The Shivering Ground & Other Stories
Sara Barkat
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Then, taking his hat and shoving it onto his head, he would rush out into the mass of busy people and all at once look nothing at all like Father anymore: in fact, if it were not for the particular way his hat had been squished ever since one of her wooden animals sat on it, Shelley would hardly have been able to tell his brown-coated figure from anyone else’s.”
“They had found honey in the pyramids, buried among the dead—in case they’d gotten hungry on their journey. He wondered what the dead did now, without any more paths to guide them to the stars.”
“The technicians added links in the neural network, dumped data, waited for the AI to respond. It looked uncannily lifelike, from the waist up; sitting behind that table as if they were reporting to it. He always walked the other way, behind the thing’s back, so he could see the mess of wires and glinting microchips. He wondered if that disturbed it, if it was capable of feeling the same uncanny itch down its spine as a human with their back unprotected.”
“Outside, the wind was growing louder—now the trees beyond the window, like mourners, bent beneath the fury of the storm, and against the window, tracks of rain spilled sideways like lead. Dr. Stein walked to the window and pushed it up, old wood creaking and water blowing in onto his skin, cold. The darkness held only shadows but still he stared into it. He leaned his head out further, gripping tightly to the sill and pulling in. When he closed the window, the sudden barrier was jarring; he ran his fingers through his wet hair once and watched the rainbow sides of droplets falling.”
“Not one of their hands even touched the brittle parchment, and at last you sat there clutching all these reams of paper in front of a galaxy and laughed a little, from the absurdity of it: because your friend, who had always created worlds like that, so simply, needed one tiny song from a soon-dead person so little.”
“In that same year, tsunamis up the coast had destroyed the rest of those cities he’d only heard about, and the TV was an always-uncomfortable static. All the wreckage, all the ruin, and the ground was brilliant red. Every morning, he would wake to more of the world ending, and the earth laid out a scarlet cloak as though waiting for an emperor to arrive.”
“Everything that was necessary could be brought by the windows on the small hot air balloons blazoned with company logos, dropping pizza in a cardboard box end over end in a hilarious slow motion tumble until the tray at the balcony caught it, and that was it: technology was grand. No more need for touch...”
“Energy could not be created or destroyed, just passed from one thing to the next, the only common inheritance.”
“And for a moment you wondered if you were angry: you should be angry, you thought, because the water you had played in that had been so blue as a child was covered in silt and piles of strange items, like shipwrecks of trash, and in and among them were the corpses of the mermaids that had once sung you to sleep.”
“-You see, I have it within me still,” you said, and opened your pocket and pulled out a piece of sheet music, the black calligraphy in its careful, blocky dots making the whole thing look like paving stones on a log road. The calligraphy went on and on, and you pulled the entire song out from your skin where you’d kept it, just in case your friend wanted to see it again.”
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Book Keywords:
fantasy, common-good, science-fiction, work, ai, artificial-intelligence, loneliness, inheritance, nature, robots, pyramids, data, writing, surrealism, ruin, touch, energy, god, stories, friendship, music, apocalypse, fury, busy-people, detachment, dead, storms, busy, writers, climate, eco-fiction, humanity, meaninglessness, darkness, society, mermaids, life-after-death, stars, isolation, destruction, technology, tsunami, after-life, environment, creation, corporate-life, identity, rain, shadows, wind, fathers
