Reviews and Comments

1) "Recreational drugs are more or less traditional at any U.S. secondary school, maybe because of the unprecedented tensions: post-latency and puberty and angst and impending adulthood, etc. To help manage the intra-psychic storms, etc. Since the place's inception, there's always been a certain percentage of the high-caliber adolescent players at E.T.A. who manage their internal weathers chemically. Much of this is good clean temporary fun; but a traditionally smaller and harder-core set tends to rely on personal chemistry to manage E.T.A.'s special demands—dexedrine or low-volt methedrine before matches and benzodiazapenes to come back down after matches, with Mudslides or Blue Flames at some understanding Comm. Ave. nightspot or beers and bongs in some discreet Academy corner at night to short-circuit the up-and-down cycle, mushrooms or X or something from the Mild Designer class—or maybe occasionally a little Black Star, whenever there's a match- and demand-free weekend, to basically short out the whole motherboard and blow out all the circuits and slowly recover and be almost neurologically reborn and start the gradual cycle all over again..."

2) "Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again."

3) "'Uh oh. Dinnertime. Triangle's a-clangin' over in West.' 'Hey Hallie though? Hang on. Kidding aside for a second. What all do you know about Separatism?' Hal stopped for a moment. 'You mean in Canada?' 'Is there any other kind?'"

4) "The cable kabal's promise of 'empowerment,' the campaign argued, was still just the invitation to choose which of 504 visual spoon-feedings you'd sit there and open wide for. And so but what if, their campaign's appeal basically ran, what if, instead of sitting still for choosing the least of 504 infantile evils, the vox- and digitus-populi could choose to make its home entertainment literally and essentially adult? I.e. what if—according to InterLace—what if a viewer could more or less 100% choose what's on at any given time? Choose and rent, over PC and modem and fiber-optic line, from tens of thousands of second-run films, documentaries, the occasional sport, old beloved non–'Happy Days' programs, wholly new programs, cultural stuff, and c., all prepared by the time-tested, newly lean Big Four's mammoth vaults and production facilities and packaged and disseminated by InterLace TelEnt. in convenient fiber-optic pulses that fit directly on the new palm-sized 4.8-mb PC-diskettes InterLace was marketing as 'cartridges'? Viewable right there on your trusty PC's high-resolution monitor? Or, if you preferred and so chose, jackable into a good old premillennial wide-screen TV with at most a coaxial or two? Self-selected programming, chargeable on any major card or on a special low-finance-charge InterLace account available to any of the 76% of U.S. households possessed of PC, phone line, and verifiable credit? What if, Veals's spokeswoman ruminated aloud, what if the viewer could become her/his own programming director; what if s/he could define the very entertainment-happiness it was her/his right to pursue?"

5) "Bob Death smiles coolly (South Shore bikers are required to be extremely cool in everything they do) and manipulates a wooden match with his lip and says No, not that fish-one. He has to assume a kind of bar-shout to clear the noise of his idling hawg. He leans in more toward Gately and shouts that the one he was talking about was: This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, 'What the fuck is water?' and swim away. The young biker leans back and smiles at Gately and gives an affable shrug and blatts away, a halter top's tits mashed against his back."

6) "The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify."

7) "It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip—and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza's The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America."

8) "This is why Moms are so obsessively loving, why they try so hard no matter what private troubles or issues or addictions they have of their own, why they seem to value your welfare above their own, and why there's always a slight, like, twinge of selfishness about their obsessive mother-love: they're trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember, except maybe in dreams."

9) "No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. What's real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn't quite gotten this before now, how it wasn't just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed."

10) "'They'll have to move us around to different sites. It's a pain in the ass, but Schtitt's done it before. I think the real variable'll be whether the Québec kids got into Logan last night before whenever it was this hit.' 'Logan'll be shut down you're saying.' 'But I think we'd have heard if they got in last night. Freer and Struck were keeping tabs on an F.A.A. link ever since supper, Mario said.' 'Boys are looking to get X'd by some slow-witted hairy-legged foreign girls or what?' 'My guess is they're stuck up at Dorval. I'll bet C.T. is on the case even now. Get some sort of announcement at breakfast, probably.'em!"

11) "Something like a shadow flanked the vividness and lucidity of the world."

12) "It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately—the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way. Modern German is better equipped for combining gerundives and prepositions than is its mongrel cousin. The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one's life, plunge in. I had researched this. Stice had asked whether I believed in ghosts. It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions whether his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. Stice had promised something boggling to look at. That is, whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning."

1) "Poetry may be playful in nature, but not all games feel poetic, and in my experience the videogames that feel most poetic are often those that have least in common with traditional games. My interest is not so much in considering poetry in light of play, but in considering (and making) videogames in light of poetry."

2) "Where fiction is concerned with what happens next, lyric poetry is concerned with what happens now."

3) "While we will be working toward a loose definition that might help us to identify and discuss 'game poems,' the point is not primarily to properly interpret or categorize these games, or get at their True Meaning, but rather to see if a close lyric reading can enhance our appreciation for any given game; whether considering these games as game poems can give us something to think about, something to talk about."

4) "Poetic address is one example of how lyric poems tend to exist in a kind of ritual space: they don't describe events so much as they exist to be events: to be performed and reperformed in what Muriel Rukeyser calls 'a ritual moment, a moment of proof.'"

5) "I have always thought of the game as a poem, and the original end-text as nothing more than a bit of context, but an explicit (and forced) indication of context always carries with it the danger of diminishing a poem's ambiguity and breaking the ritual moment on which lyric poetry tends to rely. [...] To illustrate my point: people have sometimes told me that Loneliness is a failure of a game because people cannot make sense of its central meaning without knowing the game's title."

6) "Following in the footsteps of literary theorist Stanley Fish, I would argue that categories like 'game poems' and 'digital poetry' are best thought of as related modes of paying attention rather than as objective taxonomical frameworks, and that every different mode of attention can offer us unique insights into the things we encounter."

