He saw that which cannot be seen; a concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can be reached to that end, and to remove and to add and to smash and to create so that...
And was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her. Ulver laughed. 'It looks,' she snorte...
A Mind could hold any set of facts and opinions it wanted without having to tell anybody what it knew or thought, or why.
[T]here is an osmosis from fiction to reality, a constant contamination which distorts the truth behind both and fuzzes the telling distinctions in life itself, categorizing real situations and feelin...
You know, Balveda, for such a sensitive species you show remarkably little empathy at times. Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot,
Yet my father died, I was forced to the throne, and although I knew I was not ready, I coped. I learned. I became a King by having to behave as one, not simply because I was my father’s son and had be...
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...
We are such pathetic, fleshy things, so short lived, swarming and confused.
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...
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...
This isn’t Ospin! These aren’t the Dataversities!
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 The individual is obsolete.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...
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...
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...
The world was on fire; walls of smoke filled the sky, making a night lit up like hell, flames leaping from a hundred different places, trees and outbuildings all on fire or silhouetted against the fir...
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.,...
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 empire survives, the barbarians survive, but the empire is no more and the barbarians are nowhere to be found.
Still, the underlying point held; experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the...
Still guarding against threats and possibilities even it found difficult to specify, some of the Culture’s stored warvessels were harboured not in or around highly populated Orbitals full of life and...