One defining symptom of decadence is a fondness for vast and nonsensical extravagance.

Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.

It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.

Who could not return from a visit to Jack Vance's world, without feeling that he had been somewhere unique, that he had experienced things unavailable in our mundane world?

It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.

Never pass by a chance to shut up.

Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody's thought it.