Will > Books: science-fiction‎ (48)

The road to ruin is paved with certainty. The end of the world is only ever hastened by those who think they will be able to protect their own from

The road to ruin is paved with certainty. The end of the world is only ever hastened by those who think they will be able to protect their own from the coming storm.

Love is the mind killer.

They were definitely not inspired by anyone specifically who could sue me for everything I’m worth and barely notice it…They are composite characters made up of some of the ridiculous and awful things that tech billionaires have done and some of it just made up out of my head. But of course the companies are inspired by real companies. - from the LitHub interview

“Margaret [Atwood] has very much covered how bad it can get, so we don’t need a lesser writer doing that,” Alderman says. “I’m interested in the most radical ideas about how we can make things better, and what are the avenues we can pursue.” - from the AP interview

The wealthier you are, the less you have to ask people things and the less you ask people for things, the less you have to discover that you can trust and rely on them. Eventually, that erodes your ability to trust. Then, you’re sunk. - from the Electric Literature interview

In today’s culture, technology, particularly social media, “encourages us not to really trust each other,” Alderman explains. “The ways that we use to communicate with each other have been monetized in order to make us as angry at and afraid [of one another] as possible.” And while the internet can all too often amplify “absolute hateful stupidity” to feed our distrust of one another, the author continues, “It can also demonstrably, again and again, multiply our knowledge and capacity to understand.” - from the Shondaland interview

Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures. The pulse beats faster, the pressure rises, the voice of instinct drives out reason and education. At a certain point, things become inevitable.

Naomi Alderman is the bestselling author of The Power, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as a book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and was recommended as a book of the year by both Barack Obama and Bill Gates. As a novelist, Alderman has been mentored by Margaret Atwood via the Rolex Arts Initiative, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. As a video games designer, she was lead writer on the groundbreaking alternate reality game Perplex City, and is cocreator of the award-winning smartphone exercise adventure game Zombies, Run!, which has more than 10 million players. She is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University. She lives in London.

…plugged in, navigating their vast library of original experiences and user – generated contact, his company could now map the reactions, decisions

…plugged in, navigating their vast library of original experiences and user – generated contact, his company could now map the reactions, decisions, even lingering, emotional responses of anyone who stuck around long enough to let their imagination build on the pre-existing foundation of an original experience – from what made a user crush to what made them cry out in pain, and reject the virtual experience altogether. It was a deep well. More than what made people tick, they were beginning to understand what those text amounted to. The way person would call might act. Even why.

…she had a weirdness about her that bordered on hostility.

…he’d made an awful thing. An awful place where you could never be alone. Where other people could climb in, touch everything. Turned you against yourself. Turn what you loved into something reprehensible. You could turn it back, but what happened to you once you’d seen it? once someone else had seen you see it?

I’m a Narrative Designer with a literary career. In addition to years of experience as a writer and designer for interactive games, I'm an experienced screenwriter and the author of seven books, published internationally and translated into multiple languages. My writing has also appeared in numerous publications, including Playboy Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, and McSweeney's, and it has been praised in numerous high profile venues, including the NY Times, New Yorker Magazine, LA Times, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone (France), Le Monde, and others. I'm a prolific writer and a confident collaborator with experience working across departments.

Here’s what I can say with some certainty. Something is happening. Case in point: WZPE’s AM news show usually ends at 8am. Not today. They’ve basic

Here’s what I can say with some certainty. Something is happening. Case in point: WZPE’s AM news show usually ends at 8am. Not today. They’ve basically got the phone lines wide open, and people are calling in by the hundreds. The last caller just sobbed, “They’re dead, they’re dead, they’re dead,” and disconnected.
There are TV and radio stations all over the state that just . . . aren’t on the air at all.
From my window, if I elevate my chair, I usually have a great view of the mile-long gridlock at the intersection of Monaghan and Wolcott. The traffic lights there aren’t even working, but the intersection’s just . . . dead. No cars that I’ve seen.
Usually by now my upstairs neighbor is jazzercising. But the whole building is strangely subdued. I haven’t heard a single other person.
Perhaps it’s my overactive imagination . . . but I really don’t think that’s the case.
If you have any information about what might be happening, I’ll see you in the comments.
—Posted by Eli Broder, 7/4/25 9:12am

A large room, lined with storage bins and shelves, has been transformed into a morgue. Shoved along the west wall are gurneys bearing zippered white bags. Human-sized bags, arranged haphazardly, as though they were rolled into the room and released to drift where they may. Which is exactly what happens next: An orderly in a white smock bangs into the room through an adjacent door, back first, then drags a fresh gurney into the room, pivots, and releases it, sending it spinning across the floor. It thumps into another gurney, and both roll in separate directions. The orderly, not pausing to admire his handiwork, disappears through the door again.

