“Kant tried to forge a synthesis of empiricism and rationalism which, in rough outline, works well in today’s nature-nurture debate. The mind not a mere associator of sensory impressions (as in the empiricism of his day and the connectionism of ours), nor does it come equipped with actual knowledge about the contents of the world […]
“When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed. At the moment all Will’s choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.” ––The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman, […]
“‘If you’re the bearer of the knife, you have a task that’s greater than you can imagine. A child…How could they let it happen? Well so it must be….There is a war coming, boy. The greatest war there ever was. Something like it happened before, and this time the right side must win. We’ve had […]
“It was an ordinary-looking dagger, with a double-sided blade of dull metal about eight inches long, a short crosspiece of the same metal, and a handle of rosewood. As he looked at it more closely, he saw that the rosewood was inlaid with golden wires, forming a design he didn’t recognize till he turned the […]
“It looked as if someone had cut a patch out of the air, about two yards from the edge of the road, a patch roughly square in shape and less than a yard across. If you were level with the patch so that it was edge-on, it was nearly invisible, and it was completely invisible […]
“‘No one thought it would ever be possible to cross from one universe to another. That would violate fundamental laws, we thought. Well, we were wrong; we learned to see the world up there. If light can cross, so can we. And we had to learn to see it, Lyra, just as you learned to […]
“Lededje stamped across the floor of the dimly lit Smallbay. ‘There must be other SC ships,’ she said furiously. ‘None that will talk to you,’ Jolicci said, hurrying after her. ‘And the only one that would seemed solely to want to shock and demean me.’ Jolicci shrugged. ‘The Abominator class of General Offensive Unit, to […]
“Restoria was the part of Contact charged with taking care of hegemonising swarm outbreaks, when––by accident or design––a set of self-replicating entities ran out of control somewhere and started trying to turn the totality of the galaxy’s matter into nothing but copies of themselves. It was a problem as old as life in the galaxy […]
“‘You don’t have to go back, Lededje,’ Sensia said gently. ‘You could stay here, make a new life in the Culture.’ Lededje used the heels of her hands to dry round her eyes. ‘You know, for almost as long as I can remember that was the one thing I wanted?’ she said. She glanced at […]
“Almost every developing species had a creation myth buried somewhere in its past, even if by the time they’d become space-faring it was no more than a quaint and dusty irrelevance (though, granted, some were downright embarrassing). Talking utter drivel about thunderclouds having sex with the sun, lonely old sadists inventing something to amuse themselves […]