7) "Conceived through the lens of lyric poetry that we have been utilizing, we might say that game poems are artifacts positioned as videogames that are short and subjective, make use of poetic address, exist in a ritual space, are hyperbolic, are bound to metaphor, and juxtapose signified meaning with material meaning (keeping in mind that, as in the case of lyric poetry, all of these characteristics are simply tendencies). We might summarize such a conception of game poems as 'videogames with lyric characteristics.'"

8) "From the videogame poet's standpoint, we might draw an analogy from a game's code to the ink that marks the page as a traditional poet writes down a poem on paper. The ink matters: it leaves a material trace that is relevant to the nature of poetry, and the words themselves cannot exist on the page without it; beyond this, the ink is deeply entangled with important questions of politics, economics, and ideology: where did it come from, how was it attained, what ideological structures are embedded with it on the page?"

9) "[From] the visual and auditory levels down to input mappings and operational logics, I seek to carve out new metaphors, recast established signifiers, and open avenues for new meaning. [...] Through this kind of use of explicit and shifting symbolism, I attempt to enrich and enliven depictions of squares in videogames."

10) "A blue circle moves across a blank screen, finds a sunflower, and the world turns yellow: bleep bleep. That's a game poem."

1) "Star Trek is often hailed for its prophetic dimensions, both anticipating technological 'innovation' and using allegory and optimistic visions of a utopian future to comment critically on war, racism, and capitalist inequality here and now. But Trek has almost always articulated this futurity through starships, explorers, and other images of mobility—and leaving places behind, as the late artist and critic John Berger observed, has a way of concealing consequences. DS9's stationary allegorical geography meant from the outset that it would be, as series writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe puts it, a 'show ... about consequences.' The series juxtaposes multiple clashing political, economic, and cultural perspectives embedded in a single contested place, one far from the glitz of the Enterprise or the manicured lawns of Starfleet Headquarters. It foregrounds contradictions between the Federation's comfortable core and its misunderstood and exploited Bajoran periphery, from the outside looking in. Instead of an itinerant spacecraft, this was a place where consequences would have to be, as Rodney King suggested, 'worked out.'"

2) "DS9's radical interventions also raise the question of place, and the role that local conflicts can play in global struggles against racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and empire. Attention to place is, perhaps understandably, dismissed in some corners of the political Left as sentimental, nostalgic, and reactionary. Place-based struggles, so the thinking goes, can never hope to defeat global systems of capitalist exploitation that are notoriously wily and adept at producing and taking advantage of differences across space. Challenging this view, the late geographer Doreen Massey argued that places are dynamic, capable of holding multiple identities and meanings, and defined through their specific material and cultural relationships to other places. Massey's work resonates with long-standing themes in many Indigenous cosmogonies. The late theologian Vine Deloria Jr., for instance, linked the priority of time over space in Western thought to the West's outsized role in environmental destruction, and to mass alienation in capitalist societies. These more complex views of place urge careful attention to context as a prerequisite for evaluating the politics of localized political struggles. They enable chapter 2 to affirm the progressive, emancipatory character of Bajoran anticolonial nationalisms and the Prophets' nod to theologies of liberation, and they enable A Different 'Trek' to evaluate the import of DS9's place-based intervention in Trek's hypermobile spatial epistemologies."

3) "Neither the script nor the novelization of 'Far Beyond the Stars' says much about Russell's time in the navy, where Black sailors faced a segregated division of labor, relegated to manual and service jobs, until 1944. But a brief exchange between Benny and Cassie in both texts in 1953 intimates that he began writing SF—'amateur stuff'—nearly fifteen years prior, in the late 1930s or early 1940s, while serving. At the beginning of Sisko's first extended vision as Russell, his interest in SF is met skeptically by a newspaper vendor (Aron Eisenberg/Nog), who prefers World War II films like From Here to Eternity. 'What's wrong with men from Mars?' Russell jocularly protests. He listens, both amused and uninterested, as the vendor gushes about Burt Lancaster's celluloid military heroics, and then silently hands the vendor a coin. Given Russell's experiences, is it not politically instructive that he would be more intrigued by 'men from Mars' than by reliving the wartime dramas of a white movie star? If not as openly seditious as draft resisters, we must take seriously Benny Russell's everyday, creative, 'amateurish' distractedness from harsh manual labor, his proneness to speculative fabulation, his susceptibility to dreams of 'otherwise possibilities,' including dreams of Black self-determination in the twenty-fourth century."

4) "More accustomed to the role of anticolonial freedom fighter than agent of a postcolonial state with which she often adamantly disagrees, Kira grows tremendously over DS9's seven years. She is often described as letting go of her anger, trauma, and Bajoran nationalism in a tidy liberal narrative of overcoming. Yet it is perhaps closer to the mark to say that Kira's politics and values don't change, but her heart does. Grounded in historical experience and insights from the Prophets, Kira remains in some sense a particularist—resolutely place based, religiously orthodox, fiercely anticolonial. But she becomes, in cultural studies scholar Ramzi Fawaz's felicitous phrase, 'a particularist with a heart for the universal,' making Bajoran experience a departure point for insight, empathy, and solidarity with a range of oppressed peoples. Kira models an alternative form of cosmopolitanism, one out of step with pretensions of liberal imperialist universality and replete with possibilities for international/interplanetary contact and comradeship."

5) "The decision to minimize Bajoran makeup requirements stems from producer Rick Berman's admiration for TNG actor Michelle Forbes, who portrayed Ensign Ro. Berman reportedly told Michael Westmore, the celebrated makeup supervisor on TNG and DS9, 'We've hired a pretty girl and I want to keep her that way. Think of something that we can take and make her look a little alien, and still get the idea shes from another planet, but she's still gorgeous.' Forbes, whose full name is Michelle Renee Forbes Guajardo, is of English, Welsh, and Mexican American descent and has dark-brown hair, light-brown eyes, and fair skin. The point here is not to scrutinize Forbes, a brilliant actor and a refreshingly thoughtful Leftist voice in Hollywood's sea of inchoate liberals. Rather, it is to note that the Bajorans as we know and see them are a product of Berman's valuation of fair-skinned beauty, of his directive to make that beauty visible. Casting white actors in the roles of colonized peoples is by no means a problem unique to the Bajorans, DS9, or Star Trek. The whitewashing of anticolonial allegory is a defining crisis of mainstream American SF. International studies scholar Robert A. Saunders remarks that such a habit 'inverts the genuine threat that Euro-American imperialism has posed to the non-white people of the world.' Anthropologist John G. Russell argues that such racial camouflage in SF is a cynical move that protects writers and studios from both critiques of appropriation and right-wing reaction while cashing in on the palatability of whiteness with global audiences."

