Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Unfortunately reality has no advertising budget. - Daniel Suarez

A hundred stories each and draped in vines, the dozen towers resembled overgrown postapocalyptic ruins — except for their glittering organometallic lights. Acre for acre, the towers produced ten times the food of a traditional farm on just a fraction of the water. Zero pesticides. Almost entirely automated.

They’d had so much more luck investing in eccentric B and C students. The rationale was simple: Those heavily invested in the status quo had difficulty thinking outside of it — and were often tainted by it. Especially when success and peer approval beckoned. One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions.

the others he wore simple work clothes — flannels and jeans with work boots. He was tall and handsome, with blue eyes and dirty-blond hair and a Donegal-style beard running along his broad jaw. He was athletically built with a charismatic, compelling look — like some rustic fashion model. And he had a vaguely familiar appearance. Grady felt certain he’d seen him somewhere before. Grady eyed the man warily. “Are you the foreman