Quotes from Vernor Vinge

This was the pretech experience, that even if you had no enemies the world itself could kill you. And

Now on Tines World, the Zone physics was still improving. What was it like thirty lightyears higher? Bili

Funny how Underhill could get along with almost anyone, tuning down his manias to whatever the traffic would bear.

When problems go beyond hope of solution, insanity comes creeping.

minds, who can show the rest of us what is important about the aliens' differences. So Trixia's

Viki skipped briskly through the morning chill, easily keeping up with the slower, longer strides of her big brother.

Spider names look silly. But this ''Accord'' group is a young culture. Their names are still mostly meaningful in their daily language.

There were dreams. He'd lost a captaincy once again, been busted down to tending potted plants in the ship's greenhouse. Sigh. Pham's job was to water them and make them bloom. But then he noticed the pots had wheels and moved behind his back, waiting, softly rattling. What had been beautiful was now sinister. Pham had been willing to water and weed the creatures; he had always admired them. Now he was the only one who knew they were the enemy of life.

languages. Notice how they almost make sense, some of them.' 'Yes, and that's

Pedure, there is a deepness in the sky, and it extends forever.

Its agents -- not even human equivalent on this primitive hardware -- raced through the ship's automation

Fong's obscenity-spattered fit about keyboards. So what to look

you've worked out the numbers. To do that we'd essentially have to re-create the sun. Do you have any idea of the energy involved? I remember what it took to support our diggers after Dark during the War. We used more fuel in

He watched the results, using them to design new experiments. He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.

Some people make their own problems. And they never stop hurting themselves and messing up the people around them. When that's the case, then you shouldn't keep hurting yourself for them.

There was lots of noise and action, but if you listened carefully, you could tell that the kids in the bushes were actually playing in other universes, all choreographed so neither players nor equipment would get in each other's way. She had picked the right cover; classical anime was just too highbrow for these dorks.

Johanna was looking at her expectantly, and suddenly Ravna realized that the girl thought librarians must be experts at everything.

This was a commercial situation, not some exercise in an Applied Theology course.

We'll dedicate part of R00 to this mission. If their antenna swarm works properly, the Riders should have a thirty Kb/s link to Relay. You'll be their prime contact here, and you'll have access to our best strategists.

The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.

For where there is heaven, there can also be hell.

The worst tyrannies were the ones where a government required its own logic on every embedded node.

In 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, "Is it a fact—or have I dreamed it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!" Now, more than a century later, we can see the signs of his vision.

The freedom of expression and entrepreneurship that have characterized the Internet to date would be a thing of the past, and the Internet, which has until now resisted the forces of corporate clout, and has maintained open and equal access for individuals as well as for corporate entities, would become a failed dream