Cannibals Prefer Those Who Have No Spines.

There Is Only One Positive Role Of The Nobel Prize--it Creates Some Common Way To Understand A Writer. I Cannot Say, That I Like This Situation, But That's The Way It Goes. The Books Are Being Born And Then Walk Around The World, Just As Children Do.

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.

Nothing, My Dear And Clever Colleague, Is Not Your Run-of-the-mill Nothing, The Result Of Idleness And Inactivity, But Dynamic, Aggressive Nothingness, That Is To Say, Perfect, Unique, Ubiquitous, In Other Words Nonexistence, Ultimate And Supreme.

Cancel Me Not - For What Then Shall Remain? Abscissas, Some Mantissas, Modules, Modes, A Root Or Two, A Torus And A Node: The Inverse Of My Verse, A Null Domain.

For Some Time There Was A Widely Held Notion (zealously Fostered By The Daily Press) To The Effect That The 'thinking Ocean' Of Solaris Was A Gigantic Brain, Prodigiously Well-developed And Several Million Years In Advance Of Our Own Civilization, A Sort Of 'cosmic Yogi', A Sage, A Symbol Of Omniscience, Which Had Long Ago Understood The Vanity Of All Action And For This Reason Had Retreated Into An Unbreakable Silence.