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The Nine Billion Names of God
Copyright © 1953 by Ballantine Books, Inc. | |
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A diesel generator providing fifty kilowatts at a hundred and ten volts. It was installed about five years ago and is quite reliable. Its made life at the monastery much more comfortable, but of course it was really installed to provide power for the motors driving the prayer wheels. | Topics: |
Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it will be the end of the world. Chuck gave a nervous little laugh. Thats just what I said to Sam. And do you know what happened? He looked at me in a very queer way, like Id been stupid in class, and said, Its nothing as trivial as that. | |
text checked (see note) Feb 2005 |
The Fires Within
Copyright © 1949 by Better Publications, Inc., | ||
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I tried to imagine streets and buildings and the creatures going among themcreatures who could maike their way through the incandescent rock as a fish swims through water. It was fantasticand then I remembered the incredibly narrow range of temperatures and pressures under which the human race existed. We, not they, were the freaks; for almost all the matter in the universe is at temperatures of thousands or even millions of degrees. | ||
text checked (see note) Nov 2023 |
The Fountains of Paradise
Copyright © 1978, 1979 by Arthur C. Clarke | |||
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Preface | The country I have called Taprobane does not quite exist, but is about ninety percent congruent with the island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Though the Sources and Acknowledgments will make clear what locations, events, and personalities are based on fact, the reader will not go far wrong in assuming that the more unlikely the story, the closer it is to reality. | ||
I The Palace |
2 The Engineer |
In a mood of ecological euphoria, TCC had proposed demolishing the last remaining section of the pipeline and restoring the land to the penguins. Instantly, there had been cries of protest from the industrial archaeologists, outraged at such vandalism, and from the naturalists, who pointed out that the penguins simply loved the abandoned pipeline. It had provided housing of a standard they had never before enjoyed, and thus contributed to a population explosion that the killer whales could barely handle. | |
7 The God-Kings Palace |
But man-made obstacles had never stopped him before. Nature was his real antagonistthe friendly enemy who never cheated, always played fair, but never failed to take advantage of the tiniest oversight or omission. | ||
II The Temple |
16 Conversations with Starglider |
The hypothesis you refer to as God, though not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason. If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress. William of Ockham pointed out as recently as your fourteenth century that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. I cannot therefore understand why this debate continues. | Topics: |
17 Parakarma |
We do not eat before noon. The mind functions more clearly in the morning hours, and so should not be distracted by material things. As he nibbled at some quite delicious papaya, Morgan considered the philosophical gulf represented by that simple statement. To him, an empty stomach could be most distracting, completely inhibiting the higher mental functions. Having always been blessed with good health, he had never tried to dissociate mind and body, and saw no reason why one should make the attempt. | Topic: | |
19 By the Shores of Lake Saladin |
And dont forget the Pyramids. The Sheik laughed. What did you call them? The best investment in the history of mankind? Precisely. Still paying tourist dividends after four thousand years. | Topics: | |
20 The Bridge That Danced |
Even when projected at normal speed, the final cataclysm looked as if shot in slow motion; the scale of the disaster was so large that the human mind had no basis of comparison. In reality, it lasted perhaps five seconds. At the end of that time, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge had earned an inexpungable place in the history of engineering. Two hundred years later, there was a photograph of its last moments on the wall of Morgans office, bearing the caption One of our less successful products. To Morgan, that was no joke, but a permanent reminder that the unexpected could always strike from ambush. | ||
Morgan always let his subordinates do their thinking for themselves. It was the only way to establish responsibility, it took much of the load off him, and on many occasions his staff arrived at solutions he had overlooked. | |||
21 Judgment |
That beautiful, dispassionate voice, untouched by human glottis, had never changed in the forty years that he had known it. Decades, perhaps centuries, after he was dead, it would be talking to other men just as it had spoken to him. (For that matter, how many conversations was it having at this very moment?) Once, this knowledge had depressed Rajasinghe; now, it no longer mattered. He did not envy ARISTOTLEs immortality. | ||
If one thing had been learned from the bloody history of mankind, it was that only individual human beings mattered; however eccentric their beliefs might be, they must be safeguarded, so long as they did not conflict with wider but equally legitimate interests. What was it that the old poet had said? There is no such thing as the State. Perhaps that was going a little too far; but it was better than the other extreme. | Topic: | ||
III The Bell |
22 Apostate |
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With his scientific training, he was no longer content to accept the Orders ambiguous attitude toward God. Such indifference had come at last to seem worse than outright denial. | |||
23 Moondozer |
He thought of all the times when the texture of some material, the feel of rock or soil underfoot, the smell of a jungle, the sting of spray upon his face, had played a vital role in one of his projects. Someday, perhaps even these sensations could be transferred by electronics. Indeed, it had already been done so, crudely, on an experimental basis, and at enormous cost. But there was no substitute for reality; one should beware of imitations. | Topic: | |
IV The Tower |
34 Vertigo |
Unfortunately, Bickerstaff did not know his limitations. Though he had a devoted coterie of fans who subscribed to his information servicein an earlier age, he would have been called a pop scientisthe had an even larger circle of critics. The kinder ones considered that he had been educated beyond his intelligence. The others labeled him a self-employed idiot. | |
It was all so familiar. The motto of the Lardners and the Bickerstaffs seemed to be: Nothing shall be done for the first time. And yetsometimes they were right, if only through the operation of the laws of chance. Note (Hals): end note | |||
V Ascension |
47 Beyond the Aurora |
It must be the sheer exhilaration produced by that marvelous spectacle beneath himthough it was diminishing now, drawing back to north and south, as if retreating to its polar strongholds. That, and the satisfaction of a task well begun, using a technology that no man had ever before tested to such limits. The explanation was perfectly reasonable, but he was not satisfied with it. It did not wholly account for his sense of happinesseven of joy. [...] He seemed to have left all his cares down there on the planet hidden below the fading loops and traceries of the aurora. | |
Epilogue: Kalidasas Triumph | Every species was unique, with its own surprises, its own idiosyncracies. This one had introduced the Starholmer to the baffling concept of negative informationor, in the local terminology, humor, fantasy, myth. | ||
text checked (see note) Sep 2006 |