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Once every hundred years, the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clean as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won't have to look at it.
Larry Niven
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I'd visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon.
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Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent species changes the environment to suit itself. As soon as a species becomes intelligent, it should stop evolving.
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The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.
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For each human being there is an optimum ratio between change and stasis. Too little change, he grows bored. Too little stability, he panics and loses his ability to adapt. One who marries six times in ten years won't change jobs. One who moves often to serve his company will maintain a stable marriage. A woman chained to one home and family may redecorate frantically or take a lover or go to many costume parties.
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In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap.
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The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.
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I knew it long ago: I'm a compulsive teacher, but I can't teach. The godawful state of today's education system isn't what's stopping me. I lack at least two of the essential qualifications.
I cannot "suffer fools gladly." The smartest of my pupils would get all my attention, and the rest would have to fend for themselves. And I can't handle being interrupted.
Writing is the answer. Whatever I have to teach, my students will select themselves by buying the book. And nobody interrupts a printed page.
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Matthew Leiah Keller sat beneath a watershed tree and brooded. Other children played all around him, but they ignored Matt. So did two teachers on monitor duty. People usually ignored Matt when he wanted to be alone.
Uncle Matt was gone. Gone to a fate so horrible that the adults wouldn't even talk about it.
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I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That's what we have to count on.
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I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational.
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Louis knew a few xenophobes, and regarded them as dolts.
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But... watching Steven Barnes taught me to treat my life like an art form.
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Never be embarrassed or ashamed about anything you choose to write. (Think of this before you send it to a market)
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That's the thing about people who think they hate computers … What they really hate are lousy programmers.
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Here is where the predictions failed: We didn't take Cargo Cult mentality into account: "if somebody has something I don't, he must have stolen it."
We didn't understand how good we could get at communication — when you have something that someone else doesn't, the whole damn planet knows it.
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Giving up freedom for security has begun to look naive.
Even to me. Many of you were ahead of me on this — Three out of four hijacked airplanes destroyed the World Trade Center and a piece of the Pentagon in 2001. How is it possible that those planes were taken using only five perps armed with knives? It was possible because all those hundreds of passengers had been carefully stripped of every possible weapon. We may want to reconsider this approach. It doesn't work in high schools either.
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There were organ banks all over the world, inadequately supplied by people kind enough to will their bodies to medical science.
How useful is the body of a man who dies of old age? How fast can you reach a car accident? And in 2043, Arkansas, which had never rescinded the death penalty, made the organ banks the official state method of execution.
The idea had spread like wildfire.... like a moral plague, as one critic of the time had put it.
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It does not destroy matter, which is reassuring. Rewriting one law of physics is worse than trying to eat one peanut.
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He was sick of having to be afraid. It was a situation to drive a man right out of his skull. If he stopped being afraid, even for an instant, he could be killed! But now, at least for the moment, he could stop listening for footsteps, stop trying to look in all directions at once. A sonic stunner was a surer bet than a hypothetical, undependable psi power. It was real, cold and hard in his hand.
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"You look like a girl with a secret," Matt said. "I think it must be the smile."
She moved closer to him, which was very close, and lowered her voice. "Can you keep a secret?"
Matt smiled with one side of his mouth to show that he knew what was coming. She said it anyway. "So can I."
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Anything you don't understand is dangerous until you do understand it.
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It's very difficult for a black man to get out of South-Central Los Angeles, and get out civilized....The only men I know who have escaped, all began reading Robert Heinlein at age ten.
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Cheap superconductors imply maglev trains everywhere. Computers could get big again, with RAM/ROM rising by powers of forty and fifty, if superconductors shed the heat.
Laser handguns against superconducting armor. I'm not predicting; I just love playing with superconductors.
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Jesus Pietro was worried. The Sons of Earth, if they got this far, would go straight to the vivarium to free their compatriots. But if Matthew Keller was his own agent... If the ghost of Alpha Plateau was not a rebel, but a thing with its own unpredictable purpose...
Jesus Pietro worried.
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Larry Niven
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Born:
April 30, 1938
(age 85)
Bio:
Laurence van Cott Niven known as Larry Niven is an American science fiction writer. His best-known work is Ringworld, which received Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards.
Known for:
Ringworld (1970)
The Mote in God's Eye (1974)
Protector (1973)
Lucifer's Hammer (1977)
Fleet of Worlds (2007)
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