Sometimes heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination, the sort of unsho...
Solotol is a city of arches and bridges, where steps and pavements wind past tall buildings and lance out over steep rivers and gullies on slender suspension bridges and fragile stone arches. Roadways...
Shut up! Bettlescroy shouted, one tiny fist thudding down on the desk beneath the screen. The Culture vessel has also already worked out how to get the fabricaria-built ships to set about destroying e...
She killed, yeah? The woman’s voice sounded flat. She seemed to sigh. Horza drew in a breath, was about to start talking again, but Gow spoke in the same monotone. I thought I hear she. Suddenly she b...
Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print.
Others reckoned that as long as the termination was instant, with no warning and therefore no chance that those about to be switched off could suffer, then it didn’t really matter. The wretches hadn’t...
Meaning is everywhere. There is always meaning. Or at least all things show a disturbing tendency to have meaning ascribed to them when intelligent creatures are present. It’s just that there’s no fin...
Jernau Gurgeh, the machine said, making a sighing noise, a guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. Yo...
Insult, like many such feelings, is experienced in the soul of the person addressed; it is not something that can be granted or withheld by the person doing the addressing.
In the dying days of the Gzilt civilisation, before its long-prepared-for elevation to something better and the celebrations to mark this momentous but joyful occasion, one of its last surviving ships...
I once visited a place where they killed people by putting them in a chair. Not torture — that was common enough; beds and chairs were very much the par when it came to getting people helpless and con...
I have a feeling it is not a happy story.’ ‘Indeed. Anything but. It is just that of women, especially young women, caught up in a war.’ ‘Ah.’ ‘You see? A story that scarcely needs to be told. The ing...
Holse wasn’t about to get involved in any theological arguments. He looked serious and nodded, hoping this would do.
His jaw was slack and his mouth open, and he wondered if perhaps he would drown eventually; drowned by the falling rain.
He walked along Street Six, in the heart of Night City Tier. There were Night Cities throughout the developed galaxy; it was a kind of condominium franchise, though nobody seemed to know to whom the f...
He gazed out to sea for a moment, then added, One should never mistake pattern … for meaning.
He also believed that it was a deliberate scheme of their mentors to encourage those who were in power, or who would one day assume power, to witness the wonders that they were not being shown, so tha...
Gurgeh never ceased to be fascinated by the way a society’s games revealed so much about its ethos, its philosophy, its very soul.
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...
Don’t you have a religion? Dorolow asked Horza. Yes, he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. My survival. So… your religion dies wit...