Science Fiction Books

"The ship was still only thirty days from Earth, yet David Bowman sometimes found it hard to believe that he had ever known any other existence than the closed little world of Discovery. All his years of training, all his earlier missions to the Moon and Mars, seemed to belong to another man, in another life. Frank Poole admitted to the same feelings, and had sometimes jokingly regretted that the nearest psychiatrist was the better part of a hundred million miles away."

""Hmm," said Moisevitch, obviously quite unconvinced. "Seems odd to me that you, an astronomer, should be sent up to the Moon to look into an epidemic…Then do you know what TMA-1 means?” Miller seemed about to choke on his drink, but Floyd was made of sterner stuff. He looked his old friend straight in the eye, and said calmly: "TMA-1? What an odd expression. Where did you hear it?” "Never mind," retorted the Russian. "You can't fool me. But if you've run into something you can't handle, I hope you don't leave it until too late before you yell for help.”"

"Perhaps the Chinese were only trying to shore up their sagging economy, by turning obsolete weapons systems into hard cash, as some observers had suggested. Or perhaps they had discovered methods of warfare so advanced that they no longer had need of such toys; there had been talk of radio hypnosis from satellite transmitters, compulsion viruses, and blackmail by synthetic diseases for which they alone possessed the antidote. These charming ideas were almost certainly propaganda or pure fantasy, but it was not safe to discount any of them."

"When he tired of official reports, Floyd would plug his foolscap-sized News pad into the ship's information circuit. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers…He sometimes wondered if the News pad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the News pad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg."

"So here, Floyd told himself, is the first generation of the Spaceborne; there would be more of them in the years to come. Though there was sadness in this thought, there was also a great hope. When Earth was tamed and tranquil, and perhaps a little tired, there would still be scope for those who loved freedom, for the tough pioneers, the restless adventurers…The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children."

"In a million years, the human race had lost few of its aggressive instincts; along symbolic lines visible only to politicians, the thirty-eight nuclear powers watched one another with belligerent anxiety."

""I met Moisevitch at the Space Station…he'd heard of TMA-1; rumors are beginning to leak out. But we just can't issue any statement, until we know what the damn thing is and whether our Chinese friends are behind it.”"

"Soft light flooded into the chamber; Bowman saw moving shapes silhouetted against the widening entrance. And in that moment, all his memories came back to him, and be knew exactly where he was. Though he had come back safely from the furthest borders of sleep, and the nearest borders of death, he had been gone only a week. When he left the Hibernaculum, he would not see the cold Saturnian sky; that was more than a year in the future and a billion miles away. He was still in the trainer at the Houston Space Flight Center under the hot Texas sun."

"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 our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star."

"Floyd was particularly struck by a collection of signs, obviously assembled with loving care, which carried such messages as PLEASE KEEP OFF THE GRASS…NO PARKING ON EVEN DAYS…DEFENSE DE FUMER…TO THE BEACH…CATTLE CROSSING…SOFT SHOULDERS and DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS. If these were genuine - as they certainly appeared to be - their transportation from Earth had cost a small fortune. There was a touching defiance about them; on this hostile world, men could still joke about the things they had been forced to leave behind - and which their children would never miss."

"Ash's pallor blending perfectly with the wall, her eyes and chartreuse lips seemed to float there, a disembodied Cheshire goth, beneath her snaky black thundercloud of anti-coiffure."

"Eunice had screened Inception for her, the night before…Returning her to Gavin had seemed the wisest option, but then something about her earnestly nerdy exposition of the film had been the start of a growing empathy. Somehow rooted, she thought now, in a sense of someone afflicted with extremely busy but only intermittently connected suburbs of the self."

"Verity drew a bundle out with her glove-bagged hand, Franklin’s mild portrait bisected by a red elastic band. “This is wrong, this kind of money. You know that?” “Gives us agency.” “Agency?” “Capacity to act,” Eunice said. “Act how?” “Say we need to buy some shit.” “What shit?” “Kind that takes cash money.”"

"Cursion, when they were as legit as they ever really were, lived down in the underbrush. Still do, but their new coloration’s gaming. Sometimes, if DoD doubles down hard enough on the deniability, there’s zero memory left of the original mission. The op drifts free of the department, unfunded, forgotten…I figure Cursion took the keys to something with them, when they drifted on DoD. Or maybe drifted back, long enough to lift something. Tulpagenics would be their front for monetizing it.” “It?” “Me."

