Standback

“Now, Reverend Father Abbot asked me to make the following announcements:

"First, for the next three days we shall sing the Little Office of Our Lady before Matins, asking her intercession for peace.

"Second, general instructions for civil defense in the event of a space-strike or missile-attack alert are available on the table by the entrance. Everybody take one.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“The proclamation had been very clear: All eligible maidens were to attend. All. High or low estate, fat or thin, short or tall, one leg or two. In one week's time, the prince was going to pick a pretty girl from the crowd and make a princess of her. To most women in the kingdom, it was as though God had extended His hand to them.

But not to the seamstresses.

To old Clara Le Dure, it seemed the king had decided this was the week she ought to die. He was personally seeing to it that she should stitch herself into oblivion.”
― Auston Habershaw, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February 2020

“That contraption -- listen, Brother, they claim it thinks. I didn't believe it at first. Thought, implying rational principle, implying soul. Can the principle of a 'thinking machine' -- man-made -- be a rational soul? Bah! It seemed a thoroughly pagan notion at first. But do you know what?"

"Father?"

"Nothing could be that perverse without premeditation! It must think! It knows good and evil, I tell you, and it chose the latter.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“The art of fiction, like the art of stage magicians, is one of directing the audience's attention to what you want them to see.”
― Nancy Kress, Beginnings, Middles & Ends