There’s a saying: ‘War is a long cliff.’ You can avoid the cliff completely, you can walk along the top for as long as you have the nerve, you can even choose to leap off, and if you only fall a short...
The better I do the worse things get because the more I have to lose.
The Culture gives us so much, but in fact it’s only taking things away from us, lobotimizings everybody in it, taking away their choices, their potential for being really good or even slightly bad.
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...
So basically you're sticking around to watch us all fuck up ?Yes. It's one of life's few guaranteed constants.
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...
SPADASSINS DIGLADIATE! ZIFFIDAE AND XEBECS CONTEND! GOL-IARD DUNKING! Slogans, signs, announcements, odours and personal greeters vied for attention, advertising emporia and venues. Stunning ’scapes a...
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.
I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the
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...
Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.
Empires are synonymous with centralized—if occasionally schismatized—hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through...
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...
Do you want to work with us?Everybody seems to think I should; they believe you’re fighting the good fight. It’s just that... I get suspicious when everybody agrees about something.
Did that make him a bad man? Perhaps, though if so then arguably all men were bad. A proposition his wife would probably agree with, as would most of the women Holse had known, from his poor mother on...
Concerned, somehow, but a hopeful voice; a cheerful, even loving voice. He tried to remember his mother. ‘Cheradenine?’ the voice said again.