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9fde765
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Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.
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Dan Simmons |
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b43ffb5
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Hoyt's view of hell is tactile; it is the pain which moves in him like jagged wires pulled through his veins and guts.
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Dan Simmons |
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07aa774
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all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.
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Dan Simmons |
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9980e3c
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Ah," grinned Old Sludge, showing his one tooth, "going to the company store to get some algae chewies, huh?" "Goddamn poopoo," I would grin back at him."
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Dan Simmons |
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3933df4
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Spenser Reynolds was a bit shorter than Web average, but far handsomer. His hair was curled but cropped short, his skin appeared bronzed by a benevolent sun and slightly gilded with subtle body paint, his clothes and ARNistry were expensively flamboyant without being outre, and his demeanor proclaimed a relaxed confidence that all men dreamed of and precious few obtained. His wit was obvious, his attention to others sincere, and his sense o..
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Dan Simmons |
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d358bb9
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guile was no match for the world and that hubris would always be punished by the gods.
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Dan Simmons |
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801d1c7
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Data itself... was tolerable. It was the constant nerve-web-expanding pain of context that would kill him.
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understanding
wisdom
knowledge
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Dan Simmons |
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e2e3296
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so.
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Dan Simmons |
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692fb20
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She would follow him there. And she would die there -- and die soon. Of misery and of strangeness and of all the vicious, petty, alien, and unbridled thoughts that would pour into her like the poison from the Goldner tins poured into Fitzjames -- unseen, vile, deadly.
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inuit
northwest-passage
exploration
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Dan Simmons |
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97640e7
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Johnny-boy shook his head. Maybe he thought I wanted him to drink from the bottle. Hell, I have more class than that. There are paper cups over by the water cooler.
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Dan Simmons |
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84ba569
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I was full of piss and vinegar in those days, not to mention too stupid to know better, in other words still in my twenties,
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Dan Simmons |
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2426552
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Mountaineers know that all mountains are in a constant state of collapse--their verticality being inescapably and inevitably worn down every moment by wind, water, weather, and gravity--but
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Dan Simmons |
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c9e8d60
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Tyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward in a twist of green lips. "Martin, Martin, Martin," she said, "the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg's day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments."
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reading
humor
social-commentary
satire
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Dan Simmons |
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70025bf
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There has to be more than this," I said. The doctor looked up from his grim work with a bemused smile. "Is there?" he said. "Please show me." He lifted the man's heart and seemed to weigh it in one hand."
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Dan Simmons |
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4f675f6
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There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices. The time of obedience and atonement is past. Either help us as a friend, or go away!
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religion
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Dan Simmons |
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d188f71
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The cybrid allows me to carry out my role in the datumplane community." "As poet?" Johnny smiled again. "More as poem," he said. "A poem?" "An ongoing work of art ... but not in the human sense. A puzzle perhaps. A variable enigma which occasionally offers unusual insights into more serious lines of analysis."
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Dan Simmons |
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1746885
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It was late morning when Kassad finished his story.
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Dan Simmons |
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d939f88
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Brawne looks at Johnny, realizing that she is seeing in infrared now as the heat-lamp light from distant furnaces of data suns bathes them both. He is still handsome. --
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Dan Simmons |
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0f03c5b
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Did you see any of us there?" Kassad said nothing for more than a minute. The soft sounds of the river and the ship's rigging suddenly seemed very loud. Finally Kassad took a breath. "Yes." Silence stretched again. Brawne Lamia broke it. "Will you tell us who?" "No."
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Dan Simmons |
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f08c6f7
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Alone with the Morlocks, thought Silenus. But not even Morlocks for company in the end. Only my muse. There
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Dan Simmons |
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f67f040
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Without conscious thought I stepped behind the altar, raised my arms, and began the celebration of the Eucharist. There was no sense of parody or melodrama in this act, no symbolism or hidden intention; it was merely the automatic reaction of a priest who had said Mass almost daily for more than forty-six years of his life and who now faced the prospect of never again participating in the reassuring ritual of that celebration. It
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Dan Simmons |
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bf1ee31
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In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes. Francis
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Dan Simmons |
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837b721
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No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create,
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Dan Simmons |
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6b9f2a3
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Meina Gladstone sat at the head of the long table and felt the peculiar and not-unpleasant sense of separateness which comes from far too little sleep over far too long a period.
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Dan Simmons |
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56188cf
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At sunrise of the third day, I saw the corpse's chest begin to rise and fall and I heard the first intake of breath--a rasp like water being poured into a leather pouch.
