Robert J. Sawyer

The sky above the island was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel__hich is to say it was a bright, cheery blue.

All right,_ he said. __ince you asked, Webmind is an emergent quantum-computational system based on a stable null-sigma condensate that resists decoherence thanks to constructive feedback loops._ He turned to the blackboard, scooped up a piece of chalk, and began writing rapidly. __ee,_ he said, __sing Dirac notation, if we let Webmind__ default conscious state be represented by a bra of phi and a ket of psi, then this would be the einselected basis._ His chalk flew across the board again. __ow, we can get the vector basis of the total combined Webmind alpha-state consciousness...

Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light. Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound. Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others. But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn__ exist at all: awareness. Nothing more than that. Just awareness__ vague, ethereal sense of being. Being . . . but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future__nly an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception . . .

If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught?

I get tired of hearing some science-fiction fans saying that characterization isn't important in SF. In point of fact, I think it's probably more important in SF than in mainstream fiction. After all, if the author can't characterize humans well, he or she probably can't characterize aliens well either.