"“Nothing before the 2020s has ever seemed entirely real, to me,” Rainey said. “Hard to imagine they weren’t constantly happy, given all they still had. Tigers, for instance.”"

"“How far back did Vespasian go,” Netherton asked, “to initiate this stub?” “Mid-2015.” “When is it, there, now?” “2017,” she said, “fall.” “Much changed?” “The outcome of the previous year’s American presidential election. Brexit referendum as well….” “But why would Vespasian, of all people, have desired positive change?” “He was a sadist,” said Lowbeer, “and terribly clever at it…when he failed to return to fine-tune and amplify course, as he always did, things went their own way.” “How is it there, given that?” “Grim. They’re being driven into the same blades we were, but at a less acute angle.”"

"Passing a laptop’s screen, Verity saw the president, seated at her desk in the Oval Office, explaining something. If it wasn’t the hurricane hitting Houston, the earthquake in Mexico, the other hurricane wrecking Puerto Rico, or the worst wildfires in California history, it was Qamishli. Increasingly, though, it seemed mainly to be Qamishli."

"From the crest of Dolores Park, Verity wondered if she could see the tower on Montgomery, where Gavin had first described the product that had turned out to be Eunice. There was no one for Eunice to facially recognize, looking out across the city, but the cursor, having become a white circle, was darting around the skyline, trapping invisible airborne somethings under a plus sign. “Birds?” Verity asked. “Drones.""

"People who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were. Lowbeer had said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other. Which had reminded Flynne of what her mother had said…That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room to become its bigger self, with more horrible results."

"“You're weird, Wilf…You want to fetishize an extremely narrow-bandwidth experience,” Macon said, “that’s your business.”"

"When Lowbeer wished a conversation in public to be private, which she invariably did, London emptied itself around her."

""Gavin described the product, that’s you, as a cross-platform, individually user-based, autonomous avatar. Target demographic power-uses VR, AR, gaming, next-level social media. Idea is to sell a single unique super-avatar. Kind of a digital mini-self, able to fill in when the user can’t be online.”"

"“It is,” said Lowbeer, “as people used to say, to my unending annoyance, what it is.""

"So now they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn’t happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming anyway."

"So Flynne sat with Wilf (in the Wheelie Boy), and started to explain what he called the jackpot…That it was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event. And in fact the actual climate…had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late."

"Wilf told her it killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years…droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves."

"“Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.” “They think Homes was building drugs?” Flynne said. “How else do you finance the United Nations taking over?” “There’s hardly any UN left, Janice.” “UN’s got deep roots in the demonology.”"

"“Lead the way then, Mr. Netherton,” said Lowbeer. Netherton did, imagining, as he climbed the stairs, a better world, one in which a relaxing drink would be waiting in the sitting room."

"But science…had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping."

"She looked at the moon. It would look the same, she guessed, through the decades he’d sketched for her. None of that, he said, had necessarily been as bad for very rich people. Constant crisis had provided constant opportunity."

"“You should be a weatherman,” Leon said, “you’re in the future and you know the weather.” “You’re someone who only pretends to be unintelligent,” Netherton said. “It serves you simultaneously as protective coloration and a medium for passive aggression. It won’t work with me.” “Future’s fucking snippy.”"

"Conner was in the garden, on hands and knees, snarling at Gordon and Tyenna. They were facing him, side by side, as if ready to spring, their musculature looking even less canine than usual, their stiff tails in particular. Carnivorous kangaroos, in wolf outfits with Cubist stripes. “What’s he doing out there?” Netherton asked. “I don’t know,” said Lev, “but they love it.” Now the two creatures lunged at Conner simultaneously. He fell between them, flailing, wrestling with them. They were making a high-pitched, repetitious coughing sound."

"Netherton saw the glowering bulk of Newgate…the structure’s pitted granite flanks, spiked with iron. At the City’s westernmost gate, for more than a thousand years, had stood a jail, and this its ultimate and final expression. Or had been, rather, as it had been torn down in 1902, at the start of that oddly optimistic age before the jackpot. To be rebuilt a few years before his birth. The klept having deemed its return a wise and necessary thing."

"In through a gate that reminded Flynne of a Baptist anime of hell she’d seen. Burton and Leon had thought the fallen women were hot. Into this thing’s shade, its coldness. Flagstone floors like paths in some very wrong garden. Dull lamps, like the eyes of big sick animals. It was like the intro segment for a Ciencia Loca episode, paranormal investigators, going someplace where a lot of people had suffered and died."

