“T.S. Elliot: “And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”
―
Douglas E. Richards,
Quantum Lens
“Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments” ― Louise Erdrich, The Sentence
“The universe was infinite, and there were most likely an infinite number of universes. To sit on one tiny planet in an ocean of infinite infinities and believe you understood anything about the true nature of existence and reality was absurd.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Wired
“Unless you truly believed in something to the deepest depth of your being, as did Delamater, all men were whores in the end. There was an old joke that had always struck Delamater as defining of the human species. A man asks a woman if she would sleep with him for ten million dollars. She agrees. He then asks if she would sleep with him for a dollar. She is aghast. “What kind of woman do you take me for?” she asks. To that, the man responds, “We have established what you are, madam. Now we’re just haggling over the price.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Mind's Eye
“Representatives of the Copernicus, still the most respected global authority on all things alien, held press conferences, and individual nations did the same. Scientific and governmental authorities everywhere tried to calm nerves and avert panic. Each described experiments showing the nanites were harmless—that a person could ingest them all day, could bathe in them, without any adverse effects—and insisted that that they would reach a population equilibrium as did all organisms. They called on microbiologists to hit the airwaves, reminding people that humanity had always shared the planet with microbes, which were the dominant form of life on Earth in terms of biomass, and had been for ages, despite being invisible.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Amped
“be the master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it.’” “Oliver Wendell Holmes,” ― Douglas E. Richards, Game Changer
“The Scientist (2019) “Quantum Biology May Help Solve Some of Life’s Greatest Mysteries.” Nature (2021) “Birds Have a Mysterious ‘Quantum Sense’. For The First Time, Scientists Saw It in Action.” ― Douglas E. Richards, The Immortality Code
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. ” —Arthur Schopenhauer “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.” —Niels Bohr, Nobel Laureate & Quantum Physics Pioneer” ― Douglas E. Richards, Quantum Lens
“Einstein once quipped that time’s only purpose was to make sure that everything didn’t happen at once.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second
“Socialism is great—but eventually you run out of other people’s money.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Mind's Eye
“humankind’s fundamental understanding of the nature of reality. If an observer could alter the universe by his observation, then didn’t the universe require consciousness to even exist?” ― Douglas E. Richards, Quantum Lens
“It’s impossible to say. Normal motives don’t necessarily apply to psychopathic personalities. Jeffrey Dahmer murdered and cannibalized seventeen people, three of whose skulls were found in his refrigerator.” “That’s perfectly rational behavior,” said Desh sarcastically. “He just didn’t want them to spoil.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Wired
“How had so many of my fellow citizens been gripped by mysticism and the supernatural? By mass delusion? How had reality become so distorted?” ― Douglas E. Richards, The Enigma Cube
“And then it sends a signal to turn off the system.” “So the universe with the wallet in the chamber waiting to be sent still exists,” added Allen. “But the universe from which it is actually sent never does.” “That is just so messed up,” said Blake in exasperation, and Jenna, Walsh, and Soyer nodded their agreement. “Here is my advice to all of you,” said Cargill. “The best thing to do is ignore time travel, and don’t think about the paradoxes too hard. If you do, your head really will explode,” he added with a wry smile. “Just think of it as duplication and teleportation. But always keep in mind that the universe seems to go out of its way to ensure that infinite alternate timelines aren’t allowed. So no matter what, we only ever get this one universe.” He sighed. “So we’d better make sure we don’t screw it up.” 48 Brian Hamilton hated Cheyenne Mountain. Sure, it was one of the most interesting places in the world to visit, but living there only worked if you were a bat. The Palomar facility had also been underground, but nothing like this. It had a much larger security perimeter, so trips to the surface were easier to make happen. Not that it really mattered. Soon enough he would be traveling on another assignment anyway, living in a hotel room somewhere. But what he really wanted was to work side by side with Edgar Knight, toward their common goal. He was tired of being Knight’s designated spy, having to watch Lee Cargill squander Q5’s vast resources and capabilities. Watching him crawl like a wounded baby when he could be soaring. Cargill was an idiot. He could transform the world, but he was too weak to do it. He could wipe out the asshole terrorists who wanted nothing more than to butcher the helpless. If you have the ultimate cure for cancer, you use