Storytelling 112: How to Write Hard Science Fiction:

Technological Jargon, and Systems Engineering

“Science is about discovering answers. Engineering is about executing solutions.”

—Andy Weir

“The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life…

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen.”

—Richard Feynmann

James Cameron:

“In science fiction you have to have rules and you have to state them, and you have to play by them. Somehow it makes the fantasy more real, by adding complexity.

…

Historically, science fiction has always been terrible at actually predicting the future. What it’s great at is giving you a different way of looking at your life now.

…

I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism. Isaac Asimov used to say, “Science fiction readers are people who escape from reality into worlds of pollution, nuclear war, overpopulation.” It’s a way of modeling the present through the future.

…

Science-fiction films were notoriously under-budgeted until George Lucas came along. What’s happened, though, is that filmmakers have become hardware-happy. The earlier movies told their stories through the characters; I think that earlier approach was better. Today’s audience is being taken on a rollercoaster ride, where they sit there, waiting to see the next incredible special effect. They don’t care what’s going to happen next to the people, because the filmmakers didn’t create believable characters for whom an audience can really care.”

—James Cameron

Warren Ellis, Angel Stomp Future:

“I love science fiction. It’s where I can let rip.

I have the actual scientific education of a mollusc, mind you. I am crap at science. I mean, I was the kid at school who managed to set water on fire, you know? My greatest achievement in science, according to one of my teachers, was climbing up on a table and kicking a guy who’d been bugging me for a month.

But I read science news obsessively. I love the way science SOUNDS. I love the ideas for their art. There’s a crazy beauty about a theory of dimensional structure that assembles itself into a snowflake, or the idea that reality is a two-dimensional plane of information and the 3-D universe is a hologrammatic side-effect. And that’s how I write science fiction. I use the sound of the ideas and then make it all up.
And then it all comes true anyway.”

—Warren Ellis, Angel Stomp Future

Indiewire Interview: Shane Carruth on “Primer”; The Lessons of a First-Timer:

Q: Why did you decide to use so much jargon in the dialogue? It actually works well in helping to set the realistic tone, I think.

Shane Carruth: We spent a lot of time talking about what we were talking about. It was important to me that we weren’t just talking techno-babble, that what we were saying actually does make sense. And it actually all does make sense, as far as what they are trying to build originally — dynomagnetism and using super conductors. But the hope is that even if we were humming you would get something about the politics of this group, who’s enthusiastic about what, and the friendships. The hope was that if even if that jargon doesn’t work, that there was something to be paying attention to.

Q: Was it your intention to have a slightly antagonistic relationship with the audience, that they’re not going to get everything?

Shane Carruth: No, not antagonistic. My intention was to make sure the information was in there. My favorite films are the ones that I walk away from and I know I saw a story. I saw the core part of the plot. But if I ever take another look at it then I can see that there was some more stuff going on in there that I didn’t realize. So that was the intention — to make sure that the information is in there and that at least thematically I’m telling a solid story. So that if you care enough about it, if you liked it, and you want to take another look at it, by all means, the information is in there. That’s my favorite kind of film.

…

I knew that the story was going to be about these two guys who start off as friends and then by the end of it, because of the equation of trust changing, they weren’t going to be able to be around each other. At the same time, I was reading all this non-fiction on the history of calculus and the number zero and the transistor. I found all these commonalities that I felt like I hadn’t seen before in film. And I wanted to see them. So that was my setting. Knowing what that was going to be and how fantastical it is — that dictated the world that they were going to be in it. You have to believe it, it almost has to be mundane so that when you get to that fantastical stuff, you go there too.”

—Indiewire Interview: Shane Carruth on “Primer”; The Lessons of a First-Timer

Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game: Special 20th Anniversary Edition: “Introduction”:

“The novelette “Ender’s Game” was my first published science fiction. It was based on an idea — the Battle Room — that came to me when I was sixteen years old. I had just read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which was (more or less) an extrapolation of the ideas in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, applied to a galaxy-wide empire in some far future time.

The novel set me, not to dreaming, but to thinking, which is Asimov’s most extraordinary ability as a fiction writer. What would the future be like? How would things change? What would remain the same? The premise of Foundation seemed to be that even though you might change the props and the actors, the play of human history is always the same. And yet that fundamentally pessimistic premise (you mean we’ll never change?) was tempered by Asimov’s idea of a group of human beings who, not through genetic change, but through learned skills, are able to understand and heal the minds of other people. 

…

And then, as so many science fiction readers have done over the years, I felt a strong desire to write stories that would do for others what Asimov’s story had done for me. 

In other genres, that desire is usually expressed by producing thinly veiled rewrites of the great work: Tolkien’s disciples far too often simply rewrite Tolkien, for example. In science fiction, however, the whole point is that the ideas are fresh and startling and intriguing; you imitate the great ones, not by rewriting their stories, but rather by creating stories that are just as startling and new. 

But new in what way? Asimov was a scientist, and approached every field of human knowledge in a scientific manner — assimilating data, combining it in new and startling ways, thinking through the implications of each new idea. I was no scientist, and unlikely ever to be one, at least not a real scientist — not a physicist, not a chemist, not a biologist, not even an engineer. I had no gift for mathematics and no great love for it, either. Though I relished the study of logic and languages, and virtually inhaled histories and biographies, it never occurred to me at the time that these were just as valid sources of science fiction stories as astronomy or quantum mechanics. 

How, then, could I possibly come up with a science fiction idea? What did I actually know about anything?”

…

I have a master’s degree in literature, and in writing Ender’s Game I deliberately avoided all the little literary games and gimmicks that make “fine” writing so impenetrable to the general audience. All the layers of meaning are there to be decoded, if you like to play the game of literary criticism — but if you don’t care to play that game, that’s fine with me. I designed Ender’s Game to be as clear and accessible as any story of mine could possibly be. My goal was that the reader wouldn’t have to be trained in literature or even in science fiction to receive the tale in its simplest, purest form. And, since a great many writers and critics have based their entire careers on the premise that anything that the general public can understand without mediation is worthless drivel, it is not surprising that they found my little novel to be despicable. If everybody came to agree that stories should be told this clearly, the professors of literature would be out of a job, and the writers of obscure, encoded fiction would be, not honored, but pitied for their impenetrability.”

—Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game: Special 20th Anniversary Edition: “Introduction”

George R. R. Martin, Dreamsongs Volume Two: Chapter Nine: “The Heart in Conflict with Itself”:

“I got my share of rejections as well. No writer likes being rejected, though it comes with the territory, and you need to get used to it. A few of mine were especially galling, though. Those were the ones where the editors had no problems with my plot or characterization or style, and even went out of their way to say that they’d enjoyed reading the stories. They rejected them nonetheless… because they weren’t real science fiction. 

