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63de62d
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The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
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scifi
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Douglas Adams |
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1835715
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I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
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fear
motivational
litany-against-fear
scifi
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Frank Herbert |
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c474a23
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What does a mirror look at?
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herbert
dune
frank
scifi
mirror
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Frank Herbert |
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bab8015
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The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizeable proportion of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this. The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem. This is: Change. Read it through again and you'll get it.
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science
scifi
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Douglas Adams |
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550e641
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"I think we have different value systems." --Arthur "Well mine's better." --Ford"
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science
scifi
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Douglas Adams |
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d376dd7
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"Goodnight baby, sleep in peace. After you kill that bitch!" "Goodnight mom!"
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scifi
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Sherrilyn Kenyon |
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73ae489
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He had them as spellbound as a room full of Ewoks listening to C-3PO.
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humour
spellbinding
robots
star-wars
scifi
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Cory Doctorow |
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8d3739d
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Investigate the faeries. Great. That was absolutely guaranteed to get complicated before I got any useful answers. If there was one thing faeries hated doing, it was giving you a straight answer, about anything. Getting plain speech out out of one is like pulling out teeth. Your own teeth. Through your nose.
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humor
scifi
faeries
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Jim Butcher |
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ad2b656
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Nature full strength is more than we can take, Adam One used to say. It's a potent hallucinogen, a soporific, for the untrained Soul. We're no longer at home in it. We need to dilute it. We can't drink it straight. And God is the same. Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.
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the-year-of-the-flood
toby
scifi
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Margaret Atwood |
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e8fec0d
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Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car's floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case's station.
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scifi
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William Gibson |
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9aceb3a
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"Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't know, and that's what God is. It's what you don't know - the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would be impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said: It's knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it's an essential part of us, like water."
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religion
the-year-of-the-flood
scifi
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Margaret Atwood |
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3e5733a
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"I witnessed the birth of time itself. I watched the mortal coil spring forth from perfect darkness. I watched the stars form, watched this world coalesce, watched as life was breathed into it and as your kind rose to rule it." She put both hands on the table and leaned toward me, her blue eyes cold and hard. "Thus far, I have behaved as a guest ought. But do not mistake propriety for weakness, mortal. I beg you not to oblige me to take further action."
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scifi
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Jim Butcher |
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ee57176
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The Tyr had tried. It had really tried. It must have gone over every element of human psychology, tried desperately to understand the nature of human aesthetic sense ... and then failed, miserably, in every regard.
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irony
scifi
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C.S. Friedman |
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34de6a3
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One of the first rules the Emperor had drummed into her [Mara Jade] so long ago was to blend in as best she could with her surroundings
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star-wars
scifi
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Timothy Zahn |
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181c1cc
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"Only in summer-phase is it carnivorous." If there was an award for understatement, I thought, the Tyr would trounce all competition."
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understatements
scifi
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C.S. Friedman |
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287bdea
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"Stop tormenting Derian." "Me?" Edgar gaped at her with a clearly fake look of innocence. "Yes, you." "And what about you? When will you stop tormenting him?" Edgar moved past the young queen to approach the unmoving captain. He circled the man as though he were checking out a statue on display "I'm not tormenting him; why would you say that?" "You have the poor guy believing you actually intend to marry him." Edgar stopped to fix the captain's collar, raising it up high and stiff around his neck. "I intend to marry him." Eena followed her immortal watchdog and folded down the captain's collar, repositioning it as it had been. "Oh please," Edgar groaned. "You've had two opportunities to do so, and on both occasions you turned him down." Edgar elevated the captain's elbow--adjusting him like a mannequin--leaving it in an awkward position. "The council expressed a desire for you to marry, and you nearly hyperventilated over the mere suggestion. And just recently, due to his own paranoia, Derian all but begged you to marry him. Your refusal couldn't have been more swift or more adamant." Eena returned the captain's elbow to his side as she retorted, "I'm only seventeen, Edgar! I have no desire to marry anyone right now. But when I ready, Derian be my husband." Edgar took hold of the captain's outreaching arm and shoved it forcefully down. "He will not." "He will so!" Eena raised the arm back to where it had been and warned her rival, "Don't touch him again, Edgarmetheus!" "Fine, fine," the immortal ceded. Then with a smug grin he added, "If this had been Ian, you would never have let me touch him in the first place."
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romance
fantasy
eena
edgarmetheus
richelle-e-goodrich
the-harrowbethian-saga
richelle
richelle-goodrich
ian
scifi
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Richelle E. Goodrich |
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ae83d97
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The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its time.
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science
humor
space
science-fiction
scifi
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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8268efe
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My identity is without root.
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scifi
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C.S. Friedman |
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781a9e2
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"We share need, not-human. Yours is straightforward." ... "Mine is less so, but you will serve it. Come."
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great-quote
understatements
scifi
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C.S. Friedman |
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20dd246
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Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence.
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humor
space
science-fiction
scifi
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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6af195e
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It's as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses.
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scifi
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Cory Doctorow |
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00d23cf
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And suddenly it knew what it had to do. It de-coupled its engine fields from the energy grid and plunged those vortices of pure energy deep into the fabric of its own mind, tearing its intellect apart in a supernova of sentient agony.
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suicide
spaceship
scifi
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Iain M. Banks |
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4bfa3a1
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Long legs and longer arms, each tipped with a row of black talons. Sinewy. Wiry. And above all, humanoid, its skin in the sunlight as translucent as a baby mouse's--mapped with a network of blue veins and purple arteries and even its heart faintly visible as a pinkish throb just right of center mass. snarling as strings of bloody saliva dangled from the corners of its lipless mouth, creamy eyes hard-focused on its target.
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humanoid
scifi
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Blake Crouch |