it to wipe out the disease once and for all. You don’t wield your cure only as a last resort, when the cancer has all but choked the life out of you. Edgar Knight, on the other hand, was a man with vision. He was able to make the tough decisions. If you were captain of a life raft with a maximum capacity of ten people, choosing to take five passengers of a sinking ship on board was an easy decision, not a heroic one. But what about when there were fifty passengers? Was it heroic to take them all, dooming everyone to death? Or was the heroic move using force, if necessary, to limit this number, to ensure some would survive? Sure, from the outside this looked coldhearted, while the converse seemed compassionate. But watching the world circle the drain because you were too much of a pussy to make the hard decisions was the real crime. Survival of the fittest was harsh reality. In the animal kingdom it was eat or be eaten. If you saw a group of fuck-nuts just itching to nuke the world back into the Dark Ages—who believed the Messiah equivalent, the twelfth Imam, would only come out to play when Israel was destroyed, and worldwide Armageddon unleashed—you wiped them out. To a man. Or else they’d do the same to you. It had been three days since Cargill had reported that he was on the verge of acquiring Jenna Morrison and Aaron Blake.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second
“Presidents could be fickle and arbitrary. Each new one with wildly different visions and priorities. And when all was said and done, they were nothing more than civilians who managed to get donors excited enough to give them money, and then win a popularity contest. They weren’t the smartest or best trained that humanity had to offer, and they didn’t have the best judgment. The truly brilliant, truly gifted, wanted little to do with politics.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second
“unpredictable. No conscience; no remorse.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Wired
“when you didn’t know what you didn’t know, you could fool yourself pretty easily.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Mind's Eye
“To every man upon this Earth, death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better, than facing fearful odds. For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods.” —Thomas Babington Macaulay, Horatius at the Bridge” ― Douglas E. Richards, The Enigma Cube
“In my book, though, they should have changed Unidentified Flying Objects to Mysterious Otherworldly Flying Objects—or MOFOs. This name was more accurate after all. And I’d give my last dollar to hear TV reporters using the new acronym.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Unidentified
“Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments” ― Louise Erdrich, The Sentence
“The universe was infinite, and there were most likely an infinite number of universes. To sit on one tiny planet in an ocean of infinite infinities and believe you understood anything about the true nature of existence and reality was absurd.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Wired
“Unless you truly believed in something to the deepest depth of your being, as did Delamater, all men were whores in the end. There was an old joke that had always struck Delamater as defining of the human species. A man asks a woman if she would sleep with him for ten million dollars. She agrees. He then asks if she would sleep with him for a dollar. She is aghast. “What kind of woman do you take me for?” she asks. To that, the man responds, “We have established what you are, madam. Now we’re just haggling over the price.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Mind's Eye
“Representatives of the Copernicus, still the most respected global authority on all things alien, held press conferences, and individual nations did the same. Scientific and governmental authorities everywhere tried to calm nerves and avert panic. Each described experiments showing the nanites were harmless—that a person could ingest them all day, could bathe in them, without any adverse effects—and insisted that that they would reach a population equilibrium as did all organisms. They called on microbiologists to hit the airwaves, reminding people that humanity had always shared the planet with microbes, which were the dominant form of life on Earth in terms of biomass, and had been for ages, despite being invisible.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Amped
“be the master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it.’” “Oliver Wendell Holmes,” ― Douglas E. Richards, Game Changer
“The Scientist (2019) “Quantum Biology May Help Solve Some of Life’s Greatest Mysteries.” Nature (2021) “Birds Have a Mysterious ‘Quantum Sense’. For The First Time, Scientists Saw It in Action.” ― Douglas E. Richards, The Immortality Code
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. ” —Arthur Schopenhauer “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.” —Niels Bohr, Nobel Laureate & Quantum Physics Pioneer” ― Douglas E. Richards, Quantum Lens
“Einstein once quipped that time’s only purpose was to make sure that everything didn’t happen at once.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second
