Tell me, what is happiness?Happiness? Happiness... is to wake up, on a bright spring morning, after an exhausting first night spent with a beautiful... passionate... multi-murderess.
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...
Once upon a time there was a magical land where every man was a king, every woman a queen, each boy a prince and all girl princesses. In this land there were no hungry people and no crippled people. W...
Myself, said the drone sniffily, I have never been able to see what virtue there could be in something that was eighty percent water.
My greatest enemies are Women and the Sea. These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them, and the Sea because it has always...
Just as one might do useful work without fully understanding the job one was engaged in, or even what the point of it was, so the behaviour of devotion still mattered to the all-forgiving God, and jus...
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.She laughed. 'Really?'The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. 'Oh, no. It's just something we tell ourselves.
It also occurred to him that Minds wrote voluminous biographies of each other in order to cover the odd potentially valuable or embarrassing nugget of truth under a mountain of bullshit.
He became aware, very slowly, very gradually, that he held some impossibly complex model of the contest in his head, unknowably dense, multifariously planed. He looked at that model, twisted it. The g...
Genar-Hofoen had arrived a few days after the end of Tier’s annual Festival. There was an air of autumnal desuetude mixed with high-summer torpor about the place when he arrived; people were cleaning...
But if you’re God, Sharrow said to Elson Roa, why do you need the others? What others? Roa said. Sharrow looked exasperated. Oh, come on. Elson Roa shrugged. My apparences? They are the sign that my w...
Likes to think it is very protective of me. QiRia drank from his glass. It is very protective of me. But certain sorts of protection, even care, can shade into a sort of desire for ownership. Certainl...
This water’s freezing. Get the servants to bring some more hot. And bring more wine! Where’s my goblet? What have you done with it?’ The goblet, sunk in the bath in front of YetAmidous, had left a red...
The longest it had taken him to learn any game had been three days; he hadn’t forgotten any rule of any game in all his life, nor ever had to learn one twice.
The Culture had a problem with the Affront. The Affront had a problem with the Culture, too, for that matter, but it was a pretty plain thing in comparison; the Affront’s problem with the Culture was...
That’s what we’ve lost, you know. What you’ve lost; all of you. A sense of wonder and awe and . . . sin. These people know there are still things they don’t know, things that can still go wrong, thing...
Rules and laws exist only because we take pleasure in doing what they forbid, but as long as most of the people obey such proscriptions most of the time, they have done their job.
Our Azadian friends are always rather nonplussed by our lack of a flag or a symbol, and the Culture rep here—you’ll meet him tonight if he remembers to turn up—thought it was a pity there was no Cultu...
Naturally, also, both sides were convinced they had right on their side, not that either was remotely naive enough to think that had any possible bearing on the outcome whatsoever.