his role in creating…
The silo was something she had always taken for granted. The priests say it had always been here, that it was lovingly created by a caring God, that everything they would ever need had been provided for. Juliette had a hard time with this story. A few years ago, she had been on the first team to drill past 10,000 feet…
Wake up you sleepy head Put on some clothes, shake up your bed Put another log on the fire for me Ive made some breakfast and coffee Look out my window what do I see A crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me All the nightmares came today And it looks as though they're here to stay What are we coming to No room…
If they are going to sink below, then the pressure on the vessel is going to rise as Verne talked about in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. If the pressure on the vessel is going to rise, then it's going to collapse unless the pressure within the vessel rises. So the captain is slowly letting the vessel sink into the…
Death, to the Zhodani, is not a complete ending. The "evil" (that is, failure of duty) of the individual spirit will be lost. The "good" of the spirit will merge for a time with the universal energy field, the Tavrian, and then return to another member of the race. The more dutiful the spirit, the more personality…
"Tell me what happened!" "The tree came apart. "Why?" "Maybe the fire set it off, but it was ready. Clave, everythiiing in the Smoke Ring has some way of getting around. Some way to stay near the median... middle, where there's warater and air. Where do you think jet pods come from?" The hanand relaxed a little, and…
You are part of a scientifc techno-progressive movement that seeks to solve transhumanity’s injustices and inequalities with technology. You support universal access to technology and healthcare, open source models of production, morphological freedom, and democratization. You try to avoid factionalism and divisive…
'Well, then, supposing there were other suns in the universe.' He broke off a little bashfully. 'I mean suns that are so far away that they're too dim to see. It sounds as if I've been reading some of that fantastic fiction, I suppose.' 'Not necessarily. Still, isn't that possibility eliminated by the fact that…
Now science fiction movies are mostly just shoot-‘em-ups, but back in the day sci-fi was a medium to explore social issues. SF allowed us to examine the core elements of controversial issues without all the emotional baggage that went along with them. It’s easy to dismiss the genre when you have grown-up fans walking…