Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser. Every now and again t… - John Brunner

I simply can’t make myself believe that if they’d been handicapped by belief in capricious supernatural beings they’d have achieved what they did.

The walls were chipped and needed paint. The windows were mostly okay but one pane was blocked with cardboard. There were fleas the exterminator couldn't kill and rats that scrabbled in the walls and mice who left droppings like a cocked snook and roaches that thrived on insecticide, even the illegal kinds.

The screen was a polychrome swirl, like a rainbow that had been through an electric blender.