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Terminator rolls around Mercury just like its sunwalkers, moving at the speed of the planet’s rotation, gliding over twenty gigantic elevated tracks, which together hold aloft and push west a town quite a bit bigger than Venice. The twenty tracks run around Mercury like a narrow wedding band, keeping near the…
The sun is always just about to rise. Mercury rotates so slowly that you can walk fast enough over its rocky surface to stay ahead of the dawn; and so many people do. Many have made this a way of life. They walk roughly westward, staying always ahead of the stupendous day. Some of them hurry from location to location…
FICTION Ian Banks: The “Culture” Series, Consider Phlebas, The Use of Weapons, The Player of Games, The State of the Art, Inversions, Excession, Look to Windward, Matter Greg Bear: Moving Mars, Queen of Angels, Slant David Brin: Earth, The “Earthclan” series, Startide Rising, The Uplift War, Sundiver Paul Di Filippo…
It has never yet been supposed, that all the facts of nature, and all the means of acquiring precision in the computation and analysis of those facts, and all the connections of objects with each other, and all the possible combinations of ideas, can be exhausted by the human mind. The mere relations of magnitude, the…
Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter. ... Transmutation of the elements, unlimited power, ability to investigate the working of living cells by tracer atoms, the secret of photosynthesis about to be uncovered, these and a host of other results, all in about fifteen short years…
I always rejoice to hear of your being still employed in experimental researches into nature, and of the success you meet with. The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon: it is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the…
Born like this Into this As the chalk faces smile As Mrs. Death laughs As the elevators break As political landscapes dissolve As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree As the oily fish spit out their oily prey As the sun is masked We are Born like this Into this Into these carefully mad wars Into the sight of…
The glib words of years past from our politicians are hollow nightmares indeed when we are confronted with the staggering realities of what has to be done. But the key is there--technology, using it-and we hardly do now. The future may be unpredictable, but we can make a few well-aimed guesses about what life will be…
The 1939 New York World's Fair - that so transfixed me as a small visitor from darkest Brooklyn - was about 'The World of Tomorrow'. Merely by adopting such a motif, it promised that there would be a world of tomorrow, and the most casual glance affirmed that it would be better than the world of 1939. Although the…