Santa Mira felt like a fun nod to Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, a huge influence on the show. And we think it’s a cool tradition that many writers and creators have used the same town. - from Paul Semel interview

After working on The Edge Of Sleep for so long, and in so many different iterations, we needed a fresh set of eyes. Jason had some really creative and cool ideas to expand the story. - from the Paul Semel interview

“Mama,” Davy, the child, moans.
“This is your fault,” the beast says. Its trunk searches out Davy’s face, presses slick against his cheek, exhales hot, sour breath into his hair. “I warned you, didn’t I.”
Davy looks down at his pajama shirt. Something beneath bulges. Utter panic consumes him as he clutches at his shirt, trying to hold it away from his skin. He looks wildly at the thing above him.
“I can’t stop it now,” the elephant grunts. Its mouth unhinges, and a thick river of mustard-colored bile streams onto Dave’s legs. “I wouldn’t if I could. You aren’t a good boy.”
Davy, blinded by pain, cups his hands over his chest in time to catch the small elephant that bursts from his breastbone. Yellow foam rises in Dave’s throat; he can’t clear it to breathe.
The small elephant stretches in Davy’s little palms, glistening and damp. Davy’s vision blurs; he’s suddenly terribly sleepy, and his hands fall limp.

My mother had tried to edit a few rice paddies and ended up killing two hundred million people. What havoc could she wreak—intentionally or throug

My mother had tried to edit a few rice paddies and ended up killing two hundred million people. What havoc could she wreak—intentionally or through unintended consequences—by attempting to change something as fundamental as how Homo sapiens think?

We were a bunch of primates who had gotten together and, against all odds, built a wondrous civilization. But paradoxically—tragically—our creation’s complexity had now far outstripped our brains’ ability to manage it.

The book is set slightly in the future, because I wanted to accelerate where some of the climate change and more in-the-weeds technology was heading, but it’s a mirror of where we might be five minutes from now. - Time interview

What if you create a bunch of people who are just drastically better at what they already were. Soldiers. Criminals. Politicians. Capitalists?

TIME: You did a ton of research on gene editing for Upgrade. Was there anything you learned that stood out?
Blake Crouch: The big thing I came away with is how afraid scientists are of this research and this technology. I didn’t realize how unnerved everyone was about both the optimistic potential of this technology—but also the pitfalls that await us.

When nothing works anything goes.

Be Prepared! - Boy Scout Motto

When nothing works anything goes.

Be Prepared! - Boy Scout Motto

The notion of extraordinary global events that deprive us of power—in ways both literal and figurative—is something I’ve explored in the past. But it was fascinating to shift my focus from the global to the hyperlocal, and the ways in which tiny communities might come together or split apart during hardship. - from the acknowledgments

The guy who impressed Aubrey when they met has taken a nose-dive straight to the bottom, drugs, crime, amorality, and a willingness to use anyone to get what he wants. Rusty was a “shit,” used in the classical sense of “waste matter expelled from the body,” because he had been an enormous misuse of her time, resources, and love.

…last year, things made sense. Last year, you walked into the grocery store, you paid a fair price, and you came out with your dinner. This year, you beg somebody to sell you a week’s worth of groceries for a thousand dollars. ‘if you’re lucky, they say yes, and you eat. If you’re not. They beat you to death, take your money, and they eat.

