“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

“The sky above the island was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel—which is to say it was a bright, cheery blue.”

“Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.”

“Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.”

“His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.”

“[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”

“One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy”