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d3c05f5
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I'm a childish fellow," responded Silenus with his satyr's smile. "Ambassador"--he nodded toward the Consul--"could I borrow that gilded pillow you're wearing for a hat?" The"
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Dan Simmons |
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b37ac3f
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The ship did not respond to queries. Without the ship, there could be no fatline relay to the Ousters, the Web, or anywhere else beyond Hyperion. Normal comm bands were down. 'Could the ship have been destroyed?' Sol asked the Consul. 'No. The message is being received, just not responded to. Gladstone still has the ship in quarantine.' Sol squinted out over the barrens to where the mountains shimmered in the heat haze. Several klicks close..
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Dan Simmons |
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a81ea83
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I found no muse on Hyperion during those first years. For many, the expansion of distance because of limited transportation--EMVs were unreliable, skimmers scarce--and the contraction of artificial consciousness due to absence of datasphere, no access to the All Thing, and only one fatline transmitter--all led to a renewal of creative energies, a new realization of what it meant to be human and an artist. Or so I heard. No muse appeared. My..
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Dan Simmons |
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eae1781
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I am merely a poet dying far from home.
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Dan Simmons |
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ea042e8
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A lesser light asked Ummon Are there multiple futures> Ummon answered Does a dog have fleas>]
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Dan Simmons |
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50b9d6f
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Suddenly a scream froze her in her tracks. It
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Dan Simmons |
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afa043b
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Kale pe a," repeated my friend. "It is an ancient Tibetan farewell when a caravan sets out to climb the high peaks. It means--go slowly if you wish to return." And"
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Dan Simmons |
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8bbb2f5
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Sarai gripped his hand. "Do you think you're the only one who has had the dream?" "Dream?" managed Sol. She"
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Dan Simmons |
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53ef2e6
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The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.
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Dan Simmons |
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07ef4a9
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IT IS NECESSARY wrote Silenus's own hand against the unyielding cold of the Shrike's chest. Blood dripped on
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Dan Simmons |
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aacaa4a
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Sono ancora convinto che vi siano luoghi troppo malvagi perche sia consentito loro di esistere. Di tanto in tanto, sogno nubi atomiche a forma di fungo che levano su una citta, e figure umane che danzano sullo sfondo del rogo che un tempo era Calcutta.
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Dan Simmons |
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ba7ef71
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Ogni forma di violenza e potere, signor Luczak.
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Dan Simmons |
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8a72352
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Having sex or a domestic quarrel with the house monitors on is like undressing in front of a dog or cat ... it gives you pause the first time, and then you forget about it.
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Dan Simmons |
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cb48557
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We are created precisely for this type of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. We are destined and designed to bear our pain with us, hugging it tight to our bellies like the young Spartan thief hiding a wolf cub so it can eat away our insides.
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Dan Simmons |
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f5ca3ff
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he spied what appeared to be a crystal scarab rotating far above him, its insides ablaze with cool lights.
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Dan Simmons |
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fad726e
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Look," said Tyrena. "In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure."
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Dan Simmons |
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e074e9b
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no book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.
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Dan Simmons |
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dc74e99
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We are in a comfortable Dark Ages of the inventive mind; institutions change but little, and that by gradual evolution rather than revolution; scientific research creeps crablike in a lateral shuffle, where once it leaped in great intuitive bounds; devices change even less, plateau technologies common to us would be instantly identifiable - and operable! - to our great-grandfathers.
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Dan Simmons |
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fd1f7ea
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You'll have to ask him in the next life," said Sol tiredly. "He's dead."
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Dan Simmons |
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e75f2db
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The Consul gripped the edges of the mat with fingers gone white. He had tied the strap of his duffel bag around his belt, otherwise the bag would have tumbled off to a glacier far below.
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Dan Simmons |
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31c2b93
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The Consul dozed, snapping awake each time with a sense of falling, hands gripping the edge of the rigid hawking mat. He realized that he should have tied himself in with the single rope he had brought in his bag, but he didn't want to land--the
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Dan Simmons |
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26f8967
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I now understand the need for faith - pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith - as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it. Day
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Dan Simmons |
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062cb0a
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Trusting in Theo--quiet, efficient Theo--to get him through the morning. Trusting in luck to get him through the day. Trusting in the drinking at Cicero's to get him through the night. Trusting in the unimportance of his posting to get him through life.
