“2 SECONDSHe was on her in an instant to brace her against the wall. She kicked and clawed at her unseen attacker, skin and irises ablaze in caustic gold. She fired anew, and the point-blank shot br...”

“Alex screamed and lashed out at the points of light from within, desperate for something tangible to rage against. Caleb wrapped his arms around her from behind and coaxed her out while glaring at ...”

“Crushed sandstone sifted through Calebs fingers, insubstantial as dust. A breeze caught the debris mid-fall and spirited it away before it could join the ashes blanketing the ground. He stopped in ...”

“Well go along with it for now. Valkyrie, keep close watch and be ready to swoop to the rescue.Hopefully swooping will not be required, nor rescue. But I am ready to do both.He squeezed her hand. Al...”

“The universe is not ordered, and it will not become so simply because one wishes it. The universe is chaos made manifest. The military does a fine job of creating an illusion of structure, of depen...”

“The alien reached out her hands to hold Alexs tightly. Please. Some of what I want to express, it may be difficult to locate the right words.Of course.Pure alabaster eyes stared back at her. Child,...”

“When artificial intelligence comes of age, the first thing it's going to do is get rid of the inefficient parts.And guess who that will be!And what will happen to us?Well, to find out the answer to...”

“The intelligence we will create from the reverse-engineering of the brain will have access to its own source code and will be able to rapidly improve itself in an accelerating iterative design cycl...”

“The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.”

“The Tausennigan Ob'enn warlords look like cuddly teddy-bears?""Yes, they do, and they'd cheerfully exterminate your entire race for making that observation!""I guess that explains their rich milita...”

“Casting a curious gaze down on planet Earth, extra-terrestrial beings could well be forgiven for assuming that we humans are programmed in every move we make, by a palm-sized, oblong, slab of glass...”

“It was certainly true that I had no sense of humour in that I found nothing funny. I didnt know, and perhaps would never know, the feeling of compulsion to exhale and convulse in the very specific ...”

“We realized that among us, among all the races, we had a staggering fund of knowledge and of techniques - that working together, by putting together all this knowledge and capability, we could arri...”

“It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.”

“Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.”