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d9eb5b4
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In the center of that open space, a bony woman in a threadbare garment was hunched over a dead plant. Sword of Divine Fire's reaction was succinct: "Fuck!" The woman cringed as if he'd hit her with a bullwhip. Then: "What has happened to our potato?"
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Neal Stephenson |
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1a813ad
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Therapies administered included but were not limited to: turning things off, then on again; picking them up a couple of inches and then dropping them; turning off nonessential appliances in this and other rooms; removing lids and wiggling circuit boards; extracting small contaminants, such as insects and their egg cases, with nonconducting chopsticks; cable-wiggling; incense-burning; putting folded-up pieces of paper beneath table legs; dri..
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humor
troubleshooting
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Neal Stephenson |
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999eca8
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All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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e0aa672
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Debbie insisted on following the rhythm of the waves. Typical duck-squeezer sex: slow, frustrating, in-tune with nature.
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Neal Stephenson |
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a6ad83c
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so efficient it doesn't waste power by making noise
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Neal Stephenson |
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82f8c27
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The sand was hard-packed and solid and wet, speckled all over with cockle shells in colors and patterns of such profusion and variety that they must have given the first Dutchmen the idea to go out into the sea and bring back precious things from afar.
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Neal Stephenson |
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264ad62
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That sounds like bulshytt!
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Neal Stephenson |
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1c3885e
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No," said Fraa Jad, "they are probably telling us that they have figured out that Edhar, Rambalf, and Tredegarh are where the Saecular Power stored all of the nuclear waste."
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Neal Stephenson |
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ce6e7c5
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a scattering of schizophrenic first worlders who have long ago burned their brains to ash in the radiant heat of their own imaginings
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Neal Stephenson |
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d58b9ad
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The curt maneuver forced hearty laughter from all of the fathers in the ballroom, who were delighted by the illusion of danger and the impotence of Nature.
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Neal Stephenson |
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3540d93
|
It is satisfying, and after a while he finds himself singing an old song: the same one he sang with Oldenburg in Broad Arrow Tower. He keeps time with his hammer, and draws out those notes that make the cargo-hold resonate. All round him, water seeps through the cracks between Minerva's hull-planks (for he is well below the water-line) and trickles down merrily into the bilge, and the four-man pumps take it away with a steady suck-and-hiss ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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e0b95de
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To him it was a sort of hyperspace-librarian, girl-geek thing that he found clever and fetching without attracting him in a way that would have been creepy.
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girls
women
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Neal Stephenson |
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156b557
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There is an English expression: 'high-maintenance girlfriend,'" Csongor remarked. "Now, of course, Zula is not my girlfriend. Probably never would be, even if all this shit were not happening. And I think that if she my girlfriend? She would not be high maintenance at all! She is just not that type of girl. However. Because of circumstances, today she is the most high-maintenance girlfriend since Cleopatra."
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Neal Stephenson |
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6a091f8
|
Listen to me. I did not wish to be summoned by your Princess. Summoned, I did not wish to come. But having been summoned, and having come, I mean to give a good account of myself. That's how I was taught by my father, and the men of his age who slew Kings and swept away not merely Governments but whole Systems of Thought, like Khans of the Mind. I would have my son in Boston know of my doings, and be proud of them, and carry my ways forward..
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Neal Stephenson |
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7c54ff4
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Markus's mind jumped straight to the most obvious explanation: "Is the president nuking people again?" --
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Neal Stephenson |
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3c5146a
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The little boy in him was crestfallen that he wasn't going on the adventure. Then he reminded himself that he was already part of the biggest adventure ever, and that, so far, it had been altogether miserable.
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Neal Stephenson |
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0f762cb
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We had these throwbacks who would do stuff like printing their emails out on paper to read them, or asking you for your goddamn fax number two decades after you had thrown away your fax machine.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d64d1dd
|
It is a second-generation Seattle-scene record label; all of its artists are young people who came to Seattle after they graduated college in search of the legendary Seattle music scene and discovered that it didn't really exist--it was just a couple of dozen guys who sat around playing guitar in one another's basements--and so who were basically forced to choose between going home in ignominy or fabricating the Seattle Music scene of their..
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indie-music
music
seattle
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Neal Stephenson |
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733921b
|
Also known as 'Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,' or in the original Welsh, 'Cwm Rhondda,'" added Sonar Taxlaw."
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Neal Stephenson |
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06cac85
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In war, no matter how much you plan and prepare and practice, when the big day actually arrives, you still can't find your ass with both hands.
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Neal Stephenson |
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5a4d8f4
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SF does possess at least two of the classic markers of genrehood, namely intellectual disreputability and moral salaciousness. SF thrives because it is idea porn.
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Neal Stephenson |
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49cfb31
|
That's even worse. They'll steal it. Then they'll say they didn't steal it, they confiscated it. I know you Feds, you're always confiscating shit.
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Neal Stephenson |
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e73beb3
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Occasionally a red taxi or Mercedes-Benz would squeeze by along the iron fence and burst free, the driver holding down the horn button so furiously that he might detonate the air bag.
