“It had been different during his first year of graduate school, when he temporarily forsook physics to explore instead the realm of the senses. Applying logic to the late-blooming quandries of maturity, he had parsed the elements of encounter, banter, negotiation, and consummation, separating and solving the variables one by one until the problem—if not generally solved—did appear to have tractable special solutions.”

—  David Brin , book Earth

Part V (p. 236)
Earth (1990)

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David Brin 123
novelist, short story writer 1950

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