David Koepp has written or co-written the screenplays for more than thirty films, including Apartment Zero (1989), Bad Influence (1990), Death Becomes Her (1992), Carlito’s Way (1993), Jurassic Park (1993), The Paper (1994), Mission: Impossible (1996), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Snake Eyes (1998), Panic Room (2002), Spider-Man (2002), War of the Worlds (2005), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), Angels & Demons (2009), and Inferno (2016).
As a director, his work includes the films The Trigger Effect (1996), Stir of Echoes (1999), Secret Window (2004), Ghost Town (2007), Premium Rush (2012), and You Should Have Left (2020). Ghost Town and Premium Rush were co-written with the enigmatic John Kamps.
Koepp’s first novel, Cold Storage, was published by Ecco in 2019, and his new story Yard Work is coming from Audible Originals in July.

I now understand why desperate people find religion, or end up believing in aliens or conspiracy theories. Because sometimes the rational answer do

I now understand why desperate people find religion, or end up believing in aliens or conspiracy theories. Because sometimes the rational answer doesn’t cut it. Sometimes you have to look outside the box. And my hope-desperation twofer had led me way outside the box, all the way to a Willow Green allotment in fact, where, God help me, I was waiting to meet a bunch of people who even the most charitable among us would label “raging nut-job weirdos.”

Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

I’m getting close to 50. And though I still feel and behave like a kid most of the time, my eyesight is fading, I can apparently injure myself while sleeping and my little baby boys are suddenly big hairy-legged job-working car-driving high school kids. I’m realizing that everything—youth, hairlines, memories, civilizations—fades. And the amazing technology that is a printed book seems to be one of the few human inventions that has outlived whole human generations. What a privilege it is to open a book like The Iliad and summon tales that entertained people almost 3,000 years ago.

I hope that my readers will be reminded that librarians serve as stewards of human memory—without librarians, we lose perhaps our most important windows into the human journey. - from the QBD interview

They were a place where I felt completely safe. And just the miracle of them, there's something that - talk about peeling the scales off your eyes. Like, here's the work of all these masters available to you for free. And you can take them home. - from the NPR interview

“That’s the real joy,” Doerr said, “the visceral pleasure that comes from taking these stories, these lives, and intersecting them, braiding them.” - from the NY Times interview

He had hit upon this approach for the most practical of reasons. As a parent, he couldn’t hope to get more than an hour or two of solid work done before having to attend to shuttling the boys to swim practice or some other activity. “I might have stumbled accidentally into that,” he said. - from the NY Times interview

“Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”
His eyes open very widely then, as though he peers into a great darkness.
“But books, like people, die too. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”

Doesn’t the body remember, even after the mind has been wiped clean?

Doesn’t the body remember, even after the mind has been wiped clean?

”…to truly leave yourself, the one place you can never escape, and to experience a moment as someone else. That is the ultimate luxury.”

He holds it, his grandmother’s life, between two fingers. He is sad for Florence [grandma], so trapped inside her body. Her life lost while still alive. But he is also jealous. She disappears into moments where his mother still lives, and where he exists, before all this. What could be the harm, in seeing what she sees? What damage would it do her to share? He needs to see her again. Just once would be enough.

For Graham, “blood memory” is the innate knowledge we have of the physical experiences lived by our ancestors. - from the Garage Museum site

The EOS team viewed her as an ISF snitch, a ladder-climber, a betrayal to her peer group—and also just plain strange. She was also troublingly unav

The EOS team viewed her as an ISF snitch, a ladder-climber, a betrayal to her peer group—and also just plain strange. She was also troublingly unavailable as a sexual partner—none of the expedition members were married—and this isolated her even further. There was no comfortable niche for her in the social structure. No connections to anchor her to the community.
Once, during a patient session, Valentina Hanover asked to be called “Hunter."
“Hunter,” Park repeated, thinking of her file. “That isn’t your middle name.”
Valentina gave her a look of loathing. “It’s called a nickname, you absolute imbecile.”
That about summed up everyone else’s apparent impressions of Park. She barely spoke to them, and when she did, it always seemed like she came off as baffling, primitive: some kind of specimen that one examined with half-disgust, like protozoic ooze. No, they acted like she was an alien sightseer, ogling the most basic human interactions, and in turn, they ogled her, too—squinted at her from behind the glass, whispered and smirked to each other.

“I don’t think,” he said, “that humans can live here, Park.”
“So why are we still here?”

