Quotes from Annalee Newitz

You may be a hydrocarbon guzzling bot, but he likes you because you're dealing with the same problem. Just figure out a way to share their problems.

Plus, it was made by Zaxy, the company behind Smartifex, Brillicent, and other popular work enhancement drugs.

Humanity's story must be one of constant change because that is one way to transmute hope.

Somehow Jack's call for participation on a couple of local biotech hacker forums had gotten reposted to an artists' mailing list, and a bunch of poets showed up to argue with them about the true meaning of anarchy.

If you have property, you can't be property.

Whistle had a social life that he didn't tell her about, and she didn't ask. It was one of many nonverbal agreements they had that made their working relationship deeply amicable and pleasing.

We do not make sacrifices, but we do make bargains. Pay attention to the difference. One path leads to a simple death, and the other to a complicated life.

He was right: she'd turned a shit situation into a slurry of blood-flecked diarrhea.

Threezed seemed to sense her mood. "Don't feel bad that you never got indentured." He touched her arm for a few seconds. "Nobody wants that. Plus, I'm sure you've been fucked over in lots of other ways." It was one of the nicest things a human outside her family had ever said to her.

Reaching into the pocket of her newly washed coveralls, she pulled out some 420 and sparked it up. Nothing like drugs to take the edge off drug problems.

The scientist's skin crackled with excitement. "That's the question that humans always ask—always, always. They want to scoop out the brains of their dead friends, plop them inside a nice new carapace, and presto! Resurrection!

Water engineers talked about rivers the same way they talked about people—rivers had desires; they had bodies; they had histories. Maybe they were built of sediment borne by water, but they were alive.

These feelings came from programs that ran in a part of his mind that he couldn't access. He was a user of his own consciousness, but he did not have owner privileges. As a result, Paladin felt many things without knowing why.

The more we cull diversity, the more we are vulnerable to extinction,

There are many compelling reasons why social scientists should turn more attention to the situation of whites in the underclass. Prime among these is that researchers and politicians have constructed a grossly distorted image of poverty in this country. While whites constitute a vast majority of the poor population in the United States, blackness composes the most familiar visage in representations of poverty.

When in doubt, don't kill anyone.

The more we deviate from those safe confines [of genre fiction], the more dangerous the story starts to feel, the less safe it is. Sometimes, it veers all the way into the super jaggedy realm of literature, which is really scary and often not escapist and intended to grind your face in the machete of reality.

After turning on several dirt roads, they reached a newish farm in the middle of a solar field. Its main building was an arched wall of thick glass set deeply into a grassy hill that rose like a green bubble out of a sea of dark, boxy solar antennas dribbling hydrocarbons into underground tanks.

A hundred years ago, this City[...]'s energy production, its food and fuel, came from all over the world, often traveling thousands of miles. People used energy just to ship more energy to the places that needed it. When you're high on fossil fuel fumes, I guess almost anything can make sense.

Humanity's story must be one of constant change because that is one way to transmute pain into hope.

Their postures suggested that she was a node, a person who sprouted and maintained social connections.

The truck was its own driver, and that driver was a high-functioning paranoid.

Humanity's story must be one of constant change because that is the way to transmute pain into hope.

In the soft apocalypse at Angkor, we can see directly what happens when political instability meets climate catastrophe. It looks chillingly similar to what cities are enduring in the contemporary world.