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Dan Simmons |
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fa82605
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It has to be your decision. The weapon is yours to use or disregard. It pains the Core to take any human life ... or, through inaction, allow any human life to come to harm. But in this case, where the lives of billions are at risk ...
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Dan Simmons |
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6ccaf85
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Spenser Reynolds began telling about his next project--an attempt to have suicides coordinate their leaps from bridges on a score of worlds while the All Thing watched--and Tyrena Wingreen-Feif stole all attention by putting her arm around Monsignor Edouard and inviting him to her after-dinner nude swimming party at her floating estate on Mare Infinitus. I
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Dan Simmons |
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a61ab6e
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Her head was on my shoulder and her breathing was so deep and regular that I thought her to be asleep. I was almost asleep myself when her warm hand slid up my leg and lightly cupped me. I was startled even as I began to stir and stiffen. Siri whispered an answer to my unasked question. "No, Merin, one is never really too old. At least not too old to want the warmth and closeness. You decide, my love. I will be content either way." I"
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Dan Simmons |
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1a72fca
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Martin Silenus strides back to the dying fire. "Worse," he says. "He could be twisting on the Shrike's steel tree. Where we'll be in a few--" Brawne Lamia rises suddenly and grasps the poet by his shirtfront. She lifts him off the ground, shakes him,"
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Dan Simmons |
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3c7e3dc
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After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: 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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6437679
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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, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure."
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Dan Simmons |
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537fb45
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The Shrike stepped closer. Silenus's hand twitched, lifted the pen again, and wrote across the empty lower margin of his last page: IT IS TIME, MARTIN. He stared at what he had written, stifling the urge to giggle insanely. To his knowledge, the Shrike had never spoken ... never communicated ... to anyone. Other than through the paired media of pain and death. "No!" he screamed again. "I have work to do. Take someone else, goddamn you!" The..
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Dan Simmons |
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5d628ff
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Edouard, I have spent so many hours wrestling with my faith--my lack of faith--but now, in this fearful corner of an all but forgotten world, riddled as I am with this loathsome parasite, I have somehow rediscovered a strength of belief the likes of which I have not known since you and I were boys. 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 un..
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Dan Simmons |
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5035d3b
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I realize now that what I was trying to do with the Armaghast data was offer the Church not a rebirth but only a transition to a false life such as these poor walking corpses inhabit. If the Church is meant to die, it must do so--but do so gloriously, in the full knowledge of its rebirth in Christ.
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Dan Simmons |
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77a8a38
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He'd used a ladder to get three ... maybe four meters ... up on the bole of the tree. Built a sort of platform. For his feet. Broken the arrestor rods off ... little more than spikes ... then sharpened them. Must've used a rock to drive the long one through his feet into the bestos platform and tree. "His left arm ... he'd pounded the stake between the radius and ulna ... missed veins ... just like the goddamned Romans."
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Dan Simmons |
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851c64a
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Our apartment was filled with photos of us, notes I wrote to myself about us, holos of us on Hyperion, but ... you know. In the morning he would be an absolute stranger. By afternoon I began to believe what we'd had, even if I couldn't remember. By evening I'd be crying in his arms ... then, sooner or later, I'd go to sleep. It's better this way." Rachel"
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Dan Simmons |
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39fbe2b
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thighs flesh rather than steel, her groin matted from the moisture of their passion. Her face is dark, the sun behind her, but he sees red flames dying in the multifaceted pits of her eyes. She smiles and he sees sunlight glint on rows of metal
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Dan Simmons |
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3f22d2e
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For a few minutes I stood alone in her chambers, appreciating the light and silence and art. There was a van Gogh on one of the walls, worth more than most planets could pay. It was a painting of the artist's room at Arles. Madness is not a new invention.
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Dan Simmons |
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39bf970
|
Was I a swordsman then? sends Johnny. Or a poet? [Yes There is never one without the other]
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Dan Simmons |
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a3b0de6
|
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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1e5dddf
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beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it.
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Dan Simmons |
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651c26b
|
a person born and raised into a world where information was always at hand, communication with anyone anywhere a given, and no distance more than a farcaster step away, this sudden regression to life as our ancestors had known it would be like suddenly awakening blind and crippled.
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Dan Simmons |
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14dc632
|
Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality ... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.
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Dan Simmons |
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a4bd370
|
Sometimes there is a thin line separating orthodox zeal from apostasy," said Father Lenar Hoyt. So began the priest's story."
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Dan Simmons |