I was sleeping, and then when I woke up—I couldn’t move. There were all these lights flashing in my face. I tried to open my mouth to yell for someone, but—I had no tongue.”
“In your dream,” Park couldn’t stop herself from saying.
Holt shook his head again, but Park couldn’t tell what it meant. He continued, “My lungs were frozen; I couldn’t breathe. I was cold—so fucking cold. Like I was dead. Like my skin was peeling off. None of my organs were working. And I—I wasn’t in control of myself. I wanted to go outside. Leave the ship. But I was trapped inside my body and couldn’t move. I thought to myself that I’d rather be dead than keep feeling that way. I wanted to be dead.”

It didn’t help that the air was so muggy and damp, as if she were walking into the gullet of something alive.

Solitude for her was like a religious blessing to others: it was her church of one. Always she closed the doors behind her with the awareness that she was giving herself sanctuary, an opportunity to cleanse and be purified. Fulbreech was like the neighbor who kept her from shutting the door, asking if she was interested in participating in the annual bake sale.

Did anyone really have the capacity to care—truly care—beyond the instinct to ally, fuck, and raise their young to breeding age? Were there any decisions guided by pure selflessness? Not in humans, she supposed—in androids, yes. It was too bad no one else could see the beauty in that.

The daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Lena Nguyen lives with her partner in the alien desert of Arizona. She received her MFA in fiction from Cornell University, where she also taught courses in English, writing, and zombies. Her science fiction and fantasy have won several accolades, and she was a Writers of the Future finalist. When not writing, Lena enjoys editing and game development. We Have Always Been Here is her debut novel.

Santi steps closer as she holds the light up to the gears. 'Think we can fix it?'
Thora puts her weight to one of the gears and tries to shove it ba

Santi steps closer as she holds the light up to the gears. 'Think we can fix it?'
Thora puts her weight to one of the gears and tries to shove it backwards. 'No,' she says, after a few seconds. 'I'm afraid time has stopped.'
Santi tries to push the gear in the other direction. Giving up, he steps back. 'I guess it has.' He smiles at her sideways in the flickering light. 'Welcome to forever.'
It's a pretentious thing to say. But Thora has to admit that's exactly how this feels: a moment taken out of time, with no beginning or end.

Recurring elements (Santi’s cat, a tattoo on Thora’s wrist) first gain meaning through repetition, and then become touchstones, triggering inferences for the reader about how the characters have changed and where they might be headed. Once Santi and Thora realize they are trapped in a loop, they (along with the reader) must piece together the clues scattered through the narrative to figure out what might really be going on. - from the LitHub article

…the question was: can two people ever know each other completely? That led me to the idea of characters who meet again and again in different versions of their lives…I think of the book as an argument: Thora and Santi have very different attitudes to their situation, and that leads them to respond to it in different ways. - from the Deborah Kalb interview

Santi has always trusted in fate: that there is one way thing have to go. He isn’t literal enough to believe that the future is written in the stars—he’s doing a PhD in astronomy, after all—but his memories of other skies still unsettle him. The idea that there are other possible configurations for the universe, that God could be running them all in parallel, cuts against everything he believes. The only way he can reconcile what he remembers is to think that it’s a message, one he’s not yet ready to understand. He watches the world like a detective, like a poet, waiting for the meaning to come clear.

”This’ll never work, you know,” she says conversationally.
Santi frowns at her. “Who says?”
“All my exes. Most recently, my ex-girlfriend Jules. She told me when we broke up what my problem is.”
“What’s your problem?”
“I always want somewhere else. I’m never just—content to be where I am.”
He shrugs. “Neither am I.”
She gives him a look. ”What do you mean? You’re, like, Mr Serenity.”
A smile cracks his face. “That may be what it looks like on the outside. But inside, I’m always searching…We’re the same that way.”

If God’s test were easy, it would be meaningless.

Thirty years. I looked out at their little faces. In thirty years they’d all be in their early forties. They would bear the brunt of it all. And it

Thirty years. I looked out at their little faces. In thirty years they’d all be in their early forties. They would bear the brunt of it all. And it wouldn’t be easy. These kids were going to grow up in an idyllic world and be thrown into an apocalyptic nightmare.
They were the generation that would experience the Sixth Extinction Event.

Knock-knock-knock.
No, that’s not creepy at all. Being in a spaceship twelve light-years from home and having someone knock on the door is totally normal.