“Night Shift” was about the night shift at a busy spaceport, as the spaceships come and go. They could have just as easily been trucks, an editor said. Another said that “With Morning Comes Mistfall” put him in mind of attempts to find the Loch Ness monster. Even “Second Kind of Loneliness” took its lumps. This could be a story about a lighthouse keeper, one rejection said. The focus is not on the star ring or the nullspace vortex so much as on the “rather pathetic” protagonist, with his hopes and dreams and fears.

…

Now that I was a published professional writer, and an Analog writer at that, it behooved me to find out what real science fiction was. So I reread Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder, James Blish’s The Issue at Hand, and L. Sprague de Camp’s Science Fiction Handbook, and looked into Locus and Science Fiction Review. I paid careful attention to Alexei Panshin’s “SF in Dimension” columns in Amazing. I followed the debate between the Old Wave and New Wave with interest, since that New Wave crap wasn’t real SF science fiction either, according to the Old Wave guys. And of course I paid careful attention to the various definitions of science fiction. 

There were a lot of those about, many of them mutually contradictory. L. Sprague de Camp defined SF in The Science Fiction Handbook, and Kingsley Amis defined it differently in New Maps of Hell. Ted Sturgeon had a definition, Fred Pohl had a definition, Reginald Bretnor had a definition, David G. Hartwell had a definition, Alexei Panshin had a definition, and over in the corner stood Damon Knight pointing at something. 

The Old Wave and the New Wave each championed its own view of what the genre ought to be. H. L. Gold must surely have had a definition, since he knew Bat Durston did not fit it. I absorbed all of this as best I could, and finally discerned the shape of a real science fiction story, as opposed to the stuff that I was writing. 

The ultimate template for the True Science Fiction Story was Isaac Asimov’s first sale, “Marooned Off Vesta,” published in Amazing in 1939. Asimov would later write more famous stories, and better stories—well, to tell the truth, pretty much everything he wrote after that was a better story —but “Marooned Off Vesta” was sure-enough pure-quill science fiction, in which everything hinges on the fact that water boils at a lower temperature in a vacuum. 

This was a sobering realization for me. For although I had pages of scribbled notes for the stories I wanted to tell next year and the year after and the year after that, not one of them had anything to do with the boiling point of water. If truth be told, it seemed to me that Asimov had said just about all there was to say on that particular subject, leaving nothing for the rest of us except, well…Bat Durston. The thing is, though, the more I considered old Bat, and Asimov, and Heinlein and Campbell, and Wells and Verne, and Vance and Anderson and Le Guin and Brackett and Williamson and de Camp and Kuttner and Moore and Cordwainer Smith and Doc Smith and George O. Smith and Northwest Smith, and all the rest of the Smiths and the Joneses too, the more I realized something that H. L. Gold did not.

…

Motor cars or horses, tricorns or togas, ray-guns or six-shooters, none of it matters, so long as the people remain. Sometimes we get so busy drawing boundaries and making labels that we lose track of that truth. 

Casablanca put it most succinctly. “It’s still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die.” 

William Faulkner said much the same thing while accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, when he spoke of “the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” The “human heart in conflict with itself,” Faulkner said, “alone can make good writing, because only that is worth writing about.” We can make up all the definitions of science fiction and fantasy and horror that we want. We can draw our boundaries and make our labels, but in the end it’s still the same old story, the one about the human heart in conflict with itself. 

The rest, my friends, is furniture.

The House of Fantasy is built of stone and wood and furnished in High Medieval. Its people travel by horse and galley, fight with sword and spell and battle-axe, communicate by palantir or raven, and break bread with elves and dragons. 

The House of Science Fiction is built of duralloy and plastic and furnished in Faux Future. Its people travel by starship and aircar, fight with nukes and tailored germs, communicate by ansible and laser, and break protein bars with aliens. 

The House of Horror is built of bone and cobwebs and furnished in Ghastly Gothic. Its people travel only by night, fight with anything that will kill messily, communicate in screams and shrieks and gibbers, and sip blood with vampires and werewolves. 

…

Stories of the human heart in conflict with itself transcend time, place, and setting. So long as love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice are present, it matters not a whit whether that tall, lean stranger has a proton pistol or a six-shooter in his hand. Or a sword.

…

Fantasy? Science fiction? Horror? 

I say it’s a story, and I say the hell with it.”

—George R. R. Martin, Dreamsongs Volume Two: Nine: “The Heart in Conflict with Itself”

I: Chrome, Biome, and to Chart a Genome:

Technological innovation produces miracles. 

Airplanes defy gravity. Refrigerators insulate food from decay. Submarines descend into perilous depths at the bottom of the ocean, a black abyss defined by crushing pressures. Tractors multiply manpower. Antibiotics purge invisible, microscopic bacteria. Pesticides prevent swarms of insects from ruining harvests. Chemical fertilizers amplify the productivity of crops. 

Famously, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke observed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Civilization transforms in a thousand ways, large and small. Mechanized solutions, and revolutions, introduce radical new lifestyles.

Old industries are obliterated. Traditional careers become obsolete. Experimental possibilities emerge. Culture and community are redefined, reshaped, reimagined in response to the advent of centralized or decentralized adaptations. 

Change or die. 

Learn to grow… or refuse, and be destroyed. 

Competition remains relentless.

The paradox of mass adoption of any new technology is that when life transforms, miracles become commonplace. Amazing machines lose their magic, and are eventually viewed as bland, anodyne, and mundane social facts. 

Science fiction is a brilliant genre, a playground of imagination, where grandiose ideas and extraordinary machines flirt with contemporary social allegories — where exhilarating adventures can express truths of poetic, psychological significance. 

This genre is especially well-adapted to providing meaningful entertainment in a secular, nihilistic, atomized culture where modern communities have abandoned traditional religions and classical loyalties, yet still crave spiritual purpose and supernatural authority. The promises of science masquerade as an impartial, superior, and benevolent source of ethics. Medicine retains respect, when almost every other form of institutional authority has been plundered and desecrated. 

For this reason, science fiction offers storytellers incredible opportunities. 

A malleable canvas to paint. 

Anything is possible. 

Small, intimate soap operas can explore the tensions of a family, a marriage, or friendship. Vast, epic histories can chronicle the passage of millions… billions… trillions of years, incalculable epochs unraveling in the cold vacuum of an expanding cosmos, witnessing the birth and death and rebirth of celebrities; prophets; tribes; dynasties; empires; stars; universes. 

Furious, relentless technothrillers can race along at a dizzying pace, characterized by immense set-pieces, high-octane action, and nonstop escalations. Or stories can be slow, quiet, and intimate. Patient and gentle narratives are able to meander deliberately through abstract, cerebral mathematics and vulnerable, sentimental elegies lamenting the sorrow and grief of a wounded household.

