While walking comfortably with a friend, ask him to compute 23 x 78 in his head, and to do so immediately.

Starts with very normal regular life. Then the central character, the boy, gets involved to The Apocalypse situation.

People would then be assigned one of three grades: 4.0 (Above Average), 3.5 (Average), and 3.0 (Below Average). The very rare 4.5 got you a set of steak knives; a 2.5 meant you were fired (more or less).

There is a formal counter-argument known as the “tickle defense” which proposes that evidential decision agents will also decide to chew gum; but the same tickle defense is believed (by its proponents) to choose two boxes in Newcomb’s Problem.

And someone there said that his ultimate objective was to experience delta pleasure. That’s “delta” as in the Dirac delta — roughly, an infinitely high spike (that happens to be integrable). “Why?” I asked. He said, “Because that means I win.”

Few best-sellers can have been so reviled and excoriated over the years as Dean Farrar’s Eric, or Little by Little. It has consistently earned such critical judgments as “mawkishly false” (Vivian Ogilve), “a preposterous book” (John Rowe Townshend), “the sort of story Dr Arnold would have written if he’d taken to drink” (Hugh Kingsmill), “terrible warnings, soaked in nauseously cloying piety” (Roger Lancelyn Green), “the only book I ever wanted to lose” (Eric Ambler), “the nightmare emanation of some morbid, introverted brain” (Edward C. Mack), “one of the most idiotic books of the nineteenth-century” (Benny Green). The undoubted immortality of Eric is, then, as one historian has put it, “an immortality of derision.”

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Who could forget the many vast rooms – the long hall containing a little forest of rare-wood scratching posts, the thousand-square-foot cat-condominium, the long troughs of litter in the chambre de toilette, scented, the captions said, with cardamom and myrrh – all of it as empty of cats as the other fantastic houses always were of people?

Surplus is an American, as we are apparently meant to recognize from his full name – Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux. Technically, he is also a dog, his canine genome tweaked into human form.

Everybody is so god damn impressed by Gollum. I say to the fires of Mount Doom with him!

Now look, Demon Tog, or whatever you call yourself, I am the daughter of the Fifth House, holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed, and unless you want to start an interstellar incident, you had better beam back to your ship!