I slide one leg off over the edge of my bed, which makes it wobble. The robot arms rush toward me. I flinch, but they stop short and hover nearby. I think they’re ready to grab me if I fall.
“Full-body motion detected,” the computer says. “What’s your name?”
“Pfft, seriously?” I ask.
“Incorrect. Attempt number two: What’s your name?”
I open my mouth to answer.
“Uh…”
“Incorrect. Attempt number three: What’s your name?”
Only now does it occur to me: I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I do. I don’t remember anything at all.
“Um,” I say.
“Incorrect.”
A wave of fatigue grips me. It’s kind of pleasant, actually. The computer must have sedated me through the IV line.
“…waaaait…” I mumble.
The robot arms lay me gently back down to the bed.

It’s caused a lot of headaches with the translators. Nobody outside the U.S. knows this phrase. Even English-speaking countries like the U.K. don't have that expression. In most of the language translations, they're changing the title. In one of them it’s just called The Astronaut or something like that. - from the GR interview

Ryland Grace was my first attempt to make a protagonist not to be based on me. He's a unique character I'm creating from whole cloth, and so I'm not limited by my own personality or experiences. - from the GR interview

I’m a smartass myself, so smartass comments come naturally to me. For me, humor is like the secret weapon of exposition. If you make exposition funny, the reader will forgive any amount of it. And in science fiction—especially with my self-imposed restriction that I want to be as scientifically accurate as possible—you end up spending a lot of time doing exposition. - from the Publishers Weekly interview

After The Martian, I had this idea for this massive space epic—a traditional sci-fi pilot with aliens, faster-than-light travel, and telepathy and a war and, yeah, a ten-book series and everything. I worked on it for about a year; it was going to be called Zhek. I got 70,000 words in, and…I realized that it sucked…But there are a few nuggets in Zhek that were solid. There was one interesting character who was this absolutely no-nonsense woman with a ruthless drive to get what she needs to get done and a tremendous amount of secret authority. And she became Stratt in Project Hail Mary. The other thing is, in Zhek there was this substance called black matter, which was a technology invented by aliens that would absorb all electromagnetic waves, all light, and turn it into mass and then turn it back into light…if humanity got ahold of some of that, it would be neat, but it would suck if we accidentally let any of that get into the sun—that would be a disaster. I'm like, “Wait a minute, that would be a disaster! That's where books come from!” - from the Goodreads interview

Science teachers know a lot of random facts.

There is nothing so disturbing as a creature born to flight being bound to dull lifelessness.

A nameless s

There is nothing so disturbing as a creature born to flight being bound to dull lifelessness.

A nameless sadness, the fading away of the birds. The fading away of the animals. How lonely it will be here, when it’s just us.

The sea for her is one of the great loves of her life. Maybe it’s the family she never had. She feels more connected to her body, and weightless, and almost able to fly like the birds she loves. - from the -WriterUnboxed interview

Niall is absolutely symbolic of the birds for Franny. He represents the idea that you can study what you love without taking away from the magic in those things. - from the Dead Darlings interview

I tried for Niall, like I did for my mother. I really did. But the rhythms of the sea’s tides are the only things we humans have not yet destroyed.

It was really important to me to write the moments in Franny’s past that make her who she is, and for the reader to be able to experience those moments on an intimate level with her, because I felt that this would allow readers to connect more deeply with her and what drives her through the story. There’s also a lot of tension to be built in using suspension and mystery—you leave clues peppered throughout and only reveal information at moments that will create catharsis for your readers. - from the Amazon interview

I didn’t want to write a dystopian novel about the physical impacts of climate change, such as what would become of our food supply. I wanted this to be an existential look at the way the loss of the animals would make us feel, and I think this was a refusal of the idea that humans are the most important things on this planet, and that everything exists in service to us. I wanted the world I drew to look almost identical to the world today, apart from that one major difference, hoping that this would be a more confronting way to predict how close a future without animals really is. - from the Amazon interview

A shiver of delight finds me as we set out into the dark water. We hug the coast, traveling north by the ceaseless circling light of the lighthouse. The salty smell of the sea and the sound of its crash, the sway of the waves and the black abyss of its depths, the reaching dark of it, up to where it meets the inky velvet sky pricked through with glitter. With the stars reflected in the water we could be sailing through the sky itself; there is no end to it, no end to the sea or the sky but a gentle joining together.

