efficiency has come to mean accomplishing a task with the least possible human intervention—a goal that often turns out to be self-defeating, particularly when efficiency becomes almost an end in itself. Recall Thomas Edison’s famous line that genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration and contrast it with our contemporary enthusiasm for machine-like efficiency

A stamp in the passport, Portrait, a place I must visit without ever feeling it necessary to return, though I might want to wander out now and then to drop in on Joyce’s poetry, roughly contemporary with the first novel, those curious “pomes,” wearing their spats and dandyish nosegays, occasionally taking up a putative lute to croon promises of theoretical love to unconvincing maidens in the windows of canvas-flat donjons.

the asteroid mining and the cultures that sprout up