Godshawk looked surprised, the way that people generally do when you ask them philosophical questions in shrubberies in the middle of the night.
Friends don’t leave friends behind to wash dishes for yetis!
Her face was very beautiful, he thought. He hadn’t been sure before, but he was now. The mind that lived behind it made it beautiful, the same way that the flame inside a lantern makes the lantern beautiful.
Sometimes, on our way through the world, we meet someone who touches our heart in a way others don’t.
I don’t think we are cut out to be evil sorcerers, brothers,” said Fentongoose. “If we were truly evil, we would not feel such sorrow at the deaths of our friends. We would just go, ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ or something.
I have had it with these dumb cakes on this dumb spaceship!
It’s called the Pyxis,” said Raven. “Don’t let the fancy name intimidate you. It just means ‘box’ in one of those Old Earth languages, Roman or Spanish or Klingon…
And now he was dead, his soul fled down to the Sunless Country and his body lying cold in the cold mud, somewhere in the city’s wake.
I am Nom-O-Tron,’ said the machine, in a big, boomy voice, so loud that Astra was afraid her mum and dad or some other grown-ups would hear and come to see who was sneaking a bedtime snack. ‘Shhh!’ she said. ‘Have you got any biscuits?
He was going to miss everything. But he guessed that was how everybody always felt. Everyone was losing things, leaving things behind, clinging to old memories as they rushed into the future. Everyone was a passenger on a runaway train.
As a child I always steered clear of science fiction, but in the autumn of 1977, the bow-wave of publicity for the first ‘Star Wars’ movie had already reached me, so I was eager for anything science-fictional.