Little textual note for you here (bear with me). Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of person...
I’m sure it varies across species – some seem to do quite well with no idea of love at all – but you soon enough come to realise that love generally comes from a need within ourselves, and that the be...
It was like flying upside-down over a planet made of metal; and of all the sights the galaxy held which were the result of conscious effort, it was one bested for what the Culture would call gawp valu...
It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, un...
It never ceased to amaze him how quickly a small child's face could turn from peach to beetroot.
I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you’re supposed to argue about, come later. They’re...
I let myself into the cellar, locked the door behind me. The cellar was cold. I found the whisky, let myself out of the cellar and locked it, turned all the lights out, gave Mrs McSpadden the bottle,...
I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.
However, there is another reaction to the never-ending plethora of unoriginal idiocies that life throws up with such erratic reliability, besides horror and despair. What’s that? A kind of glee. Once...
How long have we had space travel? Breyguhn shouted, smacking her fist into the table surface; the chain whipped down, scattering chips of granite. Breyguhn didn’t seem to notice. Seven thousand years...
Even the most urbanely sophisticated, scrupulously empathic and excruciatingly polite civilisation, it had been suggested, was just a hegswarm with a sense of proportion.
Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot,
Earth is a silly and boring planet. If not, then it is too deeply unpleasant to be allowed to exist! Dammit, there’s something wrong with those people! They are beyond redemption and hope! They are no...
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.
Darkness came like a black flag waved over the canyon, drawing back the grayness from the shores of the city, then pushing forward the individual specks of street and building lights as though in reco...
Contact was the part of the Culture that handled more or less every aspect of the Culture’s interactions with everything and everybody that wasn’t the Culture, from the investigation of unexplored sta...
But no matter whether we are all in a still greater game, this one here before us is at a cruder grain than that which it models. Entire battles, and sometimes therefore wars, can hinge on a jammed gu...
But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird . . . but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you wo...
An electronic computer is also made up of matter, but organised differently; what is there so magical about the workings of the huge, slow cells of the animal brain that they can claim themselves to b...
All great promises are threats, I suppose, to the way things have been until that point, to some aspect of our lives, and we all suddenly become conservative, even though we want and need what the pro...