Distinct flavors can be curated, tasted, savored, digested. 

A broad spectrum of themes and emotions fit into this aesthetic scaffolding. The genre is a convenient vehicle to carry along more important choices in terms of structure, character, and theme. 

Dreamy horizons beckon. 

Surreal landscapes of clockwork machinery, radiant starships, and terraformed moons. 

Anything is possible, and plausible, grounded by some pretense of scientific detail. 

To write science fiction, authors must possess insight, must cultivate an understanding into mankind’s historical and contemporary relationship with technology. Storytellers must perceive the subtle, indirect consequences of technological convenience, utility, volatility, and far-reaching transformations which reshape the landscape of the physical, political, and personal world. Authors must understand how collective society and the isolated, alienated individual suffer the excesses and externalities of a mechanized, industrialized world, while enjoying the overlapping perks of sanitation, transportation, air-conditioning, anesthesia, computers, on-demand entertainment, and a thousand other sleek, portable miracles.

That’s the challenge.

That’s the burden. 

How to speak with authority, without being an authority.

How an amateur can pretend to be an expert, without alienating audience members who know much more about the topic, without stumbling into ridiculous logical contradictions and lacunae. 

There’s an old joke about this dilemma, how difficult it is for a dumb writer to invent a viewpoint character who is a genius. 

One answer is simply that writing brilliant characters requires many long, tedious hours of consideration and contemplation, in order to figure out insights the viewpoint character can instantly realize. 

These cognitive challenges are deeply embedded in the puzzles and labyrinths of science fiction. 

Nobody is smart enough to understand the modern world. Not really. 

Science has branched out into a thousand forking pathways. 

Specialized knowledge exists in compartmentalized silos, guarded bunkers and underground fortresses of secretive disciplines, many of which require entire lifetimes of research, exploration, and iteration by gifted scholars.

Rare indeed is the handyman who can repair all the machines in his own household without assistance: washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, showers, toilets, vacuum cleaners, ventilation, and electrically-wired lights. Basic maintenance involves a dizzying list of universal appliances. These skills are separate from a mechanic’s ability to repair a car engine. 

There are men who can achieve all these tasks, which are simple, essential functions embedded in nearly every American household. 

But consider the state of modern science: 

Chemistry, astronomy, physics, biology, genetics, computer programming, manufacturing, geology, petroleum engineering, virology, botany, aeronautics, mathematics, statistics, ecology… all of these fields of study are pivotal to the foundations of the world we live in. Any one of these fields can swallow up decades of diligent study. 

The human brain is not designed to master a thousand separate fields of knowledge. 

Nobody is smart enough to understand the present, where thousands of technologies interact together in direct, planned strategies and indirect, unintended accidents, then to extrapolate what future innovation will occur — decades or centuries in advance.

Anyone who could theoretically predict the future on this level would be better off in Wall Street or Silicon Valley, either trading stocks or investing in venture capital startups. 

So the question becomes: how can authors write Hard Science Fiction? How can storytellers compose realistic, detailed storylines built upon granular technical data?

One approach is to be completely accurate about every description or interaction, to achieve technical fidelity from the largest asteroid to the smallest molecule. Then to integrate that painstaking dedication to scientific realism with an engrossing dramatic question, fixating upon a compelling ensemble of pioneers and explorers. 

Some writers even manage to achieve this daunting ambition.

Perhaps the most beautiful, idealized example of bestselling hard science fiction is Andy Weir’s “The Martian”. We might summarize this amazing serial novel as “Robinson Crusoe in space”. After an exploratory NASA mission lands on Mars and encounters a near-immediate catastrophe, the hero Mark Watney is abandoned and stranded on a distant planet. He survives with extraordinary toughness, ingenuity, and resourcefulness — scavenging tools from the wreckage of NASA’s equipment, and extending his food supply through comedic application of botany. 

It’s a fabulous novel. 

The story is inspirational, and dares to dream of the courage; decency; teamwork; brilliance of a unified mankind. Rescuing one man costs tens of billions of dollars, the expense and collective manpower is enormous, but the crusade to BRING HIM HOME symbolizes civilization’s potential to envision colonization beyond the stars, the tenacity to do what seems impossible, to protect and care for friends through the assembled cooperation of a functional, durable community. 

Andy Weir wrote a special, beloved novel.

But in some respects, his entire life prepared him to create “The Martian”, and it’s doubtful another writer could repeat such a magnum opus. 

His mother was an electrical engineer, his father was a physicist, Andy Weir began reading science fiction as a young boy, he started work as a computer programmer at 15, and as a professional computer programmer he worked for companies such as AOL, MobileIron, and the video game company Blizzard Entertainment.

Andy Weir spent his whole life thinking about nerdy science obsessions.

It’s impractical for an ordinary storyteller to invest decades of research into abstract technical minutiae, in order to create a single manuscript. An exhausting, all-consuming masterpiece should mostly be admired, rather than imitated. 

To survey a list of notable writers of hard science fiction, a clear trend swiftly emerges: Experienced authors draw from familiar pools of knowledge, esoteric data which occupied earlier phases of their lives, building on the insights of previous careers. Technical storytellers include: 

• Peter Watts — marine biologist 

• Alastair Reynolds — PhD in astrophysics 

• Issac Asimov — professor of biochemistry. He majored in zoology and chemistry, and worked as a civilian chemist for the American Navy during WW2. 

• Shane Carruth — computer programmer, majored in mathematics, developed flight-simulation software

• James Cameron — truck driver, read science fiction since he was a young boy. His father was an electrical engineer. Between truck driving, he would study film technology in the library of the University of Southern California, where he dissected the internal operations of “optical printing, or front screen projection, or dye transfers, anything that related to film technology”.

• Michael Crichton — graduated with an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, but never practiced medicine, preferring to write novels and screenplays instead. He received a bachelor’s degree in biological anthropology. 

• Ted Chiang — Microsoft computer programmer, deeply familiar with data science and mathematics. His mother was a librarian, and his father was a professor in mechanical engineering.

• ZeroHPLovecraft — lead designer of Farmville (2009), Candy Crush (2012), Clash of Clans (2012), and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (2014), among other highly addictive, and highly prestigious, mobile video games. 

Research cannot be allowed to crowd out actual writing.

Learning is addictive, and it never ends. 

Storytellers must give themselves permission to create, fail, and fail again, until the sting of rejection and disappointment dulls to irrelevance.

Constant momentum is the goal: grinding away in obscurity and isolation, plunging deep into cycles of experimentation, iteration, production, promotion, and publication.

Michael Crichton represents an alternative strategy. 

