Like many such beverages, this show is moderately fizzy and leaves a slightly synthetic aftertaste.

Alas, she does not start echolocating. Instead, she immediately begins to levitate. (Take that, dolphins!)

Suppose an experimenter flips a fair coin while you lie anesthetized in a white, windowless hospital room. If the coin lands heads, then she’ll create a thousand copies of you, place them in a thousand identical rooms, and wake each one up.

Have you ever lay awake at night, terrified of what would happen were the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms found to be inconsistent the next morning?

This can be viewed as a special case of constructing a new creature with similar goals and more powerful arms, and then replacing yourself with that creature.

The sweet, pungent smell of toad droppings filled her nostrils.

But there came no sound other than the snort of cyborg hounds on patrol, the clang and rustle of dragons in the yards stirring restlessly in their chains, and the distant subaudible chime of midnight bells celebrating some faraway sylvan revelry.

“Michael Swanwick is a true seer in the best sense of that word.”

-David Zindell, author of Neverness

Attribution of actual magic powers to a fellow author?  Or a novel experiment in classpect-based book blurbing?

Shifts within values of Eudaimonian civs seem of relatively low importance compared to gains from converting empty or paperclip stars to somewhere inside Eudaimonia.

A surfer dude character getting literally turned to stone.