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Dan Simmons |
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64384da
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You said seventy million were planned," I said. "Yeah, well, we changed our minds after Transline's resident AI read it." I slumped lower in the flowfoam. "Even the AI hated it?" "The AI loved it," said Tyrena. "That's when we knew for sure that people were going to hate it."
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Dan Simmons |
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d4ef5a7
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Dying Earth II sold nineteen million copies. "Not bad," said Tyrena. "It takes awhile to build an audience." "The first Dying Earth sold three billion copies," I said. "Pilgrim's Progress," she said. "Mein Kampf. Once in a century. Maybe less." "But it sold three billion ..." "Look," said Tyrena. "In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, ..
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Dan Simmons |
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408b6a9
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Ah, yes, poverty," said Chatterjee and smiled as if the word had deeply ironic connotations. "Indeed, there is much poverty here. Much squalor by Western standards. That must offend the American mind, since America has repeatedly dedicated its great will to eliminating poverty. How did your ex-President Johnson put it . . . to declare war on poverty? One would think that his war in Vietnam would have satisfied him." "The war on poverty was ..
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Dan Simmons |
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bbd570c
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We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt.
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Dan Simmons |
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238de3d
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I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet's world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy. There are three Zen Gnostic assemblies and four High Muslim mosques in the town, but the real houses of worship are the countless saloons and brothels, the huge marketplaces handling the fiberplastic shipments from the south, and th..
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Dan Simmons |
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96a1093
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But they were beautiful. When they died, rippling in rainbow colors, their many-hued messages unseen, unheard by their fleeing herdmates, the beauty of their death agony was beyond words. We sold their photoreceptive skins to Web corporations, their flesh to worlds like Heaven's Gate, and ground their bones to powder to sell as aphrodisiacs to the impotent and superstitious on a score of other colony worlds. On
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Dan Simmons |
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982e162
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Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized. Within
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Dan Simmons |
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e7cffc2
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I discovered that the difference between finding the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display.
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Dan Simmons |
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b5eb01f
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The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. I
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Dan Simmons |
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2da9146
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For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt. When one is writing--really writing--it is as if one is given a fatline to the gods. No true poet has been able to explain the exhilaration one feels when the mind becomes..
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Dan Simmons |
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a50429c
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wanted to know how any ethical system--much less a religion so indomitable that it had survived every evil mankind could throw at it--could flow from a command from God for a man to slaughter his son.
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Dan Simmons |
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7b940a8
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any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principle which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil. --
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Dan Simmons |
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7800905
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Every fatline receiver in the Web, Outback, galaxy, and universe would monitor the squirt, but only the Consul's ship could decode it. Or so she hoped. The
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Dan Simmons |
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8fd654e
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The marvelous organic computer wedged in my skull had dumped its language content like a flawed program. The right hemisphere was not without some language--but only the most emotionally charged units of communication could lodge in that affective hemisphere; my vocabulary was now down to nine words. (This, I learned later, was exceptional, many victims of CVAs retain only two or three.) For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of manag..
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Dan Simmons |
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cec12cf
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Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion, and
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Dan Simmons |
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dc2c767
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Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become." Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: "Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers."
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Dan Simmons |
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0457ba9
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On the contrary, it made me feel that faith is all the more essential. Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level ... that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.
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Dan Simmons |
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f84b857
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Religion and ethics were not always--or even frequently--mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.
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Dan Simmons |
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13f345a
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Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right--in Abraham's eyes and the hearts of his offspring--to become the God of Abraham.
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Dan Simmons |
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3729660
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I miei pensieri erano come mercurio... scivolavano sempre via, prima che potessi afferrarli o sagomarli in forma coerente.
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Dan Simmons |
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b4424b3
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THERE WILL BE nO g'URTHER MIsUsE Og' THIs CHAnnEL. YOU ARE DIsTURBIng OTHERs WHO ARE UsIng IT TO sERIOUs PURPOsE. ACCEss WILL BE REsTORED WHEn YOU UnDERsTAnD WHAT IT Is g'OR. GOODBYE.
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Dan Simmons |