Each of Crichton’s novels required extensive research into ONE BIG THING. Subject after subject, his knowledge base grew. Insights accumulated. Every time he wrote a novel, he studied a different field of science, and across subsequent decades these insights contributed to his future novels, enriching their adventures with empirical data. 

Jurassic Park (1990) involves dinosaur paleontology, computer security systems, genetic cloning, chaos theory, and corporate bureaucracy. Earlier books such as The Andromeda Strain (1969), Binary (1972), The Terminal Man (1972), Congo (1980), and Sphere (1987) had prepared Michael Crichton to write the billion-dollar intellectual property Jurassic Park by experimenting with and refining precursor ideas, plots, themes, characters, and scientific curiosities. 

Even pursuing one area of science, investigating it, and dramatizing some of the more interesting observations should improve the quality of a science fiction storyline.

When all else fails, look up a few pages of abstruse definitions, compile a list, and then smoothly, succinctly insert the material into the story’s background to provide ambience. Convoluted mumbo jumbo names, terms, and phrases can help to establish an evocative atmosphere that feels ingenious to the audience. 

If you can’t make it good, make it short!

The best approach is to start by understanding what the audience desires from beautiful stories, high-quality entertainment, and specifically from science fiction narratives. 

Science fiction is known for certain recurring concepts: alien invasions… telepathy… clones… nanotechnology… cryogenic sleep… evil robots. 

Popular ideas gain traction by providing useful symbolic functions. 

Beyond the superficial demands of science fiction’s cliches, conventions, and expectations, what audiences are looking for is a thoughtful, intelligent story. 

Readers crave entertainment that is fun, thought-provoking, well-structured, and adheres to internally-consistent logic. 

Science can be blurred and smudged, seen from a distance, as long as the applied mechanics and macroeconomic ecosystems operate in a plausible, interesting, and dramatic fashion.

The goal is verisimilitude, a sense of realism and attention to detail, even when the details themselves may be impossible. 

Stories may aspire to be educational, even theological, but above all other missions, they must remain entertaining. 

Science makes sense from a distance, as long as technology is treated as a tool, and authors focus on a tool’s purpose, rather than its internal machinery. 

Star Wars is not hard science fiction — it’s a children’s fairy tale, presented with elements of Westerns, space opera, mythology, Akira Kurosawa’s samurai historicals, Flash Gordon serials, WW2 aviation films, and epic fantasy, among various other genres. 

But Star Wars provides a good example of the potential downside of exposition.

George Lucas created a beloved spiritual, psychic power known as “The Force”, and “The Force” remained cool as long as the mechanics kept their original sense of mystery. Fans hated the idea of “midichlorians”, that some kind of cellular bacteria gave measurable psychic powers to the Jedi. Midichlorians killed the fun of Star Wars. Most fans pretend they never existed. And that’s fine — Star Wars is fiction, none of this stuff actually exists. 

Children understand the basic functions of machines. 

Phones communicate across huge distances. Cars travel fast on roads. Boats sail the ocean. Planes fly above clouds. 

These factual observations are undeniable validations of complex scientific phenomenons, and they’re simple enough for toddlers to understand. But to delve into a ponderous examination of the internal machinery of a car, boat, or plane engine is a mistake — the complexity is excessive. 

Nobody wants to read an infodump. 

There’s a tendency for authors to cram all their research into a story, which ruins pacing. Emotionally, writers want to validate their time investment researching material, but this sacrifice means nothing to the audience. Revisions and later manuscript drafts should correct against the error of including extraneous details, or unnecessary explanations. 

Remember to prioritize drama. That mindset is useful for writing science fiction, and especially hard science fiction: 

Focus on purpose, avoid complex mechanics, be prepared, remain distant from mysteries, insert technological jargon in sporadic bursts, keep the story fun, retain a consistent logic, and always stress human emotion amid exotic technology. 

Below are various samples of hard science fiction, which hopefully can serve as reference material for the rhythm, cadence, and density of effective mumbo jumbo:

Examples:

1.)

“What made you think she’d be safe here? 

Did you really imagine you were the only one who could reconfigure your vibrational frequency to take a walk in the Dreamtime?”

—Mark Millar, The Authority: Issue Fourteen

2.)

“I have been with the firm for two years working with Eric that whole time... But I hold a doctorate in engineering, specialty in propulsion, from MIT, with a Bachelors from Penn.”

“What's a specialty in propulsion?”                         

“Well... in laymen terms my thesis was a study in the way that friction ratios affect steering outcomes in aeronautical use under reduced gravity loads.”

—J. C. Chandor, Margin Call

3.)

“"For resonant polysilicon microbridge vapor sensor: If there is a large amount of reverse diode leakage, the p-region can passivate prior to reaching the n-region. A proposed solution to this is the four terminal etch system. Maximum allowable diode leakage = 27.11 mA at 60 C, in 20% KOH @ 60C: exposed area — 40% of total area of 4" water (31.41 square cm)."

—Costin Alamariu, [High School Yearbook]

4.)

“Through my blue fingers, pink grains are falling, haphazard, random, a disorganized stream of silicone that seems pregnant with the possibility of every conceivable shape…

… but this is illusion. Things have their shape in time, not space alone. Some marble blocks have statues within them, embedded in their future. 

—Alan Moore, Watchmen: Issue Four

5.)

“I can’t tell the future.”

“There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.”

—Alan Moore, Watchmen: Issue Nine

6.)

Theodore Sturgeon, Yesterday was Monday:

“Harry sat down on a grease drum and wrinkled up his brains with the effort he was making. "You mean that this time proposition ain't something that moves along all the time? Sorta- well, like a road. A road don't go no place- You just go places along it. Is that it?" 

"That's the general idea. In fact, that's a pretty good example. Suppose we say that it's a road; a highway built of paving blocks. Each block is a day; the actors move along it, and go through day after day. And our job here - mine and the little men - is to ... well, pave that road. This is the clean-up gang here. They are fixing up the last little details, so that everything will be ready for the actors." 

Harry sat still, his mind creaking with the effects of this information. He felt as if he had been hit with a lead pipe, and the shock of it was being drawn out infinitely. This was the craziest-sounding thing he had ever run into. For no reason at all he remembered a talk he had had once with a drunken aviation mechanic who had tried to explain to him how the air flowing over an airplane's wings makes the machine go up in the air. He hadn't understood a word of the man's discourse, which was all about eddies and chords and cambers and foils, dihedrals and the Bernoulli effect. That didn't make any difference; the things flew whether he understood how or not; he knew that because he had seen them. This guy Iridel's lecture was the same sort of thing. If there was nothing in all he said, how come all these little guys were working around here? Why wasn't the clock telling time? Where was Tuesday?”

