Clippings

Quoth Mandarax:

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.
— Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)

What Mandarax didn’t tell her, and what her big brain certainly wasn’t going to tell her, was that, if she came up with an idea for a novel experiment which had a chance of working, her big brain would make her life a hell until she had actually performed that experiment.

That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, “Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It’s just fun to think about.”

And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it—have slaves fight each other to the death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.

That was another things people used to be able to do, which they can’t do anymore: enjoy in their heads events which hadn’t happened yet and which might never occur. My mother was good at that. Someday my father would stop writing science fiction, and write something a whole lot of people wanted to read instead. And we would get a new house in a beautiful city, and nice clothes, and so on. She used to make me wonder why God had ever gone to all the trouble of creating reality.