6) "Some critics see in the Dominion and its galaxy-ordering mission a purely racist social formation, devoid of any profit motive or other economic imperative. Yet as Gonzalez astutely observes, the Dominion's racism and its extractive economic logics are intimately intertwined. The very first mention of the Dominion comes in 'Rules of Acquisition,' which follows Ferengi attempts to expand 'synthehol' booze sales into the Gamma Quadrant. When Quark presses a trading partner for details about this mysterious 'Dominion,' she grows circumspect, counseling, 'Let's just say if you want to do business in the Gamma Quadrant, you have to do business with the Dominion.' When Bajor later signs a nonaggression pact with the Dominion to prevent a redux of the Cardassian Occupation, the Dominion isolates the planet from all external trade. And the Dominion war machine relies heavily on intensive resource extraction, notably for mineral ingredients for Ketracel-White, which directly informs its territorial interests. Even the Founders' gelatinous default state—their shape-shifting abilities—allegorizes not only the phantasmatic mobility of whiteness but that of capital as well."

7) "But if Odo is queer, he remains a queer of a particular, privileged sort. He is indeed alienated, cast out from home, the only one of his kind on the station—and yet the community from which he hails is one of extreme wealth and power, one whose persecutory anxieties authorize an ideology of race and class supremacy. What could it mean, then, for privileged queers like Odo to fail, or refuse, to reproduce the cultural and political logics of his 'own people'—especially if those logics are oppressive and cruel?"

8) "'Bar Association,' then, is a wonderful exception to Hassler-Forest's observation that Star Trek rarely fleshes out the democratizing implications of its postcapitalist premise. Ironically, refusing to follow Trek rules and simply banish money enabled DS9 to critique capitalism, in the twenty-fourth century and in the twentieth. Shimerman has praised the episode for addressing class contradictions that mainstream television often elides: 'People think of this as a comic episode. And it is, of course. But in truth, it's really about union-management problems. The irony of it is that I play management in the episode. So I thought that to make Rom have a reasonably hard job as a union organizer, I would have to be tough about it, to show the struggle to the audience. Although you don't see it on TV very often, this is something that goes on in America all the time.' Rather than some distant future in which technology smoothly outsources so-called 'repetitive, energy-intensive, low-skill, high-output labor' to machines, 'Bar Association' critically reflects the rise of a service economy in the United States, returning us to the contradictions of our own world and the struggles to transform it."

9) "What is rightly hated in Trump, like what is hated in the Ferengi, in truth implicates a system that is bipartisan, to say the least. The very founding of the United States—a plantation economy fueled by kidnapped and coerced African labor and built on stolen Indigenous lands and the genocide of Indigenous peoples—would seem to embody the 52nd Rule of Acquisition, itself a political theology of accumulation by dispossession: 'Never ask when you can take.' Likewise, the rise of a permanent military-industrial complex in the United States after World War II—a thoroughly bipartisan affair that has also militarized U.S. police departments—exemplifies the 35th Rule: 'War is good for business.' Faced with contemporary economic and public health crises, both major parties rush to take care of corporate donors and neglect the multiracial poor and working classes, heeding the 162nd Rule: 'Even in the worst of times, someone turns a profit.' These contradictions cannot be pinned on Trump, nor even on the Republican Party, alone. To suggest as much is to fetishize both Trump and the Ferengi, rather than heed the occasion for thoroughgoing critical reflection and more transformative political commitment that both offer."

10) "If there is a heroic, suffering O'Brien, then, perhaps it is the indispensable Professor Keiko Ishikawa O'Brien, first and foremost. As an engineer, Miles might keep the lights on at DS9, but it is Keiko who, consigned to the position of trailing spouse, champions efforts to collectivize social reproduction on the station, founding and defending the station school and welcoming Kira into her extended family as a brave experiment in collective kinship. Keiko produces scholarship on local botany in collaboration with Bajoran colleagues who are rebuilding agricultural and scientific infrastructure in the wake of the devastating Cardassian Occupation. She does all of this while raising her own children, pushing her husband to be a better person, and abiding the stress of routine threats to her husband's safety as a condition of his work. We only get glimpses of station life from Keiko O'Brien's perspective occasionally. But taking Keiko's geographies seriously challenges fantasies of a future that has automated away the 'low-skilled' work of social reproduction or 'innovated' away the political problems that surround racialized and gendered divisions of labor. Keiko's frustrations also offer a cautionary tale, suggesting that if the privatized, neoliberal family values of the 1990s remain the best that twenty-fourth-century humanity has to offer, the same crises of social reproduction and the same racialized and gendered divisions of labor will continue to fester, even in a 'postscarcity' Federation economy. In the decades since DS9 aired, this warning has certainly proven prescient. Rather than dismissing Professor O'Brien as 'annoying,' we might yet learn from her example, finding fairer ways to organize and distribute the joys and burdens of care work and fighting for that work to be valued and supported."

11) "Finally, as we saw in chapter 1, Garak is central to the events of 'In the Pale Moonlight,' carrying out the outsourced, illegal, and immoral dirty work of espionage, including murder, that Sisko cannot undertake himself. Garak is at once an enabling queer outsider to the Cardassian imperial family who eagerly serves its shady security state and an illiberal, enabling outsider to the Federation's liberal multicultural empire who abets it by carrying out the same sorts of unspeakable deeds. We might even read Garak's work for Sisko as a metaphor for the contemporary alliances between military multiculturalisms and neoconservative imperialisms, alliances increasingly embodied in the U.S. Democratic Party."

1) "It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity–but that would be asking too much of fate! Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it."

2) "John is a physician, and PERHAPS–(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)–PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster."

3) "It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls. The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off–the paper–in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide–plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight."

4) "There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,–the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction. It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap I guess. I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to."

5) "There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will."