—Theodore Sturgeon, Yesterday was Monday

7.)

William King, Green Troops: 

“Bill-boy, who was sentry, looked at him and winked. Travis got up and rummaged in his pack. Time for his pills.

First he took Bio-lok^(TM) for his arm, a drug to suppress his immune system's natural urge to reject the complex neural linkages that enabled him to control an arm of teflon, kevlar and fibre-optic nerves. Next a neurotransmitter enhancer which enabled the protein based computer at the top of his spine to take orders from his brain and transmit them to his limbs. Finally some vitamin tablets. Just to keep him fit and healthy. The first two were the chains the CIA used to bind him, keep him coming back. Without the drugs he would be a cripple.

His preparations had disturbed the Greens who came awake instantly and quietly around him. It astonished him that they could do that. Go from being completely at rest to combat readiness in a moment. Still it was only part of the design that made them into what the Pentagon believed was the soldier of the future.

He reviewed the facts; grown by accelerated cell division in culture vats, educated by neural induction helmet. They had stomach bacteria modified to enable them to digest cellulose, live off the land. They could eat wood if necessary. They had sub-dermal pigmentation sacs which gave them natural camouflage.

They were stronger, faster and cheaper to mass produce than comparable human soldiers. At least such was the hope. These were the field trials, he was the observer.”

—William King, Green Troops 

8.)

Kim Newman, The Chill Clutch of the Unseen:

“‘So you think we're the last?’ asked the Man. 

"You're the last." 

"Invisible Man the Last?" Shoulders lifted in a shrug. "Perhaps. Though that's been said before, too many times. And I deliberately used the first person plural. We. You're a part of this too. You're as much a coelacanth as I am." 

"Coelacanth?" 

"Living fossil. Prehistoric fish. Thought extinct for millennia, until one showed up in some African peasant fisherman's net back in the '20s." 

"I've heard of that story." 

"Good. It's the duty of a lively mind to take an interest in sports and freaks, don't you think. You might aver that it was your specialist subject." Stockton nodded. 

"How many of us have you killed, Chief Stockton?" 

The question was a surprise, a slap.”

—Kim Newman, The Chill Clutch of the Unseen 

9.)

Rich Larson, LOL, said the Scorpion:

““Does it come in any other colors?” Maeve asks, eyeing herself in the smart glass.

“No,” the salesperson admits. “You look quite elegant in eggshell, though.”

She’s undecided. The holiday suit is a cooperative swarm of microorganisms, a pale paramecium shroud that coats her entire body, wetly glistening.

“Full-spectrum UV protection, internal temperature regulation, virus filtration, water desalination, emergency starch synthesis.” The salesperson has a comforting sort of murmur. “Ideal for any sort of live tourism. Where will you be off to?”

“Faro,” Maeve says, and saying the name conjures immaculate white buildings and deep blue waters onto the smart glass behind her, displaying the paradise she’s dreamed of for entire weeks now.”

—Rich Larson, LOL, said the Scorpion 

10.)

“I stand around, waiting, in case they’re on the verge of finishing up, but the baby is busy squashing cold fries in its fingers and the adults are busy thinking this is the cutest and best thing any living being has ever done. I bet that baby has never developed a microbe with a novel sulfur dioxide metabolic pathway.”

—Aimee Ogden, Nothing of Value 

11.)

“He emphasised ‘individual’. Why? He did not know. It had almost been instinctive. The Dragon head swayed then switched, shaking off an accumulation of snow. 

‘Running round the inside of your skull is a net of mycorhizal fibre optics connected to etched-atom processors, silicon synaptic interfaces, and an underspace transmitter. Evolution is a wonderful thing,’ it said.”

—Neal Asher, Dragon in the Flower

12.)

Alastair Reynolds, Dilation Sleep:

“I looked away from the porthole, towards the bow of the ship. The vessel, the Wild Pallas, was a ramliner — a nearlight human-rated starship. Most of what I saw, therefore, was very dense neutron shielding. The vessel required protons for its bosonic drive process. 

Ahead, a graser beam swept space and stripped deuterium nuclei into protons and neutrons. Our gauss scoop sifted free the protons and focused them into the heart of the ship. The neutral baryons were channeled around the hull in a lethal radiative rain, diverted clear of the lifesystem and its fragile payload of sleepers. The drone sensed the flux and passed the data to me in terms of a swirling roseate aura, as if we were diving down the gullet of the universe. To the rear, things were eclipsed by the glow of the exhaust. 

Gamma shields burned Cherenkov-blue. Within the ship, the proton harvest was extremely short-lived. Fields targeted the protons into a beam, lancing through a swarming cloud of heavy monopoles. The relativistic protons were decelerated and steered into the magnetic nodes. Inside each monopole was a shell of bosons which coaxed the protons to disintegrate. 

This was the power source of a ramliner. 

I had studied all the tech before signing up for the overmind partnership, the human-cybernetic steering committee that commanded this vessel. 

When I say studied, I mean that I had downloaded certain eidetic documents furnished by the Macro that owned the ship. These eidetics entered my memory at an almost intuitive level, programmed of course to fade once my contract expired. They told me everything I needed to know and little else. We carried nine hundred reefersleep passengers and we crew comprised six humans, each of whom was an expert in one or more areas of starflight theory. 

My own specialties were scoop subsystems — gauss collimators and particle-ablation shields - and shipboard/in-flight medicare. The computer that wore the masque of Katia was also equipped for these zones of expertise, but it was deficient — so the cybertechs said — in human heuristic thought modes. Crewpersons were therefore its Heuristic Resources — peripherals orbiting the hard glittering core of its machine consciousness.”

—Alastair Reynolds, Dilation Sleep

13.)

Peter Watts, The Island:

“I join him at the tank. Diaphanous veils hang within like frozen, color-coded smoke. We're on the edge of a molecular dust cloud. Warm, semiorganic, lots of raw materials: formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, the usual prebiotics. A good spot for a quick build. A red dwarf glowers dimly at the center of the Tank. The chimp has named it DHF428, for reasons I've long since forgotten to care about.”

…

Tac splits down the middle. Cloned dwarves burn before me now, each perhaps twice the size of my fist. On the left, an Eri'seye view: DHF428 stutters as it did before, as it presumably has these past ten months. On the right, a compound-eye composite: an interferometry grid built by a myriad precisely-spaced vons, their rudimentary eyes layered and parallaxed into something approaching high resolution. Contrast on both sides has been conveniently cranked up to highlight the dwarf's endless winking for merely human eyes. Except it's only winking from the left side of the display. On the right, 428 glowers steady as a standard candle. "Chimp: any chance the grid just isn't sensitive enough to see the fluctuations?" 

"No."

