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
Just doing nothing is a statement, don’t you understand that? What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what i...
[...] there was a relief in not being listened to, sometimes. Power meant responsibility. Advice unacted upon almost always have been right
Well, the voice said, seemingly oblivious, one thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the s...
Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain. And what the Idirans
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...
They also, [the drone] said, refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value — carbon fascists.
The way to a man’s heart is through his chest!
The good soldier did as he was told, and if he had any sense at all volunteered for nothing, especially promotion.
She'd asked him what it was like to be in there, doing nothing but then being woken up to speak to somebody you couldn't see. He'd said that it was like being woken from a deep and satisfying sleep, t...
Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the...
Meanwhile the Mind of Pittance watched over them, and looked out into the resounding silence and the sun-freckled darkness of the spaces between the stars, forever content and ineffably satisfied with...
Look on the happy side, think of the good things. Hadn't it been clever? Yes, it had.
Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean towards the latter.
It wasn’t a finite supply of promiscuity he was draining, it was an ever-replenishing fixation that was eating up his potential for future personal growth.
It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders. Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civ...
In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after...
If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking amongst yourselves seemed to be the way you convinced yourself of it.
I have a whole regimental intelligence service that’s developed a fine line in rumour-mongering and story-placing over the last few years, and the ear of every media player you’ve courted so assiduous...
He wasn’t sure himself why he was pulling his punches in this way, but somehow it seemed important not to let Contact know everything, to keep something back. It was a small victory against them a lit...