1) "The connection we make between cycling and flying is metaphorical. You might even call it spiritual: an expression of the powerful feelings of freedom and exhilaration we experience when we ride bikes. But it is also a response to a physical fact. If cyclists imagine themselves to be flying, it is because, in a sense, they are. When you ride a bicycle, you're airborne. The wheels that spin beneath you slip a continuous band of compressed air between the bike and the road, holding you aloft. That floating feeling, that sensation of airy buoyancy, is heightened by the way the bike bears your body: your legs do the work of propelling the vehicle, but the job of supporting your body weight is outsourced to the bicycle itself. Today you can attach an inflatable saddle to your seat post and sit back on a pillow of air even as your bike's wheels turn on air. Perhaps you are riding down an empty road on a quiet night; maybe, like Johnnie Dunlop, like Elliott and E.T., you are riding on a night lit by a full moon. Your bicycle will not take you on a voyage to the moon, but it is not quite earthbound, either. You're in another world, an intermediary zone, gliding somewhere between terra firma and the huge horizonless sky."

2) "A favorite slogan of bicycle activists goes: 'Two wheels good, four wheels bad.' It's a cheeky paraphrase of Orwell, but the motto smacks of sanctimony: the certainty that bikes are morally superior to cars, and that cyclists are nobler than motorists."

3) "The design was clever in several ways. Drais situated the saddle toward the rear of the frame, at a height low enough for the user's legs to reach the ground. On the other end of the Laufmaschine, Drais placed a padded rest for the forearms. This arrangement held the rider's body in an optimal position—back erect, torso slightly tilted forward—providing comfort and ensuring efficient movement. 'The instrument and the traveller are kept in equilibrio,' Drais noted in his first published description of the invention. He had hit upon the defining oddity of bicycle mechanics: the symbiosis between man and machine, between the bicycle and the rider who is also the power source. Drais's intuition about ergonomics was matched by an eye for aesthetics. The Laufmaschine was primitive by comparison with the bicycle as we have come to know it, lacking many key features, notably pedals. But its silhouette—the slender frame that loops on either end into wheels of equal size—is recognizably that of a bike. To behold the Laufmaschine in 1817 was to glimpse the future."

4) "There have been many innovations in bicycle design and construction since the arrival of the safety bike. Derailleurs, disc brakes, titanium and carbon-fiber frames—innumerable new components and building materials have appeared on the scene. Whole new genres of bikes have come into the world. There are collapsible bikes that fold on hinges so you can carry them around like a backpack or briefcase; there are bicycle designs that you can download on open-source websites and print out on a 3D printer. But the basic shape, the classic safety bicycle silhouette, remains and reigns. Lewis Mumford wrote: 'In every art there are forms so implicit in the process, so harmonious with the function, that they are, for practical purposes, 'eternal.'' Mumford had in mind such things as the safety pin and the drinking bowl, whose antiquity would seem to justify the heady designation 'eternal.' In historical terms, the bicycle is a new thing, but its form feels as fundamental and inviolable as any pin or bowl or Grecian urn."

5) "[Excerpt: The Wichita Daily Eagle (Wichita, Kansas), 1896] The bicycle has appeared in a new role—that of destroyer of a once happy home. The woman in the case is Mrs. Elma J. Dennison [...who was] married to Charles H. Dennison in 1892. At that time she devoted herself to household duties which were soon increased by the arrival of two pretty children. Then, in an evil hour, Mr. Dennison presented his wife with a bicycle. Mr. Dennison says that his wife developed the bicycle fever to such a degree that she neglected everything her home, her children, and her husband. She lived only for her wheel, and on it. Soon she changed her bicycle for a man's wheel; then she discarded her skirts and adopted bloomers."

6) "As for his own cycling: he finds the kind of fulfillment on a bike that you might expect of an erstwhile aspiring monk. 'The feeling that you get when you're riding on the trail, alone in nature, surrounded by all those nature sounds, it is one of the greatest feelings you can ever have,' shering said. 'My happiness—my own personal GNH—is the mountain bike and the forest.'"

7) "The CEVIS [Cycle Ergometer with Vibration Isolation and Stabilization System] does not quite fulfill the old fantasy of bicycles in outer space. No one will mistake the pedaling astronaut for the nymphs in those old advertising posters, zigzagging their bikes through an obstacle course of moons and stars. But a spin on NASA's bicycle holds other wonders. Astronauts are often required to ride for ninety minutes at a stretch, during which time the space station passes over two sunrises, completing an orbit of Earth. At NASA they like to joke that the riders of its exercise bike are the fastest cyclists in history, capable of circling the globe in a single workout. ('Lance Armstrong, eat your heart out!' wrote the astronaut Ed Lu in a blog post.) A cyclist clicks his shoes into the CEVIS and goes wheeling above clouds, deserts, jungles, oceans full of islands and icebergs, the Himalayas, the Amazon, Newfoundland, New York, Antarctica, Africa, Asia crossing the heavens at 17,150 miles per hour, and going nowhere at all."

8) "There are two more bikes hanging from the ceiling in the garage: a yellow Fuji S10-S and a black Sekai 2500. These are the bicycles that Bill Samsoe and Barb Brushe rode across America in the summer of 1976. BILL: Neither of us has been on those bikes in quite a number of years. I used mine for triathlons for a while, but it's not really a triathlon bike. It's a touring bike. BARB: We'll probably never ride them again, but I don't think we'd ever get rid of them. BILL: They're museum exhibits, you know? But I bet if I put in a little bit of work, they'd ride fine. They say if you treat it right, a bicycle will run for a hundred years."

9) "Boorish American car culture and incipient American fascism were natural allies."

1) "The Stamper brothers' talent had shined from an early age. Chris started tinkering with electronics as a young boy and eventually built his own computer in college. He got his first programming job—in arcade games—before he had even graduated. Meanwhile, Tim brought to the table an artistic eye and a knack for graphic design. Uncanny business sense combined with excellent creative instincts and big dreams had led the Stamper brothers to enormous success in their earliest days as a company, when they produced games under the trading name 'Ultimate Play the Game,' chosen because, in Tim's words, 'it was representative of our products: the ultimate games.' In May 1983, Ultimate's very first release—a 2D shooting platformer called Jetpac—hit it big on the ZX Spectrum home computer, selling 300,000 copies. Considering about one million people owned a Spectrum at the time, this was, in Chris's words, 'incredible penetration for a single product.' The Stampers worked insane hours to make this happen—eighteen-hour days, seven days per week. In fact, they only took off two days from work over the course of three years—both Christmas mornings."

2) "Brosnan's Bond was more technological than Dalton's or Craig's Bonds, and in GoldenEye, the bad guys weaponize information and surveillance technology, like Trevelyan's satellite or his security cameras in the bunker. It's no accident that you spend so much time in the game blowing up cameras and computers, the new enemies of the era. On the flipside, technical knowledge—like Natalya's computer expertise and the datathiefs and covert modems Bond uses to steal information in the game—proved particularly powerful in 1995. In this way, GoldenEye addressed concerns like, according to academic Martin Willis: 'What place is there for the human in an increasingly technological world? What power will technology wield in the future? What impact will global information and communication networks have on the continued prosperity of the nation-state?' Bond's bungee leap off the dam at the start of the film and game might as well be him diving into the unknown modern world. This tech dive persists until, in the final Brosnan film, Bond drives an invisible car like a superhero."

3) "Hollis told me that he based the delayed watch pause on the same four principles he always uses when making games: Is it fun? Is it funny? Is it self-consistent in the world of the game? and Is it fair?, meaning: 'When you die does it feel like it was your fault?' 'It doesn't have to seem fair straight away,' he told me. 'Sometimes I think it is okay if the player has to spend time and come to a realization that the game rule is fair. As one example, the random placement of the scientists in the gas plant push this rule a lot, but it is okay to play with the rules a little bit I think, and to worry the player on the hardest difficulty. The pause menu delay is highly unconventional, and is definitely pushing the issue of fairness. But once you know the rule, it does always feel like your fault when you die in that moment. You can imagine the game speaking to you softly, saying, 'You should not have paused then.'"

4) "The game's most controversial weapons weren't any of the powerful guns or the massive grenade launcher but rather the knives. The game's throwing knives inflicted a huge amount of damage in total silence and could be picked up and used again. 'We have throwing knives in the game because they're hilarious,' Doak told me, even though they aren't very Bondian per se. 'They were very nearly cut at the last moment because there was a tragic murder in Japan' involving a hunting knife, Doak added. The team received a fax from Nintendo asking them to take out the knives, arguing that a knife felt more offensive than a gun because it meant 'too much murder in the close distance'—an explanation that tickled the team. 'We just loved that phrase,' Doak told me, laughing. 'It became a phrase we would use. Murder in the far distance is great—knock yourself out all day long, but not murder in the close distance.'"

5) "The most famous of GoldenEye's scrapped design elements remains visible to players. The Dam mission is home to one of the game's most tantalizing mysteries—a distant island viewable through the sniper rifle's scope, impossible to get to but so seemingly intentional that it left a generation of gamers wondering. Botwood and Edmonds said they had originally been planning to add a boat that would allow you to get to the island to complete a mission objective. 'If I did it today I'd probably have a control for an open water outlet pipe that was blocking Bond's [bungee] jump there, so you'd have to go there to turn off the water,' Botwood speculated later. 'I think the original plan was to have a building over there to go and investigate, with armour as a reward. That would have meant a boat ride needed to be coded in, and some of the scenery had gaps when viewed from the island, so it was too much work.' Late in development, it was way more difficult to take something like the island out than to just leave it in, Hilton told me. Looking back on it now, Botwood considers the island a mistake. 'I should have never put it there,' he told me. 'It's a visual annoyance.' But messy things like the island add to GoldenEye's mythology—they add life to the world and give players something to theorize about, and are some of the best examples of the handcrafted quality of the game."

6) "The best example of how the team's inexperience benefited the final product is in their 'backwards' or 'anti' game design process. Today, much of the advice on FPS design says to start with objectives and work backward from there—tailor your level spaces to your objectives instead of building level architecture with no idea what will happen within that architecture. Instead, the team designed GoldenEye backwards—levels first and objectives second. When Hilton created the level spaces, he paid little to no attention to the player's starting place, exit point, mission objectives, or enemy location. All of that came later, with Doak and Botwood's work. 'The benefit of this sloppy, unplanned approach was that many of the levels in the game have a realistic and non-linear feel,' Hollis has said. 'There are rooms with no direct relevance to the level. There are multiple routes across the level. This is an anti-game design approach, frankly. It is inefficient because much of the level is unnecessary to the gameplay. But it contributes to a greater sense of freedom, and also realism. And in turn this sense of freedom and realism contributed enormously to the success of the game.'"

7) "After the cheats and bonus levels were added and GoldenEye was tested and scoured for bugs, it went through 'lot check,' a two-week process of playing the game to death on various types of televisions. In these final days, testers reported back a fairly serious problem: on one of the levels, (probably Frigate), if you played it in a certain order, the characters would appear with awful-looking textures due to a glitch in the game's dynamic memory system. In a single day, Hollis had to make a few particularly clever last-minute hacks to the ROM that would get it working with as minimal a touch as possible to the game's code. With that final eleventh-hour adjustment made, and without recompiling anything, Hollis sent the ROM back to Nintendo. GoldenEye was finally finished."

8) "In the end, the reimagining's updates only reveal what made the original so special. The 2010 game's shift from 'slappers only' to 'melee only' 'is almost the same [as the original],' one reviewer noted, 'but perhaps not as hilarious at three in the morning with three other slightly inebriated chums.' GoldenEye's goofiness—its messiness, even—is lost in a game as slick as the 2010 GoldenEye. The Daniel Craig stunt double and martial arts expert who did all the 2010 game's motion-capture acting contrasted sharply with Duncan Botwood in a smelly suit getting beat up by sweet British nerds. But 'bigger' isn't always better. You can feel it as you play the two: the 2010 GoldenEye was created by a corporation, and GoldenEye by human beings."