"“Vespasian,” Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer said, peering sidewise at Netherton over her greatcoat’s upraised collar, “our hobbyist of hellworlds. Recall him?” “The one who made such horrific stubs? All war, all the time?” “I’d wondered how he so quickly rendered them nightmares,” she said. “Eventually, I looked into it…Vespasian discovered a simple way of exaggerating the butterfly effect, or so it seems…On making contact, he’d immediately withdraw. Then return, months later, study the results, and very deliberately and forcefully intervene. He achieved remarkable if terrible results, and very quickly. Investigating his method, I happened on another of his so-called stubs, one in which he’d initiated contact in 2015, several years before the earliest previously known contact.""

"She put the glasses on…a cursor appearing. A white arrow, centered in her field of vision. Then moving down, of its own accord. “Here we go,” said a woman’s husky voice in Verity’s ear."

"There was a looseness to this, beyond her experience of chatbots, but a wariness as well."

"I dislike calling them stubs,” Lowbeer said. “They’re short because we’ve only just initiated them, by reaching into the past and making that first contact. We should call them branches, as they literally are."

"“It’s not a dream,” Flynne said. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a dream. Don’t know that any of us are okay.” “Never sprained anything in a dream,” Conner said."

"“Why’re you here?” “Thing is,” Tommy said, “strangers keep getting killed out this way.” Flynne looked at him, stuck for what to say. “Why, if you don’t mind my asking, have you been sleeping, if that was sleeping, with some kind of sugarloaf cake on your head? And what, and this is what I’ve really been wanting to ask somebody for the last little while, the actual fuck is going on out here? Out here, in town, over in Clanton, at the statehouse.” “We aren’t builders.” “The basic flow of cash in the county’s changed, Flynne, and I mean overnight. So pardon my jumping to conclusions.”"

"“We’ve sourced something field-expedient,” Ash began, “from what little’s available there…She’s a surprisingly advanced product of the early militarization of machine intelligence…They saw it as cloning complexly specific skill sets.” Netherton nodded, hoping his eyes weren’t visibly glazing. “There were, for instance, individuals adroit at managing what were termed competitive control areas…complexly volatile environments, where you might easily lose prized field operators. Hence a project to replace such operators with autonomous AI, piped directly into the goggles of local recruits.”"

"“You communicate with it?” “Her. Given the technological asymmetry, she’s been rather like an operative whose handlers are recurrent figures in a dream.”"

"“Ash imagines you a conservative,” Lowbeer said, “or a romantic, perhaps. She sees your distaste for the present rooted in the sense of a fall from grace. That some prior order, or perhaps the lack of one, afforded a more authentic existence.” “I simply imagine things were less tedious,” Netherton said. “I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,” she said. “Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp.""

"The peripheral’s eyes opened wide. “Christ on a corndog,” it said, raising large hands until it could see them. It wiggled the fingers of both. "Goddamn. Look at all these fingers.”"

"“Luke 4:5 still across the street?” “I think so, but Ossian’s exploring buying them out.” “Buying a church?” “You may already own several.""

"Ask Lowbeer something, almost anything, and she’d have the answer. Meeting strangers, she might answer questions they hadn’t thought to ask. The whereabouts, for instance, of possessions long misplaced. She was fundamentally connected…in ways resulting in her knowing virtually everything about anyone she happened to meet. She’d apologize, then, declaring herself an ancient monster of the surveillance state, something Netherton knew her to well and truly be."

"“Got a go-bag?” Eunice asked. “I haven’t had my own place for the past year…Living out of a bag. That count?” “We had go-bags in our go-bags,” Eunice said, “depending.” “On what?” “Where we were going,” Eunice said."

"“I like it,” Stets said. “A Silicon Valley ghost story, assuming Eunice is real.” “Thing is,” Eunice said, “I’m here. Realness is kinda sorta.” “So why here, exactly, right now?” he asked. “I want to know where I come from. The infrastructure. Be some Area 51 shit, for real.”"

"“Too much like asymmetric warfare.” "Terrorism.” “We prefer not to use that term,” said Lowbeer, "if only because terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state.”"

"Leon had to come into town to do contractually obligated promo media with a crew from the lottery, with, he said, the douchebag he’d bought the ticket from. “If he’s a douchebag,” Flynne asked, “why’d you buy the ticket from him?” “’Cause I knew it would burn his ass so bad, when I won,” Leon said."