Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.

Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.

Having been brought up among the biologists and having followed various debates about ways to improve the human template and other debates about the true nature of our nature, I began seriously to wonder: What if? We hold in our hands a tool that is more powerful - for good or ill - than any we have wielded before.

In the animal world individuals cheat, as do we.

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.