…

“I put my voice back into ChimpComm mode. "What's the current field-of-view for Eri's forward scope?" 

"Eighteen mikes," the chimp reports. 

“At 428's range, the cone is three point three four lightsecs across." 

"Increase to a hundred lightsecs." The Eri's-eye partition swells, obliterating the dissenting viewpoint. For a moment the sun fills the tank again, paints the whole bridge crimson. Then it dwindles as if devoured from within. I notice some fuzz in the display. "Can you clear that noise?" 

"It's not noise," the chimp reports. "It's dust and molecular gas." 

I blink. "What's the density?" 

"Estimated hundred thousand atoms per cubic meter." 

Two orders of magnitude too high, even for a nebula. "Why so heavy?" Surely we'd have detected any gravity well strong enough to keep that much material in the neighborhood. 

"I don't know," the chimp says. 

I get the queasy feeling that I might. 

"Set field-of-view to five hundred lightsecs. Peak false-color at near-infrared." Space grows ominously murky in the tank. The tiny sun at its center, thumbnail-sized now, glows with increased brilliance: an incandescent pearl in muddy water. 

"A thousand lightsecs," I command. 

"There," Dix whispers: real space reclaims the edges of the tank, dark, clear, pristine. 428 nestles at the heart of a dim spherical shroud. You find those sometimes, discarded cast-offs from companion stars whose convulsions spew gas and rads across light years. But 428 is no nova remnant. It's a red dwarf, placid, middle-aged. Unremarkable. Except for the fact that it sits dead center of a tenuous gas bubble 1.4 AUs across. And for the fact that this bubble does not attenuate or diffuse or fade gradually into that good night. No, unless there is something seriously wrong with the display, this small, spherical nebula extends about 350 lightsecs from its primary and then just stops, its boundary far more knife-edged than nature has any right to be. For the first time in millennia, I miss my cortical pipe. It takes forever to saccade search terms onto the keyboard in my head, to get the answers I already know.

Numbers come back.”

—Peter Watts, The Island 

14.)

“Lester does the inhalation of one about to explain things to an idiot. “The Three Mad Monks didn’t lose their minds in the desert,” he says. “They found God. By which I mean the effectively immortal Precambrian parasite that had been dormant for millions of years and makes tardigrades look like pushovers.”

Amir recalls the last article on Lester’s wall.

“Recent geological activity had brought a spar of ancient rock towards the surface. The monks met it halfway, in the chasm where they were sheltering from the sandstorm.” Lester shifts slightly; the corpse beneath him makes a slimy, rasping sound. “The parasite revived and took three hosts. But it couldn’t really do much with them. The structures of the human brain are a long way from the Precambrian organisms it used to puppeteer. It’s smart, but not that smart. It managed to buy itself time to figure things out, though. Got the monks to pickle themselves.”

—Rich Larson, Headhunting 

15.)

Bruce Sterling, Swarm:

“Captain-Doctor Simon Afriel was a past master of these pursuits. That was why the Reshaped faction had paid the millions of kilowatts necessary to buy his passage. 

Afriel held doctorates in biochemistry and alien linguistics, and a master’s degree in magnetic weapons engineering. He was thirty-eight years old and had been Reshaped according to the state of the art at the time of his conception. His hormonal balance had been altered slightly to compensate for long periods spent in free-fall. He had no appendix. The structure of his heart had been redesigned for greater efficiency, and his large intestine had been altered to produce the vitamins normally made by intestinal bacteria. 

Genetic engineering and rigorous training in childhood had given him an intelligence quotient of one hundred and eighty. He was not the brightest of the agents of the Ring Council, but he was one of the most mentally stable and the best trusted.”

—Bruce Sterling, Swarm 

16.)

Bruce Sterling, Swarm:

“We live in space,” Afriel said flatly. “Space is an unnatural environment, and it takes an unnatural effort from unnatural people to prosper there. Our minds are our tools, and philosophy has to come second. Naturally I’ve felt those urges you mention. They’re just another threat to guard against. I believe in an ordered society. Technology has unleashed tremendous forces that are ripping society apart. Some one faction must arise from the struggle and integrate things. We Shapers have the wisdom and restraint to do it humanely. That’s why I do the work I do.” He hesitated. “I don’t expect to see our day of triumph. I expect to die in some brush-fire conflict, or through assassination. It’s enough that I can foresee that day.” 

—Bruce Sterling, Swarm

17.)

Donald Maass, The Breakout Novelist:

“The following is an excerpt from one of several long sequences in which Lisa discusses the plague with Dr. Henrick Barnhardt, a Dutch toxicologist whom Lisa, for tension purposes, does not much like. Joining in is Devesh Patanjali, “acquisitions officer” of the mysterious Guild, Rollins’s baddie organization that has taken over the ship. Together, these three ponder how the virus is turning ordinary bacteria in human bodies into biological death camps: 

Devesh continued. “These two plasmids — pX01 and pX02 — are what turn ordinary Bacillus species into superkillers. Remove these two rings, and anthrax transforms back into an innocent organism, living happily in any garden. Put those same plasmids into any friendly Bacillus and the bug turns into a killer.” 

Devesh finally swung around to face them. “So I ask you, where did these extraneous and deadly bits come from?” 

Lisa answered, intrigued despite herself. “Can’t plasmids be shared directly from one bacterium to another?” 

“Certainly. But what I meant was, how did these bacteria first acquire these foreign bits of genetic material? What’s their original source?” 

Henri stirred, moving closer to study the screens. “The evolutionary origin of plasmids remains a mystery, but the current theory is that they were acquired from viruses. Or more specifically bacteriophages, a category of viruses that only infect bacteria.” 

“Exactly!” Devish turned back to the screen. “It’s been theorized that, sometime in the ancient past, a viral bacteriophage injected a peaceful Bacillus with this deadly pair of plasmids, creating a new monster in the biosphere and transforming a sweet little garden bug into a killer.” Devesh tapped more rapidly, clearing the screen. “And anthrax isn’t the only bacterium thus infected. The bacterium that causes the black plague, Yesinia Pestis… its virulence is also enhanced by a plasmid.” 

Lisa felt a prickling chill as realization dawned… 

“Are you suggesting it’s happening here again?” she mumbled. “This same corruption of bacteria.” 

Devesh nodded. “Indeed. Something has risen again out of the depths of the sea, something with the ability to turn all bacteria deadly.” 

Plasmids? Bacteriophages? If your eyes glazed over during all that bio-speak, that’s okay. You’ve got the basic message, which is that this outbreak is bad news for us since, as we quickly learn, 90 percent of the cells in our bodies are composed of bacteria. We’re food for the Judas Strain. If you don’t believe that, hey, you can believe Dr. Lisa Cummings, Dr. Henrick Barnhardt, and Devesh Patanjali. They know what they’re talking about — or seem to, anyway. Rollins has boned up on bacteriophages for us and wields his research like a hammer. The Judas Strain is wildly speculative, but by the time Rollins is through pummeling us, we are ready to cry Killer Virus! Anyway, why argue with him?”

