A Fire Upon the Deep

I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.

Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.

One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.

Once upon a time I was such a good liar; I could talk the fish right into my mouths.

[The Universe] does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that can not be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.

He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.

Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.

Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood...and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?

Here we begin frank speculation. And since we are speculating, we'll use those powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption.

All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

We're endangered by our own success.

Ravna became a librarian. "The ultimate dilettante!" Lynne had teased.

Five seconds, ten seconds, more change than ten thousand years of a human civilization. A billion trillion constructions, mold curling out from every wall, rebuilding what had been merely superhuman.

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience.

Where the surf meets the shore – lots of neat things can happen there.

At the Docks’ altitude, gravity was still about three-quarters of a gee. Air fountains hung a breathable atmosphere over the middle part of the platform. The day before, she had taken a sailboat across the clear-bottomed sea. That was a strange experience indeed: planetary clouds below your keel, stars and indigo sky above.

The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as long as all the time before

How long must a fish study to understand human motivation?

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience. Of

Be cool, dear student. The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.

Our conclusion: this Helper Symbiosis is just another messianic religion, another screwball empire excusing its excesses and attempting to trick those it cannot directly coerce. Don’t be fooled! Crypto:

This was the pretech experience, that even if you had no enemies the world itself could kill you. And

Over the last few weeks, some newsgroups have been full of tales of war and battle fleets, of billions dying in the clash of species. To all such — and those living more peaceably around them — we say look out on the universe. It does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

Its agents -- not even human equivalent on this primitive hardware -- raced through the ship's automation