Life is full of situations cut short, unfinished observations, everything that doesn’t fit in the parameters of a story that would make sense to stra… - Dmitri Bilenkin

I’m sure that the fantastic descriptions of interstellar travel in the science fiction of the last century made many a heart skip a beat. I really don’t want my account to be a wet blanket, but the truth is the truth: there is nothing duller than space flight.

If you’ve ever heard a physicist trying to explain to a mere mortal the meaning of quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity, you’ll understand our state. Some waves or other of time overlapping so as to create time splashes that broke off from their substratum into supratime and could be controlled – that’s all I got out of Lyova’s lectures and the popular articles written by my fellow journalists. But in the long run I wasn’t too upset about it. We use electricity without knowing a thing about electrodynamics, and I have yet to see anyone who was too bothered by that fact to go on living.

There is one basic fact that holds for all living things. Evil for any form of life is anything that hinders or threatens its existence; good is anything that promotes it. It’s that way everywhere, under every sun. It’s as obvious as two times two, because otherwise, if the opposite were true, life would be dooming itself to destruction. No civilization can change the criteria for good and evil without suffering for it.