The Sadness You Feel Is Not Your

Real Courage Is Doing The Right Thing When Nobody's Looking. Doing The Unpopular Thing Because It's What You Believe, And The Heck With Everybody.

Writers Who Pretend That Everything They're Doing Is Completely New Are Full Of It.

And I Grew Up On A Steady Diet Of Science Fiction, Especially Apocalyptic And Postapocalyptic Fiction.

She Remembered No One At All. She Remembered One Day Thinking: I Am Alone. There Is No I But I. She Lived In The Dark. She Taught Herself To Walk In The Light, Though It Was Not Easy.

In Her Mind's Eye She Saw It, Saw It All At Last: The Rolling Armies And The Flames Of Battle; The Graves And Pits And Dying Cries Of A Hundred Million Souls; The Spreading Darkness, Like A Black Wing Stretching Over The Earth; The Last, Bitter Hours Of Cruelty And Sorrow, And The Terrible, Final Flights; Death's Great Dominion Over All, And, At The Last, Empty Cities, Becalmed By The Silence Of A Hundred Years. Already These Things Were Coming To Pass.