1) [From "What Is/What If: The Beauty of Mystery, by Karen Lord] "Fiction is both process and mystery, knowledge and imagination. It lies somewhere on a spectrum that begins with poetry and ends with statistics. It is art. It takes the forms and shapes of the real world and re-views them with new perception: the shade, texture, and weight of the subconscious and the unreal."

2) "All of these approaches are valid, depending on context, and each can achieve interesting artistic effects."

3) "As indicated, each of these approaches can work, as long as they don't represent a failure of control or thought. So much depends on the proper execution of your intent."

4) [George RR Martin on magic] "[If] you're going to have magic in your story, you have to keep it magical, so to speak. This is a supernatural element. It doesn't follow the laws of nature. It doesn't follow any laws we understand. There's something frightening about it. This is the unknowable. I think magic should be handled that way. Magic should always remain a little mysterious and a little dangerous. [...] Don't just make it fake science."

1) "If people believe firmly enough that they cannot do math, they will usually succeed in preventing themselves from doing whatever they recognize as math. The consequences of such self-sabotage is personal failure, and each failure reinforces the original belief. And such beliefs may be most insidious when held not only by individuals but by our entire culture."

2) "One day I was surprised to discover that some adults—even most adults—did not understand or even care about the magic of the gears. I no longer think much about gears, but I have never turned away from the questions that started with that discovery: How could what was so simple for me be incomprehensible to other people? My proud father suggested 'being clever' as an explanation. But I was painfully aware that some people who could not understand the differential could easily do things I found much more difficult. Slowly I began to formulate what I still consider the fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can't, anything can be painfully difficult."

3) "In many schools today, the phrase 'computer-aided instruction' means making the computer teach the child. One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building."

4) "Thus this book is really about how a culture, a way of thinking, an idea comes to inhabit a young mind. I am suspicious of thinking about such problems too abstractly, and I shall write here with particular restricted focus. I shall in fact concentrate on those ways of thinking that I know best. I begin by looking at what I know about my own development. I do this in all humility, without any implication that what I have become is what everyone should become. But I think that the best way to understand learning is first to understand specific, well-chosen cases and then to worry afterward about how to generalize from this understanding. You can't think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking about something."

5) "What is happening now is an empirical question. What can happen is a technical question. But what will happen is a political question, depending on social choices."

6) "The ethic of school has rubbed off too well. What we see as a good program with a small bug, the child sees as 'wrong,' 'bad,' 'a mistake.' School teaches that errors are bad; the last thing one wants to do is to pore over them, dwell on them, or think about them. The child is glad to take advantage of the computer's ability to erase it all without any trace for anyone to see. The debugging philosophy suggests an opposite attitude. Errors benefit us because they lead us to study what happened, to understand what went wrong, and, through understanding, to fix it."

7) "Imagine a microworld in which things can be ordered but have no other properties. The knowledge of how to work the world is, in terms of the Bourbaki school, the mother structure of order. A second microworld allows relations of proximity, and this is the mother structure of topology. A third has to do with combining entities to produce new entities; this is the algebraic microstructure. The Bourbaki school's unification of mathematics is achieved by seeing more complex structures, such as arithmetic, as combinations of simpler structures of which the most important are the three mother structures."

8) "The emergence of motion pictures as a new art form went hand in hand with the emergence of a new subculture, a new set of professions made up of people whose skills, sensitivities, and philosophies of life were unlike anything that had existed before. The story of the evolution of the world of movies is inseparable from the story of the evolution of the communities of people. Similarly, a new world of personal computing is about to come into being, and its history will be inseparable from the story of the people who will make it."

9) "In 1964 I moved from one world to another. For the previous five years I had lived in Alpine villages near Geneva, Switzerland, where I worked with Jean Piaget. The focus of my attention was on children, on the nature of thinking, and on how children become thinkers. I moved to MIT into an urban world of cybernetics and computers. My attention was still focused on the nature of thinking, but now my immediate concerns were with the problem of artificial intelligence: How to make machines that think? Two worlds could hardly be more different. But I made the transition because I believed that my new world of machines could provide a perspective that might lead to solutions to problems that had eluded us in the old world of children. Looking back I see that the cross-fertilization has brought benefits in both directions. For several years now Marvin Minsky and I have been working on a general theory of intelligence (called 'The Society Theory of Mind') which has emerged from a strategy of thinking simultaneously about how children do and how computers might think."

1) "Can we unravel the tortuous history of a state-of-the-art technology from beginning to end, as a lesson to the engineers, decisionmakers, and users whose daily lives, for better or for worse, depend on such technology? Can we make the human sciences capable of comprehending the machines they view as inhuman, and thus reconcile the educated public with bodies it deems foreign to the social realm? Finally, can we turn a technological object into the central character of a narrative, restoring to literature the vast territories it should never have given up namely, science and technology? Three questions, a single case study in scientifiction."

2) "'You see, my friend, how precise and sophisticated our informants are,' Norbert commented as he reorganized his notecards. 'They talk about Oedipus and about proximate causes... They know everything. They're doing our sociology for us, and doing it better than we can; it's not worth the trouble to do more. You see? Our job is a cinch. We just follow the players. They all agree, in the end, about the death of Aramis. They blame each other, of course, but they speak with one voice: the proximate cause of death is of no interest-it's just a final blow, a last straw, a ripe fruit, a mere consequence. As M. Girard said so magnificently, 'It was built right into the nature of things.' There's no point in deciding who finally killed Aramis. It was a collective assassination. An abandonment, rather. It's useless to get bogged down concentrating on the final phase. What we have to do is see who built those 'things' in, and into what 'natures.' We're going to have to go back to the beginning of the project, to the remote causes. And remember, this business went on for seventeen years.'"

3) "In the beginning, there is no distinction between projects and objects. The two circulate from office to office in the form of paper, plans, departmental memos, speeches, scale models, and occasional synopses. Here we're in the realm of signs, language, texts. In the end, people, after they leave their offices, are the ones who circulate inside the object. A Copernican revolution. A gulf opens up between the world of signs and the world of things. The R-312 is no longer a novel that carries me away in transports of delight; it's a bus that transports me away from the boulevard Saint-Michel. The observer of technologies has to be very careful not to differentiate too hastily between signs and things, between projects and objects, between fiction and reality, between a novel about feelings and what is inscribed in the nature of things."