—Donald Maass, The Breakout Novelist 

18.)

Larry Niven, The Warriors:

“The Captain flicked his tail back and forth, gently, thoughtfully, like a pink lash. 

“You worry me,” he commented. “If they know we’re here, why haven’t they tried to get away? Are they so sure they can beat us?” He whirled to face the A-T Officer. “Should we be running?” 

“No, sir! I don’t know why they’re still here, but they can’t have anything to be confident about. That’s one of the most primitive spacecraft I’ve ever seen.” He moved his claw about on the screen, pointing as he talked. “The outer shell is an iron alloy. The rotating ring is a method of imitating gravity by using centripetal force. So they don’t have the gravity planer. In fact they’re probably using a reaction drive.” 

The Captain’s catlike ears went up. “But we’re lightyears from the nearest star!” “They must have a better reaction drive than we ever developed. We had the gravity planer before we needed one that good.” 

There was a buzzing sound from the big control board. 

“Enter,” said the Captain.”

—Larry Niven, The Warriors 

19.)

Stephen King, Salem’s Lot:

“‘You don’t really think you saw Hubert Marsten, do you, Ben?’ Far up ahead she could see the yellow blinking light that signaled the center of town and was glad for it. 

After a long pause, he said, ‘I don’t know.’ 

He said it with difficulty and reluctance, as if he would have rather said no and closed the subject thereby. ‘Probably I was so keyed up that I hallucinated the whole thing. On the other hand, there may be some truth in that idea that houses absorb the emotions that are spent in them, that they hold a kind of… dry charge. Perhaps the right personality, that of An imaginative boy, for instance, could act as a catalyst on that dry charge, and cause it to produce an active manifestation of… of something. I’m not talking about ghosts, precisely. I’m talking about a kind of psychic television in three dimensions. Perhaps even something alive. A monster, if you like.’ 

She took one of his cigarettes and lit it. 

‘Anyway, I slept with the light on in my bedroom for weeks after, and I’ve dreamed about opening that door off and on for the rest of my life. Whenever I’m in stress, the dream comes.’ ‘That’s terrible.’ 

‘No, it’s not,’ he said. ‘Not very, anyway. We all have our bad dreams.’ 

He gestured with a thumb at the silent, sleeping houses they were passing on Jointner Avenue. ‘Sometimes I wonder that the very boards of those houses don’t cry out with the awful things that happen in dreams.’ He paused. ‘Come on down to Eva’s and sit on the porch for a while, if you like. I can’t invite you in-rules of the house-but I’ve got a couple of Cokes in the icebox and some Bacardi in my room, if you’d like a nightcap.’ 

‘I’d like one very much.’”

—Stephen King, Salem’s Lot

20.)

Alastair Reynolds, Troika: 

“This much I understood: The Matryoshka was a complex machine. It was layered because it had no choice but to be. Each layer was a form of armor or camouflage or passkey, evolved organically to enable it to slip through the threshing clockwork of a cosmic time machine. That time machine was older than Earth. It had been constructed by alien minds and then added to and modified by successive intelligences. 

In the future, humanity found it. 

At its ticking, whirling core was a necklace of neutron stars. It had been known since our own era that a sufficiently long, sufficiently dense, sufficiently fast-rotating cylinder had the property of twisting spacetime around itself until a path into the past became possible. Such a path — a mathematical trajectory in space, like an orbit-could take a signal or object to any previous point in time, provided it was no earlier than the moment of the time machine’s construction. 

Constructing such a machine was not child’s play. 

A single neutron star could be made to have the requisite density and spin, but it lacked the necessary axial elongation. To overcome this, the machine’s builders had approximated a cylinder by stringing 441 neutron stars together until they were almost touching, like beads on a wire. An open-ended string would have collapsed under its own appalling self-gravity, so the ends had been bent around and joined, with the entire ensemble revolving fast enough to stabilize the neutron stars against falling inward. 

It still wasn’t a cylinder, but locally — as far as a photon or vehicle near the necklace was concerned-it might as well have been. 

The machine had catapulted the Matryoshka into the prehuman past of our galaxy. The insertion into time-reversed flight, the passage through the various filters and barriers installed to prevent illicit use of the ancient machinery, the exit back into normal timeflow, had caused eleven additional layers of shell to be sacrificed. What we saw of the Matryoshka was just the scarred kernel of what had once been a much larger entity. 

But it had survived. 

It had come through, albeit overshooting its target era by many millions of years. Yet that had been allowed for; it was easier to leap back into the deep past and crawl forward in time than to achieve a bullseye into a relatively recent era. The emergence event was indeed the opening of a local wormhole throat, but only so that the Matryoshka (which incorporated wormhole-manipulating machinery in Shells 1 and 2) could complete the last leg of its journey. 

How far downstream had it come? 

A hundred years? A thousand years? Five thousand?

I couldn’t tell. 

The knowledge told me everything, but not all of that wisdom was framed in terms I could readily decode. 

But I could sense a thread, a sense of connectedness between the era of the Matryoshka and our own. They knew a lot about us. Enough to know that we had made a terrible mistake.”

—Alastair Reynolds, Troika 

21.)

“Wardani worked herself grey.

She attacked the gate’s impassive folded density with a focus that bordered on fury. She sat for hours at a time, sketching glyphs and calculating their likely relation to each other. She speed-loaded technoglyph sequencing into the dull grey instant-access datachips, working the deck like a jazz pianist on tetrameth. She fired it through the assembly of synthesiser equipment around the gate and watched with arms wrapped tightly around herself as the control boards sparked holographic protest at the alien protocols she imposed. She scanned the glyph panelling on the gate through forty-seven separate monitors for the scraps of response that might help her with the next sequence. She faced the lack of coherent animation the glyphs threw back at her with jaw set, and then gathered her notes and tramped back down the beach to the bubblefab to start all over again.”

—Richard K. Morgan, Broken Angels

22.)

Richard K. Morgan, Broken Angels:

““What is that?” asked Cruickshank at my back.

“It’s a countdown,” said Schneider with dismissive familiarity. He’d seen this before. “Right, Tanya.”

Wardani smiled weakly and leaned on the console. “We’re pretty sure the Martians saw further into blue than we do. A lot of their visual notation seems to refer to bands in the ultraviolet range.” She cleared her throat. “They’d be able to see this unaided. And what it’s saying, more or less, is: stand clear.”

