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...
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...
Tactics cohered into strategy, strategy disintegrated into tactics, in the sliding scale of their dialectical moral algebra.
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.
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...
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.
Look, Horza, Yalson said, turning to him, when you come on board this ship you don’t have a past. It’s considered very bad manners to ask anybody where they came from or what they’ve done in their liv...
I’m a fucking razor-arsed starship, you maniac! I’m not male, female or anything else except stupendously smart and right now tuned to smite. I don’t give a fuck about flattering you. The few and fran...
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
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...
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...
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...
Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for 'Mr David Bowie's Space Oddity for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This fr...
Like a berserk raptor thrown into a nest of hibernating kittens...
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...
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
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...