I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed . . . that inanimate objects were no less falli… - Stanisław Lem

I wanted to stop her; in the darkness and silence we occasionally managed to throw off our despair for a while by making each other forget.

Futurologists have been multiplying like flies since the day Herman Kahn made Cassandra's profession "scientific," yet somehow not one of them has come out with the clear statement that we have wholly abandoned ourselves to the mercy of technological progress. The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable.

Gibarian belonged to what may well have been the last generation of researchers who had the courage to refer back to the glory days of optimism and were not averse to their own kind of faith, which went beyond the boundaries laid