Re: [off topic] SF Quotes

I'm taking a little licence here and posting a couple of (slightly
edited)
paragraphs instead of a quote, but I think it's evocitive as hell, so
here
goes:

     . . . You could think of a pulsedrive as a series of micro-fusion
bombs
and field shielding and reaction heated to plasma, or as a sword of
radiation
and high-energy particles tens of kilometers long.
     That was the Staff way of seeing it. Her imagination flashed other
images
on the inner screen of her consciousness. The matte-black shaped of the
Limpers falling outward. A shallow disk perched on a witch's maze of
tubing
like some mad oil refinery, all atop the great convex soup-plate of the
pusher. The dozen crewfolk locked in their cocoons of armor and sensors,
decision-making units in a dance of photonics. Units that sweated with
fears
driven below consciousness; the ringing impact of  crystal
tesseract-mines
scattering their high-vee shrapnel through hulls and bodies, blood
boiling
into vacuum. The pulse of a near miss and secondary gamma sleeting
invisibly
through  the body, wreaking the infinitely complex balances of the
cells.
Tumbling in a wrecked ship, puking and delerious and dying slowly from
thirst.
. . 
     Fears that carried down from the ground ape; hindbrain reflexes
that
twitched muscles in a desperate need to flee or fight, pumped juices
into the
blood, roiling minds that must stay as calm as the machines that were
master
and slave both. (. . . ) The slamming impact of deceleration; railguns,
lightguns, mineshowers, missile and counter-missile, the parasite bombs
driving their one megoton X-ray beams like the icepicks of the gods. The
drives punching irresitibly through fields and shieldings; perhaps a
single
second for the stricken to know their fate as plasma boiled through the
corridors.
     Silence. Long slow zero-g fading past, waiting for the sensors to
tell
you if you were already dead . . . 

Thats from the Stone Dogs, by S. M. Stirling,and I always thought of
this as
one of the best descriptions of near-future space combat. Doesn't really
fit
in the tone of FT, but what the heck.

Don