As you say, DeWar, our shame comes from the comparison. We know we might be generous and compassionate and good, and could behave so, yet something else in our nature makes us otherwise. She smiled a...
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...
Does identity matter anyway? I have my doubts. We are what we do, not what we think. Only the interactions count (there is no problem with free will here; that’s not incompatible with believing your a...
Even once the Culture as an entity had been established and the use of conventional currency had come to be seen as an archaic hindrance to development rather than its moderating enabler, appreciable...
Genar-Hofoen found himself wondering again about the trade-off between skill-honing and distraction that took place in the development of any species likely to end up as one of those in play in the gr...
He was what she wanted, but it would mean so much more after a charged friendship; that long, exquisite exchange of gradually more intimate confidences, the slow accumulation of shared experiences, th...
It was not so difficult to understand the warped view the Azadians had of what they called human nature - the phrase they used whenever they had to justify something inhuman and unnatural
Might, fury, decisive force, the willingness to smite; how her father had loved such terms and ideas, and how shallow they began to look when you saw them played out time and time again over the centu...
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...
People can be teachers and idiots; they can be philosophers and idiots; they can be politicians and idiots... in fact I think they have to be... a genius can be an idiot. The world is largely run for...
Promises take many shapes, and the more … momentous they are, the more they might look like threats. All great promises are threats, I suppose, to the way things have been until that point, to some as...
See that little black thing sticking up? Gurgeh looked. There was a little black bulb poking up through the surface of the red mud. Yes. That’s his dick. Gurgeh looked suspiciously at the other man. H...
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...
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...
The ball itself was for over a thousand people, about half of them game-players; the rest were mostly partners of the players, or officials, priests, officers and bureaucrats who
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 story, the intruder said, settling back in the chair. Once upon a time, over the gravity well and far away, there was a magical land where they had no kings, no laws, no money and no property, but...
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...
What difference does it make whether a mind’s made up of enormous, squidgy, animal cells working at the speed of sound (in air!), or from a glittering nanofoam of reflectors and patterns of holographi...
Conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?
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