Flux: Tales of Human Futures
Orson Scott Card
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0812516850
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The second volume of the award-winning author's Maps in a Mirror. Here are seven tales of the possible futures open to humanity, including Card's brilliant story The Originist--set, with Isaac Asimov's permission, in the Foundation universe.
and that was that. No it wasn’t. My professor in that course, Preston Gledhill, was sympathetic, and so he arranged to bend the rules and I got my performance. Two nights in the Experimental Theatre, doing reader’s theatre as it had never been done before. The audience laughed in all the right places. They sobbed at the end. The standing ovation was earned. The actors still remember, as I do, that it was something remarkable. I may have been using someone else’s story, but that student
trade. I could see that he used to have money, and he didn’t anymore. Lots of great clothes, tailor-tight fit, but shabby, out of sync. The really old ones, he tore all the wiring out, but you could still see where the diodes used to light up. We’re talking neanderthal. “Vanity, vanity, all is profanity,” says I, while I’m holding out the sleeve of a camisa that used to light up like an airplane coming in for a landing. “They’re too comfortable to get rid of,” he says. But there’s a twist in
They were true children of their father and mother—they wouldn’t have any self-respect if they didn’t earn their own way in the world. No doubt they’d be disappointed by having their inheritance snatched away. But they wouldn’t be destroyed. I am not ruined. All the lies that Rom told are really true, only they didn’t realize it. All that matters in my life. I still have. I really don’t care about my fortune. It’s just the way I lost it that made me so furious. I can go on and be the same person
language, but the normal forces of language separation caused each new planet to develop its own offshoot, until many dialects became mutually unintelligible. Thus, different languages would not have developed until humanity moved out into space; this was one of the reasons why the Galactic Empire was necessary to restore the primeval unity of the species. Kispitorian called his first and most influential book Tower of Confusion, using the widespread legend of the Tower of Babble as an
of discovering that no matter how many curtains you peel back, you never find the real curtain or the real man behind it in Asimov’s Oz. There are always plans underlying plans, causes hidden behind plausible causes. And, finally, I had a compelling story of my own to tell. I had already made a stab at it, with a fragment of a novel that was to be called Genesis—a book I may still write someday. In it I was trying to show the borderline between human and animal, the exact comma in the