I watched, fascinated. Each blob seemed to ignite at the peak of the spire and then separate and drip rapidly along the leading edges to the base. At intervals along the drip down, the lights fired bursts off themselves into the folding that filled the splits between the edges. It was hard to tell, but if you tracked the trajectory of these offbursts, they seemed to be travelling a long way into the cramped geometry of each crack, a longer distance than they had any right to in three-dimensional space.

“Some of it becomes visual later,” said Wardani. “The frequency scales down as we get nearer to the event. Not sure why.”

Sutjiadi turned aside. In the splashes of rendered light through the filigree screen, he looked unhappy.

“How long?” he asked.

Wardani lifted an arm and pointed along the console to the scrambling digits of a countdown display. “About six hours, standard. A little less now.”

—Richard K. Morgan, Broken Angels

23.)

Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama:

“It had taken more than a hundred and twenty years to collect the first thousand asteroids, since the discovery of Ceres, largest of these tiny worlds, on the very first day of the nineteenth century. Hundreds had been found and lost and found again; they existed in such swarms that one exasperated astronomer had christened them 'vermin of the skies'. He would have been appalled to know that SPACEGUARD was now keeping track of half a million. Only the five giants — Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Eunomia and Vesta — were more than two hundred kilometres in diameter; the vast majority were merely oversized boulders that would fit into a small park. Almost all moved in orbits that lay beyond Mars; only the few that came far enough sunwards to be a possible danger to Earth were the concern of SPACEGUARD. And not one in a thousand of these, during the entire future history of the solar system, would pass within a million kilometres of Earth.

The object first catalogued as 31/439, according to the year and the order of its discovery, was detected while still outside the orbit of Jupiter. There was nothing unusual about its location; many asteroids went beyond Saturn before turning once more towards their distant master, the sun. And Thule II, most far-ranging of all, travelled so close to Uranus that it might well have been a lost moon of that planet. But a first radar contact at such a distance was unprecedented; clearly, 31/439 must be of exceptional size. From the strength of the echo, the computers deduced a diameter of at least forty kilometres; such a giant had not been discovered for a hundred years. That it had been overlooked for so long seemed incredible.

Then the orbit was calculated, and the mystery was resolved — to be replaced by a greater one. 31/439 was not travelling on a normal asteroidal path, along an ellipse which it retraced with clockwork precision every few years. It was a lonely wanderer between the stars, making its first and last visit to the solar system — for it was moving so swiftly that the gravitational field of the sun could never capture it. It would flash inwards past the orbits of Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury, gaining speed as it did so, until it rounded the sun and headed out once again into the unknown.”

—Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama

24.)

Stephen King, The Dead Zone:

““Ladies and gentlemen of the press. This man spent four-and-a-half years in a coma. We who study the human brain have no idea why he did, or why he came out of it, and this is for the simple reason that we do not understand what a coma really is, any more than we understand sleep or the simple act of waking. Ladies and gentlemen, we do not understand the brain of a frog or the brain of an ant. You may quote me on these things . . . you see I am fearless, nuh?” 

More laughter. They liked Weizak. But Dussault did not laugh. 

“You may also quote me as saying I believe that this man is now in possession of a very new human ability, or a very old one. Why? If I and my colleagues do not understand the brain of an ant, can I tell you why? I cannot. I can suggest some interesting things to you, however, things which may or may not have bearing. A part of John Smith’s brain has been damaged beyond repair —a very small part, but all parts of the brain may be vital. He calls this his ‘dead zone,’ and there, apparently, a number of trace memories were stored. All of these wiped-out memories seem to be part of a ‘set’—that of street, road, and highway designations. A subset of a larger overall set, that of where is it. This is a small but total aphasia which seems to include both language and visualization skills. 

“Balancing this off, another tiny part of John Smith’s brain appears to have awakened. A section of the cerebrum within the parietal lobe. This is one of the deeply grooved sections of the ‘forward’ or ‘thinking’ brain. The electrical responses from this section of Smith’s brain are way out of line from what they should be, nuh? Here is one more thing. The parietal lobe has something to do with the sense of touch—how much or how little we are not completely sure— and it is very near to that area of the brain that sorts and identifies various shapes and textures. And it has been my own observation that John’s ‘flashes’ are always preceded by some sort of touching.” 

Silence. Reporters were scribbling madly. The TV cameras, which had moved in to focus on Weizak, now pulled back to include Johnny in the picture. 

“Is that it, Johnny?” Weizak asked again.”

—Stephen King, The Dead Zone

25.)

Ian Watson, Space Marine:

“He wriggled into the impulse-suit, ducked his head into the helmet. Strapping himself into the vacated chair, he entreated Rogal Dorn to guide him — then emptied his mind of all but Titanic tech thoughts.

My plasma gun, he thought, and his muscles twitched. It works by… by…

…by a discharge of super-heated ionised matter in its fourth state, as in the inferno of a blazing sun. The accumulator vanes within the hood energise the conductors and insulators of the capacitor to power this incandescent discharge. After each venting, this ancient capacitor recharges its energy briefly while the frontal hood ventilates. During that short pause I am vulnerable unless I draw booster power from our Titan’s plasma reactor and opt for maximal fire. But then I may fuse my gun…

Thoughts were welling up like globules of oil through water to form a glutinous slick upon the surface of Yeremi’s consciousness.”

—Ian Watson, Space Marine

26.)

A. J. Quinnell, Man on Fire:

“The mood had been brought on by the presence of two American girls sitting at a corner table. They were late tourists, and one of them was a beautiful redhead. Satta was partial to redheads. The other was a blonde-passable. "Not a remora," Sata had commented, and to Bellu's query had explained, "Usually a beautiful girl has with her an ugly one. Both benefit. The beautiful girl is enhanced by the comparison, and the ugly one picks up the leftovers. A remora is a fish — a scavenger. By means of a sucker, it attaches itself to a shark and feeds off it." He looked at the blonde and smiled. "But she is not a remora; she can feed by herself. What do you think, Guido, is she your type?"

Guido looked across at the table. The blonde was attractive, and in the age-old language of glances, lowered eyelashes, and feigned indifference, had already indicated that Guido was to be favored. Obviously the two girls had already divided the spoils. But Guido was not in the mood. For days a tension had been building within him. He couldn't tear his mind from Creasy.”

—A. J. Quinnell, Man on Fire

27.)

“Social entities use biological capital to make technology the way biological entities use chemical capital to make intelligence. At every level of the process of emergence, efficient auto-catalytic loops generate energy surpluses which bubble up into higher layers of emergence. In a sense, capital IS energy surplus, specifically the surplus that layer N uses to realize layer N+1 .

When a new layer emerges, we call that a singularity.”

—ZeroHPLovecraft