4) "The difference between dreams and reality is variable. The guy who spray-paints his innermost feelings on the white walls of the Pigalle metro station may be rebelling against the drab reality of the stations, the cars, the tracks, and the surveillance cameras. His dreams seem to him to be infinitely remote from the harsh truth of the stations, and that's why he signs his name in rage on the white ceramic tiles. The chief engineer who dreams of a speedier metro likewise crosses out plans according to his moods. But if the AT-2000 had been developed, his dream would have become the other's world."

5) "A technological project is neither realistic nor unrealistic; it takes on reality, or loses it, by degrees. After the Orly phase, called Phase 0, Aramis is merely 'realizable'; it is not yet 'real.' You can't use the word 'real' for a nonfailsafe 1.5-kilometer test track that transports engineers from one beet field to another. For this 'engineers' dream' to continue to be realized, other elements have to be added. So can we say that nothing is really real? No. But anything can become more real or less real, depending on the continuous chains of translation. It's essential to continue to generate interest, to seduce, to translate interests. You can't ever stop becoming more real. After the Orly phase, nothing is over, nothing is settled. It's still possible to get along without Aramis. The whole world is still getting along without Aramis."

6) "The time frame for innovations depends on the geometry of the actors, not on the calendar. The history of Aramis spreads out over eighteen years. Is that a long time, or a short one? Is it too long, or not long enough? That depends. On what? On the work of alliance and translation. Eighteen years is awfully short for a radical innovation that has to modify the behavior of the RATP, Matra, chips, passengers, local officials, variable-reluctance motors— what an appropriate name! Eighteen years is awfully long it the project is dropped every three or four years, if Matra periodically loses interest, if the RATP only believes in it sporadically, if officials don't get excited about it, if microprocessors get involved only at arm's length, if the variable-reluctance motor is reluctant to push the cars. Time really drags."

7) "'Why do we do the sociology and history of technology,' asked my mentor Norbert, with tears in his eyes, 'when the people we interview are such good sociologists, such good historians? There's nothing to add. It's all there. 'Built into the nature of things: there you have it-technology! Insert, engrave, inscribe things within, inside, right in the middle, of nature and they flow on their own, they flow from the source, they become automatic. Give me the remote causes let's go back to the mainsprings of the tragedy give me Matra, the Com-munists, the Right, the Left, the mayor of Paris, the traitorous technicians; let's put them on stage in 1984... and in 1987, here comes the death blow. An implacable clockwork is operating before our very eyes. And it's he, the company head, who inscribes, who engraves, these things in nature. He himself machine-tools the fatum that is going to bring the plot to its conclusion with no surprises; he's the deus ex machina, the god of machines. Enshrine the interviews and shut up-that's the only role for a good sociologist.'"

1) "All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING"

2) "For whatever it's worth, here's what I believe. It took me a lot of time to understand it, then a lot more time with a dictionary and a thesaurus to say it just right—just the way it has to be. In the past year, it's gone through twenty-five or thirty lumpy, incoherent rewrites. This is the right one, the true one. This is the one I keep coming back to: God is Power— Infinite, Irresistible, Inexorable, Indifferent. And yet, God is Pliable— Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay. God exists to be shaped. God is Change. This is the literal truth."

3) "Sometimes naming a thing—giving it a name or discovering its name—helps one to begin to understand it. Knowing the name of a thing and knowing what that thing is for gives me even more of a handle on it. The particular God-is-Change belief system that seems right to me will be called Earthseed. I've tried to name it before. Failing that, I've tried to leave it unnamed. Neither effort has made me comfortable. Name plus purpose equals focus for me. Well, today, I found the name, found it while I was weeding the back garden and thinking about the way plants seed themselves, windborne, animalborne, waterborne, far from their parent plants. They have no ability at all to travel great distances under their own power, and yet, they do travel. Even they don't have to just sit in one place and wait to be wiped out. There are islands thousands of miles from anywhere—the Hawaiian Islands, for example, and Easter Island—where plants seeded themselves and grew long before any humans arrived. Earthseed. I am Earthseed. Anyone can be. Someday, I think there will be a lot of us. And I think we'll have to seed ourselves farther and farther from this dying place."

4) "I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as 'the Apocalypse' or more commonly, more bitterly, 'the Pox' lasted from 2015 through 2030—a decade and a half of chaos. This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended."

5) "Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of 'heathen houses of devil-worship,' he has a simple answer: 'Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.'"

6) "Partnership is giving, taking, learning, teaching, offering the greatest possible benefit while doing the least possible harm. Partnership is mutualistic symbiosis. Partnership is life. Any entity, any process that cannot or should not be resisted or avoided must somehow be partnered. Partner one another. Partner diverse communities. Partner life. Partner any world that is your home. Partner God. Only in partnership can we thrive, grow, Change. Only in partnership can we live."

7) "'We need the stars, Bankole. We need purpose! We need the image the Destiny gives us of ourselves as a growing, purposeful species. We need to become the adult species that the Destiny can help us become! If we're to be anything other than smooth dinosaurs who evolve, specialize, and die, we need the stars. That's why the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars. I know you don't want to hear verses right now, but that one is... a major key to us, to human beings, I mean. When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves. We have these chaotic, apocalyptic periods of murderous craziness.'"

8) "Dreamasks—also known as head cages, dream books, or simply, Masks—were new then, and were beginning to edge out some of the virtual-reality stuff. Even the early ones were cheap—big ski-mask-like devices with goggles over the eyes. Wearing them made people look not-quite-human. But the masks made computer-stimulated and guided dreams available to the public, and people loved them. Dreamasks were related to old-fashioned lie detectors, to slave collars, and to a frighteningly efficient form of audiovisual subliminal suggestion. In spite of the way they looked, Dreamasks were lightweight, clothlike, and comfortable. Each one offered wearers a whole series of adventures in which they could identify with any of several characters. They could live their character's fictional life complete with realistic sensation. They could submerge themselves in other, simpler, happier lives. The poor could enjoy the illusion of wealth, the ugly could be beautiful, the sick could be healthy, the timid could be bold..."

