It was a warship, after all. It was built, to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the weaponry of w...
That’s why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place. He
War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its cr...
All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be a...
The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try...
Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!
Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess.
Though drones, avatars and even humans are one thing; the loss of any is not without moral and diplomatic import, of course, but might be dismissed as merely unfortunate and regrettable, something to...
Zakalwe, in all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security...
I have a story to tell you. It has many beginnings, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginnings and endings are contingent things anyway; inventions, devices. Where does any story really begin? Th...
You're saying nothing lasts forever, he heard the fellow whine. (Well, pretty trite, he thought.)No, he heard her say. I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and amongst those exce...
I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away.
Naturalness?’ I said, loudly. ‘This lot’ll tell you anything is natural; they’ll tell you greed and hate and jealousy and paranoia and unthinking religious awe and fear of God and hating anybody who’s...
[T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered.
The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.
You mean, if you lose a game… you have… these things done to you? Exactly. One might bet, say, the loss of a finger against aggravated male-to-apex rectal rape. Gurgeh looked levelly at the machine fo...
All was the game, everything was seen in its light, translated into the combative imagery of its language, evaluated in the context its structure imposed upon the mind.
High in a turret of a great castle rising on a black crag above snowy plains, besieged and grand, crammed full of an empire’s treasure, and he sitting by a log fire with a sad and lovely princess. . ....
God, what did any of it matter, in the end? You lived; you died. You were as indistinguishable from a distance as one of these blades of grass, and who was to say more important? Growing, surrounded b...
Though. 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...
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