Good grief, man; the Culture’s been a spacefaring species for eleven thousand years; just because you’ve mostly settled down in idealized, tailor-made conditions doesn’t mean you’ve lost the capacity...
[M]y determined and strenuous endeavours to take in absolutely nothing of what I had regarded as entirely the most irrelevant part of my schooling had patently not met with total success
If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideratio...
If I had to guess, nephew, I would surmise that you are not in direct trouble as such. However, I will confess to the distinct and unsettling feeling that very large, very ponderous and most momentous...
Hup! . . . and here we are, waking up. Quick scan around, nothing immediately threatening, it would seem . . . Hmm. Floating in space. Odd. Nobody else around. That’s funny. View’s a bit degraded. Oh-...
Happily, I am not human, Parinherm thought, and this is only a simulation.
Gurgeh felt grateful and cosseted, and both important and foolish, all at once.
At one end of the vast C bitten from the castle a single great bastion-tower stood, almost intact, five kilometres high, and casting a kilometre-wide shadow across the rumpled ground in front of the...
Ancient, vicious, discredited ideas backed with adolescent war mania. It’s
Although it was only four kilometers in height, the Plate class General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal was fully fifty-three in length, and twenty-two across the beam. The topside rear park covered an...
The battle-memes of the invading alien consciousness aided by the thought processes and shared knowledge of the by now obviously completely overwhelmed ship. With
One thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting—corruption and favoritism, mos...
At least showed you were interested in trying to provide an explanation for the world around you, and so was generally held to be a promising first step towards coming up with the belief system that p...
[...] there was a relief in not being listened to, sometimes. Power meant responsibility. Advice unacted upon almost always have been right
What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of
Was Fergus Urvill anywhere, still? Apart from the body - whatever was left of him physically, down there in that dark, cold pressure - was there anything else? Was his personality intact somehow, some...
Up to this point, the story of the Gzilt and their holy book was, to students of this sort of thing, quite familiar: an upstart part of a parvenu species/civ gets lucky, proclaims itself Special and w...
Una verdad aparentemente tan trascendental que uno se asombra de que los oprimidos de la Tierra no se subleven envueltos en llamas y rabia. Pero no lo hacen, porque están tan infectados con el mito de...
The truth is not always useful, not always good. It’s like putting your faith in water. Yes, we need the rain, but too much can sweep you away in a flood and drown you. Like all great natural, element...
The good soldier did as he was told, and if he had any sense at all volunteered for nothing, especially promotion.