“You ever get the feeling,” she said…”that somebody else already did all this shit? That we’re, like, just watching it happen?”

“You ever get the feeling,” she said…”that somebody else already did all this shit? That we’re, like, just watching it happen?”

Short, thin, with narrow shoulders. The head just a little too big for that slight body, skull-like, all forehead and cheekbones, narrow as a trowel at the mouth.

If she had a choice, if she’d learned anything tonight, she would never speak to any of them again. But she knew, here, too, that this wasn’t how things would work out. She would find a way to call Stacy, and later find a way to ask Wolfboy’s forgiveness. And inside she would hate them both a little for knowing her too long, for not letting her change, not letting her find out who she really was. What she was, what she wanted to be, or what she wanted others to see in her was that song “Pretty Vacant” by the Sex Pistols, just emptied out and gone, as if someone better than Ted or Chris or anyone ever asked her, that’s what she would say and if they laughed, she would beat them to the ground like she had Wolfboy. Or she wouldn’t. Of course she wouldn’t.

I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma. In the late ’80s a mall was built in the next town over, and at its center — as far as I was concerned — was this dark arcade where I would occasionally run into people I knew from school or others of my age from nearby towns. I feel like in my pre-teen imagination the place was a kind of salon for dorks like me. Of course, I’d only have 15 or 20 minutes to roam around wasting quarters while my mom was looking at shoes or something. But it’s buried deep in there, and through that memory I discovered the character of Debbie, who is much cooler than I ever was, and much tougher. - from the Bookweb interview

Originally, he’d pictured retiring at fifty-nine to be filled with travel and projects around the house. Instead he’d spent most of his time puttering from room to room and getting on his wife’s nerves. She wasn’t used to him being around all day…what he really wanted to tell her he couldn’t put together in words. Something about how he missed her so desperately, how it seemed anymore they were strangers passing on a sidewalk, how he’d started to itch with this feeling that he’d wasted all his life doing next to nothing.

As she spoke about it all, he began to see it in his mind, and as it formed, he felt a warm glow at the base of his neck. Here was a dream, yes, and the two of them, connected to it only by hearsay, frolicked in its possibilities. A town was more like a family, spreading out in all directions, changing its neighboring towns like falling dominoes. The vision of this better place seemed so easy to make true, and he had to stop himself from reaching out and taking her hand in his. To his surprise they had already become friends.

The image I kept in my head as I wrote and revised was of a painting with a foreground and background. In the foreground are these characters in each of their stories, but looming behind them is this shared background…this structure allowed me to create a sense of characters flowing through history, absorbed in their personal lives even though we (readers, I mean) can see and understand that history, those bigger shifts happening around and to them. - from the Vol. 1 Brooklyn interview

He looked up into the deep vastness above, hoping for a shooting star to arc earthward, something he could take home as a sign. But there was only the chill in the air and the big country around him, floating loose, unmoored, starved for meaning.

Nature was a green battlefield where the weak were forever preyed on by the strong. Nature did not care, nor did the earth, which for all its beaut

Nature was a green battlefield where the weak were forever preyed on by the strong. Nature did not care, nor did the earth, which for all its beauty was nonetheless a hard place, indifferent to its creatures. It was mind that mattered, mind that cared, mind that loved, the best works of the mind that changed this hard world for the better. Mind—and heart—had bonded people and dogs for tens of thousands of years. They had formed an alliance for survival and a covenant of affection against the darkness of the world.

Neither the law nor any code of morality constrains him, because he knows them to be fantasies of order. In truth, the only rule by which anyone can live successfully, either in the wilds or in civilization, is the sole mandate of cruel Nature: Prey shall submit, and predators shall reign supreme.

To Woody, the internet was a planet of its own, every site a village or a city with its neighborhoods and streets, a planet across which he traveled as if by magic, typing a brief incantation and, with a click, teleporting from one continent to another.

On Interstate 80, south of Colfax, they pulled into a rest stop that provided bathrooms as filthy as any in the state’s most deteriorated public schools.

