that is a good description not only of the piece itself, but of the characteristic narrative ploy of science fiction: to be sober in imagining and to tell the incredible credibly.

So, in so much contemporary fiction, the most revealing and accurate descriptions of our daily life are shot through with strangeness, or displaced in time, or set on imaginary worlds, or dissolved into the phantasmagoria of drugs or of psychosis, or rise from the mundane suddenly into the visionary and then come out the other side.

I seek the appropriateness of sound to sense.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

If you had unlimited access to a drug that would give you a perfect high for hours or days at a time, at any time, without doing you any bodily harm, and with the enthusiastic approval of your entire society, would you be likely to abstain from it? You’re not allowed to. You must consume your daily dose of soma because it’s what holds everything to

Reading is a means of listening. Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media.

The whole garden is imaginary, but the toads in it are real.

If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. I beg you to see what it is that we must save, and not to let the bigots and misogynists take it away from us again.

In Kipling’s Mowgli stories, the connections between human and animal are complex and ultimately tragic. Mowgli is a link between his village people and the people of the jungle, and like all go-betweens, all liminal figures, he is torn between the two sides, torn apart. There is no common ground between the village and the jungle; they have turned