The Bomb Lives Only As

Experience As Well As Common Sense Indicated That The Most Reliable Method Of Avoiding Self-extinction Was Not To Equip Oneself With The Means To Accomplish It In The First Place.

Science Fiction Is Trying To Find Alternative Ways Of Looking At Realities.

Even Galaxy-spanning Anarchist Utopias Of Stupefying Full-spectrum Civilisational Power Have Turf Wars Within Their Unacknowledged Militaries.

Intellectual Achievement. The Exercise Of Skill. Human Feeling.

Stories Set In The Culture In Which Things Went Wrong Tended To Start With Humans Losing Or Forgetting Or Deliberately Leaving Behind Their Terminal. It Was A Conventional Opening, The Equivalent Of Straying Off The Path In The Wild Woods In One Age, Or A Car Breaking Down At Night On A Lonely Road In Another.