As a citizen of the modern state, he had uncountable reasons to understand that a slight excess of power rapidly became a lethal excess, that when an agent of the state insisted he had come to help, there was at least a 70 percent chance that he had come to punish or pillage.

the wind howled down on the house, not a nature sound empty of meaning, but a shriek of blackest madness
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The wind sang requiem for the world, and it seemed to Carson that the chilly currents of harried air were more than that, were also time itself racing toward some plug that had been pulled, to drain away and leave the world eternally still, silent, and dark.
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the sagging chain-link sang eerily in the wind: Hell’s harp strings strummed by a demon hand. Plastic bags of numerous origins, in a variety of conditions, caught in the gaps between the links, flapped and fluttered, producing a sound like a swarm of wings, as if a colony of bats were passing low overhead.
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The wind raving like rabid wolves outside, the building seeming filled with machine sounds, as if the Robots of the Apocalypse were being manufactured there.

We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet; and amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us. - Maurice Maeterlinck

I found a way, I found a way to survive with them. Am I a great person? I don’t know. I don’t know. We’re all great people. Everyone has something in

I found a way, I found a way to survive with them. Am I a great person? I don’t know. I don’t know. We’re all great people. Everyone has something in them that is wonderful. I’m just different and I love these bears enough to do it right. I’m edgy enough and I’m tough enough. But mostly I love these bears enough to survive and do it right. – from the video diary of Timothy Treadwell, self-proclaimed “Grizzly Man,” recorded right before he was eaten by a bear

On April 1, 1969 the Board of Commissioners of Skamania County, Washington State, adopted an ordinance for the protection of sasquatch/bigfoot creatures (Ordinance No.69-01). Although it sounds like an April Fool's Day joke, it was an official ordinance. It was published in the local weekly newspaper, Skamania County Pioneer on April 4 and April 11, 1969. Because people did not take it seriously, the newspaper publisher had the article notarized on April 12, 1969, and printed both the ordinance and an Affidavit of Publication in a subsequent paper edition. - Courthouse Libraries- BC

It’s great to live free of the other sheep until you hear the wolves howl.

Adversity introduces us to ourselves.

But whoso shall offend one of these little ones…it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the

But whoso shall offend one of these little ones…it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. -- Matthew, Chapter 18

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, roughly 800,000 children are reported missing each year in the United States. Most are found. Thousands are not.

Great events turn on small hinges.

The concept for the book dates back more than two decades, when King — who has depicted similar psychic characters as loners in books such as “Carrie,” “The Shining,” “Firestarter” and “The Dead Zone” — pictured an entire schoolhouse filled with such kids. When he began writing the book in March 2017, he thought of it not as a horror story but as a resistance tale, with 12-year-old telekinetic genius Luke, teenage mind reader Kalisha and 10-year-old power-channeler Avery forming a rebellion inside their detention center.
“I wanted to write about how weak people can be strong,” King says, speaking by phone from his home in Bangor, Me. “We’re each on our own island, and at the same time sometimes we can yell to each other and get together, and there is that sense of community and empathy. I love that.” - from the NY Times interview

The Institute is about a concentration camp for children, staffed by implacable factotums. To what extent did Trump’s immigration policies affect the book?
Trump’s immigration policies didn’t impact the book, because it was written before that incompetent dumbbell became president. Children are imprisoned and enslaved all over the world. Hopefully, people who read The Institute will find a resonant chord with this administration’s cruel and racial policies.

“I wanted to write a book like Tom Brown’s School Days,” King says, referencing the 1857 Thomas Hughes children’s classic about a British boarding school. “But in hell.”

Long before Stranger Things and even It, children with supernatural powers were at the center of King books like Carrie, The Shining, and Firestarter. “Like a pitcher that has a great fastball or slider, you go back to what worked for you before,” says King. “I do think that kids are sort of magic. When I was a young man, I could draw [inspiration] from my own kids. Now that I’m so much older, I am drawing from my grandchildren and what I see them doing and how I see them interacting.”

Only in the Westside could a woman with blood in her hair stroll down the sidewalk on a weekday afternoon, wearing nothing but a slip and hearing o

Only in the Westside could a woman with blood in her hair stroll down the sidewalk on a weekday afternoon, wearing nothing but a slip and hearing only the chattering of a few far-off birds.

