Lots of science fiction deals with distant times and places. Intrepid prospectors in the Asteroid Belt. Interstellar epics. Galactic empires. Trips to the remote past or future.

You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.

Today, Mihir stopped a bomb from killing the Tahitian President but not from shattering his own collar bone. So, he is now in the operating chamber, undergoing his 250th reconstruction. The nurses have tied a balloon to his bed that says, “Don’t make it to 251!

I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of science fiction.

[...]How can a great civilization have destroyed itself so completely?"
"Perhaps,"said Apollo, "by being materially great and materially wise and nothing else.

Tally smiled. At least she was causing trouble to the end. "I'm Tally Youngblood," she said. "make me pretty.