sci-fi Quotes

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.”

“The ... smart ones are as smart as the Turing heat is willing to let ‘em get.”

“For ... years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible.”

“She dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of individual consciousness.”

“Of course I dreamed. The cold let the outside in, that was it. The outside. All the night I built this to hide us from. Just a drop, at first, one grain of night seeping in, drawn by the cold.”

“You can’t let the little pricks generation-gap you.”

“Very flash. What he imagines, you see.”

“Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed.”

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

“Operators above a certain level tended to submerge their personalities, he knew. ”

“This is my first visit to the moon. I’m like a kid in a candy store! I’ve always been a fan of science fiction. I grew up watching Star Trek. Now I get to live it!”

It’s also horribly, heartbreakingly sad. After a nuclear cataclysm transforms the world as they know it, the survivors are thrown into a cruel new reality.

“She heard the outer door of the house open, and slam shut. Raising her head, she looked down from the stove-top and saw the inner door fly open. In hurried a tall figure, hidden under a big fur hat and a long, quilted, padded, fantastically embroidered coat.”

Fifteen-year-old Dolf uses a prototype time machine and gets stuck in the Middle Ages. Trying to find his way back to the twentieth century, he joins a children’s crusade of almost ten thousand children on their way to the Holy Land.

Danny survives the bombing and rejoins what is left of his family to face the struggles of life after the bombing. The book is full of awful scenes---the dead who died from the bombing, the dead who slowly die after the bombing, shooting those who have food, and much more.

Before the nuclear bomb that destroyed their northern England town (and many others), Danny Lodge, his little brother Ben and his father kept a little convenience shop.

“In a place far distant from where you are now grows an oak-tree by a lake. Round the oak’s trunk is a chain of golden links. Tethered to the chain is a learned cat, and this most learned of all cats walks round and round the tree continually.”

“It was that which first made me understand the enormity of what had happened. Nuclear missiles had fallen on England, and if they’d fallen on England they must have fallen on a lot of other countries too. This rain, black rain, was falling now on each of them.”