“Socialism is great—but eventually you run out of other people’s money.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Mind's Eye
“humankind’s fundamental understanding of the nature of reality. If an observer could alter the universe by his observation, then didn’t the universe require consciousness to even exist?” ― Douglas E. Richards, Quantum Lens
“It’s impossible to say. Normal motives don’t necessarily apply to psychopathic personalities. Jeffrey Dahmer murdered and cannibalized seventeen people, three of whose skulls were found in his refrigerator.” “That’s perfectly rational behavior,” said Desh sarcastically. “He just didn’t want them to spoil.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Wired
“How had so many of my fellow citizens been gripped by mysticism and the supernatural? By mass delusion? How had reality become so distorted?” ― Douglas E. Richards, The Enigma Cube
“And then it sends a signal to turn off the system.” “So the universe with the wallet in the chamber waiting to be sent still exists,” added Allen. “But the universe from which it is actually sent never does.” “That is just so messed up,” said Blake in exasperation, and Jenna, Walsh, and Soyer nodded their agreement. “Here is my advice to all of you,” said Cargill. “The best thing to do is ignore time travel, and don’t think about the paradoxes too hard. If you do, your head really will explode,” he added with a wry smile. “Just think of it as duplication and teleportation. But always keep in mind that the universe seems to go out of its way to ensure that infinite alternate timelines aren’t allowed. So no matter what, we only ever get this one universe.” He sighed. “So we’d better make sure we don’t screw it up.” 48 Brian Hamilton hated Cheyenne Mountain. Sure, it was one of the most interesting places in the world to visit, but living there only worked if you were a bat. The Palomar facility had also been underground, but nothing like this. It had a much larger security perimeter, so trips to the surface were easier to make happen. Not that it really mattered. Soon enough he would be traveling on another assignment anyway, living in a hotel room somewhere. But what he really wanted was to work side by side with Edgar Knight, toward their common goal. He was tired of being Knight’s designated spy, having to watch Lee Cargill squander Q5’s vast resources and capabilities. Watching him crawl like a wounded baby when he could be soaring. Cargill was an idiot. He could transform the world, but he was too weak to do it. He could wipe out the asshole terrorists who wanted nothing more than to butcher the helpless. If you have the ultimate cure for cancer, you use it to wipe out the disease once and for all. You don’t wield your cure only as a last resort, when the cancer has all but choked the life out of you. Edgar Knight, on the other hand, was a man with vision. He was able to make the tough decisions. If you were captain of a life raft with a maximum capacity of ten people, choosing to take five passengers of a sinking ship on board was an easy decision, not a heroic one. But what about when there were fifty passengers? Was it heroic to take them all, dooming everyone to death? Or was the heroic move using force, if necessary, to limit this number, to ensure some would survive? Sure, from the outside this looked coldhearted, while the converse seemed compassionate. But watching the world circle the drain because you were too much of a pussy to make the hard decisions was the real crime. Survival of the fittest was harsh reality. In the animal kingdom it was eat or be eaten. If you saw a group of fuck-nuts just itching to nuke the world back into the Dark Ages—who believed the Messiah equivalent, the twelfth Imam, would only come out to play when Israel was destroyed, and worldwide Armageddon unleashed—you wiped them out. To a man. Or else they’d do the same to you. It had been three days since Cargill had reported that he was on the verge of acquiring Jenna Morrison and Aaron Blake.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second
“Presidents could be fickle and arbitrary. Each new one with wildly different visions and priorities. And when all was said and done, they were nothing more than civilians who managed to get donors excited enough to give them money, and then win a popularity contest. They weren’t the smartest or best trained that humanity had to offer, and they didn’t have the best judgment. The truly brilliant, truly gifted, wanted little to do with politics.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second
“unpredictable. No conscience; no remorse.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Wired
“when you didn’t know what you didn’t know, you could fool yourself pretty easily.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Mind's Eye
“To every man upon this Earth, death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better, than facing fearful odds. For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods.” —Thomas Babington Macaulay, Horatius at the Bridge” ― Douglas E. Richards, The Enigma Cube
“In my book, though, they should have changed Unidentified Flying Objects to Mysterious Otherworldly Flying Objects—or MOFOs. This name was more accurate after all. And I’d give my last dollar to hear TV reporters using the new acronym.” ― Douglas E. Richards, Unidentified