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Neal Stephenson |
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68131cc
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It is inherent in the mentality of extramuros bulshytt-talkers that they are more prone than anyone else to taking offense (or pretending to) when their bulshytt is pointed out to them. This places the mathic observer in a nearly impossible position. One is forced either to use this "offensive" word and be deemed a disagreeable person and as such excluded from polite discourse, or to say the same thing in a different way, which means becomi..
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Neal Stephenson |
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80b2669
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At this point, Mrs. Disher stepped in to say, if you thought that was scary, look at how poor people lived in the late twentieth century. Indeed, after ractives told them about the life of an inner-city Washington, D.C., child during the 1990s, most students had to agree they'd take a workhouse in pre-Victorian England over that any day.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f04d10e
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Even though he grew up in churches, raised by church people, Waterhouse (as must be obvious by this point) never really understood their attitudes about sex. Why did they get so hung up on that one issue, when there were others like murder, war, poverty, and pestilence?
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Neal Stephenson |
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82ab903
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The expenditure of paper and printer ink had been somewhat lavish. Two generations from now, if any humans survived, they would look on this heap of documents with some combination of disgust and amazement. Because paper was going to be scarce by then, and they would view its use for such purposes in roughly the same way as Americans of the twenty-first century had viewed the use of sperm whale oil to fuel streetlamps.
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Neal Stephenson |
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949bedf
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For the first time in her life she was feeling the stirrings of what was called Old Racism: the survival into modern times of racial attitudes, or reenactments thereof, that had existed on Old Earth, had been altogether snuffed out, and were known only because documentation thereof had survived. On a certain kind of diseased mind they exerted the same magnetic pull as they had pre-Zero, and so among a population of millions on the ring you ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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ea73bf9
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a fucking rat race that is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don't work harder because you're competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy--but what kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself. That's why ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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b02f702
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His job on TV was to explain science to the general public and, as such, to act as a lightning for people who could not accept all the things that science implied about their worldview and their way of life, and who showed a kind of harebrained ingenuity in finding ways to refute it.
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Neal Stephenson |
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519b147
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Maybe that's what a leader is, Dinah. The one person who can't--who shouldn't--share her problems with anyone else.
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Neal Stephenson |
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8da741b
|
The Cloud Ark Constitution is now in effect." Dinah drew breath, knowing what this meant. Markus spelled it out anyway. "This means that all nation-states of Earth, and their governments and constitutions, no longer exist. Their military and civilian chains of command are no more. Oaths you may have taken to them, allegiances you may have held, loyalties you may have felt, citizenships you may have had are now and forever dissolved. The rig..
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Neal Stephenson |
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65f79f1
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People who claim they are motivated by the Purpose end up behaving differently--and generally better--than people who serve other masters." "So it is like believing in God." "Maybe yes. But without the theology, the scripture, the pigheaded certainty."
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Neal Stephenson |
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d3d86e5
|
One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don't know what the hell you are talking about, they are at least open to the possibility that it might be their fault.
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Neal Stephenson |
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75d3183
|
Didn't happen anymore. Pizza delivery is a major industry. A managed industry. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand.
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Neal Stephenson |
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71f18af
|
The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.
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Neal Stephenson |
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b427b34
|
Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not..
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Neal Stephenson |
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6c189cb
|
Your ability to have empathy with the Geometer--to imagine what it would be like to be someone else--isn't a mere courtesy. It is an innate process of consciousness.
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Neal Stephenson |
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85bfa34
|
He had had many conversations during his long life. Some were fascinating and stayed with him more than a century later. Others were less so. As a younger man he had tolerated those as part of the cost of doing business--a sort of tax that all people must pay in order to take part in civilized society. When he had turned one hundred, he had decided to stop paying that tax. Henceforth he would engage only in conversations that really interes..
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Neal Stephenson |
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5e169b3
|
These were rice paddies before they were parking lots. Rice was the basis for our society. Peasants planted the seeds and had highest status in the Confucian hierarchy. As the Master said, "Let the producers be many and the consumers few.' When the Feed came in from Atlantis, from Nippon, we no longer had to plant, because the rice now came from the matter compiler. It was the destruction of our society. When our society was based upon plan..
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Neal Stephenson |
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dd9945b
|
It was humanly impossible to extend to seven billion people the full sympathy that each of them deserved.
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Neal Stephenson |
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acc65d8
|
People tried and failed to combine the words Izzy and Ymir. The closest they came was Izmir, but that had been the name of a city in Turkey.
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Neal Stephenson |
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59505ba
|
We can't run this experiment a thousand times to see the range of different outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don't exist, we find meaning in randomness.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f794306
|
He overrides the warning buzzer, jams the stereo over to Taxiscan, which cruises all the taxi-driver frequencies listening for interesting traffic. Can't understand a fucking word. You could buy tapes, learn-while-you-drive, and learn to speak Taxilinga. It was essential, to get a job in that business.
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Neal Stephenson |