“I’m a go-between. On the one side is Elmo Shepherd, who believes that brains can be simulated—and that once the simulation is switched on, you’ll

“I’m a go-between. On the one side is Elmo Shepherd, who believes that brains can be simulated—and that once the simulation is switched on, you’ll reboot in exactly the same state as when you last lost consciousness. Like waking up from a nap. On the other side is Jake, who believes in the existence of an ineffable spirit that cannot be re-created in computer code.”
“What do you believe, Enoch?”
“Jake’s opinion is based on a theology I do not agree with. But like a lot of theologies it can do duty as a cracked mirror or a smudged lens through which we might be able to glimpse things that are informative. I don’t know about an ineffable spirit, but I do have a suspicion that there are aspects of who we are that will not come back when our brains are scanned and simulated by the likes of Elmo. It’s not clear to me that memory will work, for example, when its physical referents are gone. It’s not clear that the brain will know what to do with itself in the absence of a body. Particularly, a body with sensory organs feeding it a coherent picture of the world.”

PC Mag: What's the larger message you were trying to get across through the Moab hoax?
NS: Well I try not to be too message-y, because I think that people tend to turn on their deflector shields when they see that coming. But actually when I originally wrote an earlier version of the Moab section, it was prior to the events of the 2016 election and at the time I sort of was patting myself on the back for really being on top of things and predicting the future. And then I discovered that the future was way ahead of me. - from PC Mag interview

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me… --- Psalm 23

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me… --- Psalm 23

I just knew that I wanted to write a book that had something to do with shadows because, you know, they’re just cool. They’re eerie, mysterious and there’s a lot of different art, and stories and beliefs about shadows in different cultures. But I did not have anything more than that. I just knew I wanted to write about shadows. I started googling things about shadows and then I saw something about Zero Shadow Day and that was the rabbit hole. - from the Red Carpet Crash interview

So Zero Shadow Day, it's a real actual day in India where every year on a certain day, everyone's shadows actually do disappear for just a few minutes. It sounds completely fantastical but it's a real thing… I think humans have been fascinated with shadows for a really long time, but I didn't have a story until I started researching and then when I came across Zero Shadow Day it was just — I mean that was it. The idea sparked and I started writing. - from KJZZ interview

…it seemed to me like, obviously shadows and memories are very different things, but on some kind of a very deep level, they both feel like, kind of integral and permanent parts of you as a person and if you were missing, you know, one or the other, would you still be yourself? I think the book asks that question a lot, you know, what can you lose and still be you? What would make you not you anymore? So they seemed to fit together really well, even though they're very different things. - from the KJZZ interview

Interviewer - …the memory aspect strikes much closer to home and I’m sure it will for a lot of readers, aging, dementia, Alzheimers and such. Did you recognize that as you were writing this?

PS - I did, not at first. And the further I got into it, especially upon revision, reading the whole thing and seeing how everything fit together, I really did see the parallels. - from the AZPBS interview

One of the things that I did was go to Iraq. I was in Baghdad and Basra and then up north in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah. There were some pretty tense situations there. It was such an amazing place, so amazing, but yeah, there were some really tough situations there and actually, there was a moment, there was a rocket attack that happened very close to us and that was actually the moment that made me really decide that I should write this book and really go for it…. It was like, you have to try. You have to do the thing that you have wanted to do your whole life. You got to do it now. (presumably before the incomings landed too close) - from the KJZZ interview

Maybe this is how it happened in Germany with the Nazis, in Bosnia, with the Serbs, in Rwanda with the Hutus. I’ve often wondered about that, how k

Maybe this is how it happened in Germany with the Nazis, in Bosnia, with the Serbs, in Rwanda with the Hutus. I’ve often wondered about that, how kids can turn into monsters, how they can learn that killing is right and oppression is just, how in one single generation the world can change on its axis into a place that is unrecognizable. Easily, I think, and push out of my chair.

From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. Silence! In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check.

…a late 19th-century/early 20th-century movement in America called the Cult of Domesticity, “The idea was to go back to Biblical roles, to separate men and women,” [Dalcher] says, explaining that women were expected to conform in four ways; piety, purity, submission and domesticity. She adds that there is a modern version of the Cult of Domesticity active in the US right now; the True Woman movement, part of a larger religious campaign called Revive Our Hearts. - From the Bookseller interview