9) "'I wonder whether it was your abduction that made your father give up on Jarret.' 'Give up on him?' 'On him and on the United States. He's left the country, after all.' After a moment, she nodded. 'Yes. Although I'm still having trouble thinking of Alaska as a foreign country. I guess that should be easy now, since the war. But it doesn't matter. None of this matters. I mean, those people—that man and his kids who you just fed—they matter, but no one cares about them. Those kids are the future if they don't starve to death. But if they manage to grow up, what kind of men will they be?' 'That's what Earthseed was about,' I said. 'I wanted us to understand what we could be, what we could do. I wanted to give us a focus, a goal, something big enough, complex enough, difficult enough, and in the end, radical enough to make us become more than we ever have been. We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that's the way things are. That's the way things always have been.' 'It is,' Len said. 'It is,' I repeated. 'There seem to be solid biological reasons why we are the way we are. If there weren't, the cycles wouldn't keep replaying. The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can grow up. We can leave the nest. We can fulfill the Destiny, make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and whatever our new environments challenge us to become. Our new worlds will remake us as we remake them. And some of the new people who emerge from all this will develop new ways to cope. They'll have to. That will break the old cycle, even if it's only to begin a new one, a different one. 'Earthseed is about preparing to fulfill the Destiny. It's about learning to live in partnership with one another in small communities, and at the same time, working out a sustainable partnership with our environment. It's about treating education and adaptability as the absolute essentials that they are. It's...' I glanced at Len, caught a little smile on her face, and wound down. 'It's about a lot more than that,' I said. 'But those are the bones.'"

10) "To survive, Know the past. Let it touch you. Then let The past Go."

1) "Already at work on the building site, which sprawled through the heart of Florence, were scores of other craftsmen: carters, bricklayers, leadbeaters, even cooks and men whose job it was to sell wine to the workers on their lunch breaks. From the piazza surrounding the cathedral the men could be seen carting bags of sand and lime, or else clambering about on wooden scaffolds and wickerwork platforms that rose above the neighboring rooftops like a great, untidy bird's nest. Nearby, a forge for repairing their tools belched clouds of black smoke into the sky, and from dawn to dusk the air rang with the blows of the blacksmith's hammer and with the rumble of oxcarts and the shouting of orders. Florence in the early 1400s still retained a rural aspect. Wheat fields, orchards, and vineyards could be found inside its walls, while flocks of sheep were driven bleating through the streets to the market near the Baptistery of San Giovanni. But the city also had a population of 50,000, roughly the same as London's, and the new cathedral was intended to reflect its importance as a large and powerful mercantile city. Florence had become one of the most prosperous cities in Europe. Much of its wealth came from the wool industry started by the Umiliati monks soon after their arrival in the city in 1239. Bales of English wool—the finest in the world—were brought from monasteries in the Cotswolds to be washed in the river Arno, combed, spun into yarn, woven on wooden looms, then dyed beautiful colors: vermilion, made from cinnabar gathered on the shores of the Red Sea, or a brilliant yellow procured from the crocuses growing in meadows near the hilltop town of San Gimignano. The result was the most expensive and most sought-after cloth in Europe."

2) "Yet by 1418 what was by far the grandest building project in Florence had still to be completed. A replacement for the ancient and dilapidated church of Santa Reparata, the new cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore was intended to be one of the largest in Christendom. Entire forests had been requisitioned to provide timber for it, and huge slabs of marble were being transported along the Arno on flotillas of boats. From the outset its construction had as much to do with civic pride as religious faith: the cathedral was to be built, the Commune of Florence had stipulated, with the greatest lavishness and magnificence possible, and once completed it was to be 'a more beautiful and honourable temple than any in any other part of Tuscany.' But it was clear that the builders faced major obstacles, and the closer the cathedral came to completion, the more difficult their task would become."

3) "Filippo, on the other hand, offered a simpler and more daring solution: he proposed to do away with the centering altogether. This was an astounding proposal. Even the smallest arches were built over wooden centering. How then would it be possible to span the enormous diameter called for in the 1367 model without any support, particularly when the bricks at the top of the vault would be inclined at 60-degree angles to the horizontal? So astonishing was the plan that many of Filippo's contemporaries considered him a lunatic. And it has likewise confounded more recent commentators who are reluctant to believe that such a feat could actually have been possible."

4) "Given the experimental nature of Filippo's plan, the 30-braccia limit seems to have been a wise precaution, especially since a sound logic governs the restriction. At a height of 30 braccia the bed joints of the masonry would have risen to form an angle of 30 degrees to the horizontal, or just inside the critical angle of sliding. Friction alone would keep the stones in place up to an angle of 30 degrees, even when the mortar was green; therefore, no centering would have been required until that point. Above that level, however, each course of masonry would incline more sharply, reaching a maximum angle, near the top, of 60 degrees to the horizontal. No doubt it was impossible for the wardens to imagine how these courses might be held in place without centering of some sort."

5) "Religious feasts were numerous in Florence, averaging almost one per week. The populace was accustomed to grand spectacles on these occasions: to the sight of priests and monks in rich habits of gold and silk bearing through the streets the standards of their orders and their most prized relics, all to the tolling of bells, the blaring of trumpets, the chanting of songs and the splashing of holy water. But in 1436 the Feast of the Annunciation, observed on the twenty-fifth of March, was the occasion for a celebration that was spectacular even by the standards of Florence. On this day Pope Eugenius IV processed eastward to the center of the city from his residence in Santa Maria Novella. He was accompanied by seven cardinals, thirty-seven bishops, and nine members of the Florentine government, including Cosimo de' Medici. The procession moved along a 1,000-foot-long wooden platform, six feet in height, that was bedecked with sweet-smelling flowers and herbs. This gangway had been designed by Filippo to carry the pope safely above the crowds teeming in the streets below, a method of crowd control evidently selected in place of a much-used alternative, that of throwing coins into the street in order to scatter the people and keep them from pressing too closely upon the Holy Father. As the entourage turned into the Via de' Cerretani and creaked across the boardwalk in the direction of the thronging Piazza San Giovanni, the new cathedral rose suddenly into view. After 140 years of construction, the time had finally come to consecrate Santa Maria del Fiore."