• E.M. Forster: “The Machine Stops”

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk - that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh - a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.

• Robert A. Heinlein: “By His Bootstraps”

Bob Wilson did not see the circle grow.
Nor, for that matter, did he see the stranger who stepped out of the circle and stood staring at the back of Wilson’s neck-stared, and breathed heavily, as if laboring under strong and unusual emotion. Wilson had no reason to suspect that anyone else was in his room; he had every reason to expect the contrary.

• Elizabeth Bear: “Fiction: Black is the Color”

Sunrise light glazed the oblong cobbles along the north bank of the River Clyde. The thump of music from a barge-turned nightclub had ended hours earlier. Only the river–winding between stark industrial buildings on the south bank and condominiums on the right–remained. The river, silence, and the morning chill.

• Gene Wolfe: “Unrequited Love”

You have no reason to listen to me, but may sigh and turn the page and be none the worse for it. Yet I have every reason to speak out. If this public confession of my innocent guilt lifts my spirits to the slightest degree, it will be well worth the loss of your esteem. You see, I am one who had done wrong while seeking to do good. There are millions like me in that, and most acknowledge no smallest trace of guilt.