Once upon a time ... the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were us humans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project ... a great mass of silicon and ancient transistors and chips and circuit boards ... a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping-if you will pardon the expression-the human brain in form and function. Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way.

There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?

Laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.

Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level ... that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.

Context is to data what water is to a dolphin