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...
Life buzzed in, fumed about, rattled around and quite thoroughly infested the entire galaxy, and probably - almost certainly - well beyond. The vast ongoingness of it all somehow put all one's own pet...
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 the Culture’s fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that...
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
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...
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...
For are women not supposed to resist even those they would happily surrender to, so that when they resist a more brutal violation how can the man be sure that any struggle, any protestation is not mer...
First person singular obtaining colloquial orgasm within a Caledonian sandwich,’ it said, then looked annoyed, and spoke incoherently into a grille set in its belly, which replied. It looked up and sa...
Don’t! he had time to shout, but the gun was already in the woman’s mouth and an instant later, as Horza started to duck and his eyes closed instinctively, the back of Gow’s helmet blew out in a singl...
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...
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...
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...
All these people seemed to do was talk! It supposed it was just what biologicals did. If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking am...
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...
Tactics cohered into strategy, strategy disintegrated into tactics, in the sliding scale of their dialectical moral algebra.
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...
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...
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...
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...