Adam-Troy Castro

Adam-Troy Castro is an American science fiction, fantasy, and horror writer.

Quotes

Short fiction

An Alien Darkness (2000)

Page numbers from the trade paperback first edition, published by Wildside Press, ISBN 1-58715-153-7, first printing

See Adam-Troy Castro's Internet Science Fiction Database page for original publication details

Capitalization and ellipses as in the book. Bold face added for emphasis.

• Talent’s cheap…historically, one of the cheapest things you can buy. And considering the sheer amount of angst you carry around on your back, you need it. After all, angst from a Talented person is fascinating; angst from a Common Everyday Nobody is just an annoyance.
  • Ego To Go (p. 35)

• “The question is, just how do we tackle this problem? Do we merely modulate your Ego so it’s less irritating? Admittedly, that might make you easier to take – but it won’t address the real core of the problem, which is that when all is said and done you really don’t have a lot to be egotistical about.”
  “That can’t be true! My Haiku alone –”
  “First rule of human social interaction, Mr. Porter: If you have to lead with Haiku, you’ve already lost.”
  • Ego To Go (pp. 37-38)

• What Nancy Peabody can be blamed for was actually behaving like a crowbar, designed to pry open the locked places belonging to others. Not that she was interested in stealing material things. No, her sin was much more insidious than that. She thought everybody in the whole wide world was obligated to rearrange their lives to avoid doing anything that ran even a miniscule chance of offending her. That included reading the wrong books, seeing the wrong movies, wearing the wrong clothes, worshiping the wrong God, enjoying the wrong kind of sex, learning the wrong kind of knowledge, thinking the wrong kind of thoughts, and – most importantly, for our narratives sake – making music with the wrong kind of instruments. Nancy had spent her entire adult life pitilessly crusading against the right of anybody anywhere within her line of assault, to have even a thimble’s worth of fun without her approval. And because there were unfortunately all too many people running around who were (except for the regrettable crowbar-shaped nose) exactly like her, and were willing to support her in her various crusades, she was much more successful than she deserved to be. Before long, people who enjoyed things she didn’t begin wearing a hunted, apprehensive look similar to that worn by the lead cow entering the slaughterhouse.
  • The Guy Who Could Make These, Like, Really Amazing Armpit Noises, and Why He Was Contemplating Hippopotami at the Top of Mount Everest (p. 79)

• All of this had seemed so obvious and vital to them once. But then it changed, in the timeless time since putting their vessel together; some might even say, they’d degenerated. They were no longer the beings who’d set themselves an impossible task and built themselves a miraculous vessel to help them accomplish it. In that time they had forgotten all of their arcane and hard-won knowledge and become passengers, instead of engineers. Now the bubble piloted itself, without their input; and the glorious mission that had once been the whole reason for their existence now seemed nothing but an ancient folly, too far gone to change.
  They wouldn’t have understood Vietnam, but they would have sympathized.
  • Fuel (pp. 92-93)

• In short, they were like the complacent everywhere: in that they were already dead, and did not yet happen to know it…
  • Fuel (p. 93)

• There was never any shortage of Despair; it had always been far more common than hope, and there was always more being manufactured, everywhere in the universe. That was what made it such a convenient, and inexhaustible, Fuel.
  • Fuel (p. 95)

• Like all career diplomats, he’d spent a lifetime sculpting the truth into the shapes that best suited the needs of the moment, and would see nothing wrong with doing the same now.
  • The Funeral March of the Marionettes (p. 143)

• Every once in a while, some poor bastard get saddled with the kind of impossible decision that destroys his career and makes his name a curse for the next hundred years.
  • The Funeral March of the Marionettes (p. 150)

• It was the sort of platitude-laden gibberish that people learn to repeat so they can imagine themselves clever without ever bothering to think an original thought themselves.
  • The Funeral March of the Marionettes (p. 155)

• Art isn’t just technique, in any culture…it’s also Content. It’s understanding not just How, but also What, to express.
  • The Funeral March of the Marionettes (p. 155)