The Sheep Look Up

by John Brunner

was a bus, huge, German, articulated, electric, discharging passengers.

I like how its electric and its discharging its passengers

Our watchmen are drawn from the police, our sharpshooters are all ex-Marines.”

Why don't they just recruit highschoolers?

also ornamented with zodiacal emblems.

Horrorscope for the scope of the horror

But slit to the waist in front. Moreover she was wearing pubic panties, with a tuft of fur at the crotch to suggest hair.

Did I see that some women are wearing camel toe enhancers now? Will they evolve to the comically sized cod pieces?

… And this is what the buggers do to the plants, see?”

Ender's game

Red among the snow here. He burrowed with his fingers for fear his shovel might hurt someone, and discovered a side of beef.

He thought he hit a person but it was a missed steak

“What does your mom use for this soup?” Pete said, thinking to change a ghoulish subject. “It’s great.”

Goulash

He had given up books, even his favorites: the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Precepts of Patanjali, the I Ching, the Popul Vuh, the Book of the Dead …

LOL sounds like a cure to insomnia and not a favourite books list

“And she’s likely to lose her great toe. Blood-poisoning too, unless we’re quick. Is that your car outside, a government car?”

Call a toe truck

That strange cold Peg: she must, he concluded, be queer, because she didn’t—not only not with him, not with anybody.

Incel vibes

that the news media were complying with the president’s celebrated dictum, “If the papers know what’s good for them they’ll print what’s good for America!”

(It had been years since cattle could be grazed on open land anywhere in the country.) Or was there—as rumor claimed—a wave of contagious abortion decimating the herds,

De-calf-inated

The government couldn’t go on forever bailing out mismanaged giant corporations, even though it was their own supporters, people who ranted against “UN meddling” and “creeping socialism,” who yelled the loudest for Federal aid when they got into a mess.

He read the semiliterate capitals that almost covered it: “TO MISTER COMMIE ASS LICKING QUAREY YOU SAY ONE MORE WORD AGANST AMRICA WELL HANG YOU BY YOUR PRICK ON A FAGPOLE GET OUT OR WELL BURN DOWN YOUR HOME AND YOUR NIGGERFUCKING WIFE TOO OUHT TO HAVE A GUN STUFF UP HER CUNT NOW YOU NOW WHAT LOYAL AMRICANS THINK OF TRATORS.”

Pre internet hatemail looks like the modern form

in spite of the evidence around them, in spite of what their eyes and ears reported—and sometimes their flesh, from bruises, stab wounds, racking coughs, weeping sores—these people believed their way of life was the best in the world, and were prepared to export it at the point of a gun.

“Peg, I think I may be able to save the world. Do you believe me?”

This is a weird synchronicity for me as I've started reading tim anderson's new book get naked and he keeps mentioning lines like wanting to save the world.

“Austin, for heaven’s sake! Don’t you realize you’re the most powerful man

Austin Powers, LOL! ya baby!!!

“It’s natural for a man to defend what’s dear to him: his own life, his home, his family. But in order to make him fight on behalf of his rulers, the rich and powerful who are too cunning to fight their own battles—in short to defend not himself but people whom he’s never met and moreover would not care to be in the same room with him—you have to condition him into loving violence not for the benefits it bestows on him but for its own sake.

Result: the society has to defend itself from its defenders, because what’s admirable in wartime is termed psychopathic in peace. It’s easier to wreck a man than to repair him. Ask any psychotherapist. And take a look at the crime figures among veterans.”

“Nothing. I am no more responsible for the actions of the Trainites than Jesus for the behavior of the Christians on whom Paul of Tarsus projected his personal neuroses.”

No, not against his brother. Against the enemies of his species. That they also happen to be human—well, that’s regrettable. Is a cancer cell in your lung or liver any more welcome for being tissue spawned from your own body?”