Nothing else is needed except a pair of eyes and daylight. Once a book is printed and acquired, it’s yours. And that basic, inalienable right should be as independent of external factors as possible. “It just seems to me that the most valuable thing that any human has is the ability to educate himself, to find out about the world around him, to program his primary organ of perception-his brain. “True enough, but you are still dependent upon others to repair your viewer if it breaks down.the more advanced a technology, the more fragilely inter-dependent it is.” There are plenty of solar-powered cube-readers. Promise ran her hands over the spines of a nearby stack, then shook her head. “Do you understand that that makes you dependent upon others?” “Yes, that’s true enough-but as far as I’m concerned, the difference is that they all require an external power source.” He cocked his head sideways, until he looked absurdly like a bird examining a piece of fruit. “They don’t take up as much space as books, I guess.” “Tell me, Aubry-what’s the similarity between all the modes of information storage I’ve just named?”Īubry scratched his head. “You know, it isn’t that you can’t get information in electronic form, or microfilm, or disk, or cube, or any of the other forms-tape, holographic computer feed.” He paused.Being needed is just the flip side of being royally screwed. Join the club honey-guess what, there are a few more of us out here who’ve had our brains beaten our with our own dreams.

And your life is ruined because you tried to do the Right Thing.“Don’t want my feathers ruffled, it that’s what you mean.” The price of chemical ecstasy was a dear one, paid in flesh and spirit.“Earthquake!” She pulled herself from the bed, stumbled from her building into the street, and watched the lurching structures and snapping powerlines, the buckling sidewalks and exploding water mains, as a seismic debt long outstanding came due. Maxine was torn from her slumber by the moans of the dying and the awful sound of her ramshackle apartment shifting on its foundations. It stretched from slumber, shedding its skin, the screams of its wrath heard in the shriek of tortured steel, of splintering wood and concrete. It was on one of those terrible, fever-clouded days when the serpent beneath southern California awoke.Quotes Street Lethal (1983) All page numbers from the mass market paperback first edition published by Ace Science Fiction Books (second printing, February 1984) ISBN 8-2 Steven Barnes (born March 1, 1952) is an American science fiction, fantasy, and mystery writer.įor the Dream Park novels, co-written with Larry Niven, see Niven's Wikiquote page.

Streetlethal by Steven Barnes