I saw her clearly, then: beautiful and terrible, ancient and radical, a goddess as much as any human can be. Killing a hexapedal carnivore with a hand-made spear, hiding for two days from a giant amphibious jellyfish desperate for food, surviving alone in the Well for five years before the computers on this side even registered the malfunction—those rumors had floated around the agency for decades. I'd found it impossible to believe that such a small, unassuming woman had done all they said she did.

What decades of evolution have done for the [adventure game] genre is refine the user interface. The genre's improvements are largely independent of the technology used and have gradually evolved in response to user feedback and designers' efforts to make the puzzles clear yet challenging.

A couple years ago, I picked up another copy of China Mountain Zhang at a used bookstore, but I didn't dare read it. Much of the science fiction I had loved as a teen had turned out, when read as an adult, to feel simplistic, clunky, shallow. I preferred my memories.

if they had slapped blinkers / on our eyes, narrowing our vision