So basically you're sticking around to watch us all fuck up ?Yes. It's one of life's few guaranteed constants.
That conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?
The Colonel talked into the mike near his shoulder again.
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.
The Xinthia were regarded with something approaching affection by even the most ruthless and unsentimental of the galaxy’s Involved, partly because they had done much great work in the past – they had...
The better I do the worse things get because the more I have to lose.
The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into b...
The ship left the construction bay of the factory craft with most of its fitting-out still to be done. Accelerating hard, its course a four-dimensional spiral through a blizzard of stars where it knew...
The swirling mist lay in the bottom of such great bowls like a broth of dreams.
The usual bizarre bio-mix of who-knew-how-many planetary-original blood-lines, all tangled inextricably together with those from an equally unfathomable number of others, boosted with genetech, aug.,...
There was nothing worse, Veppers thought, than a loser who’d made it. It was just part of the way things worked – part of the complexity of life, he supposed – that sometimes somebody who absolutely d...
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...
They were enemies, they had both been very close to death and the other had done little or nothing to intervene, but actually to kill her would be very difficult.Or maybe he only wanted to pretend tha...
This is not a heroic age, he told the drone, staring at the fire. The individual is obsolete. That’s why life is so comfortable for us all. We don’t matter, so we’re safe. No one person can have any r...
This isn’t Ospin! These aren’t the Dataversities!
To touch this abomination with anything less perfectly attuned to its nature than the carefully dispersed wings of an engine field would be like an ancient, fragile rocket ship falling into a sun, lik...
Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underne...
We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they point the way to future success. But the universe does not have our own best interests at heart, and to a...
We are such pathetic, fleshy things, so short lived, swarming and confused.
We’re losing, he thought again. There is a war in heaven and we are losing it. The war was amongst the Heavens, between the Afterlives, if you wanted to be pedantic about it. And it was over the Hells...
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