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...
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!
If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!
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...
Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.
[I]t would be a niceness that was enforced leniently, patiently and gracefully, with the sort of unflappable self-certainty [they] couldn't help displaying when all its statistics proved that it reall...
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...
The ship told you a guilty system recognises no innocents. I’d say it does. It recognises the innocence of a young child, for example, and you saw how they treated that. In a sense it even recognises...
The only sin is selfishness.
Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of s...
Lying here, during all this time after my own small fall, it has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We’ll pluck significance from the least consequential happ...
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.
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...
Then there’s nothing worse I can wish on you than to be exactly the fuckhead you so obviously are.
The ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces.
Genuinely annoyed that the woman could use even something so obviously a testament to the power of intelligence and hard work as an argument for her own system of irrational belief.
The majority of species, too, could scrape together some sort of metaphysical framework, a form of earlier speculation – semi-deranged or otherwise – regarding the way things worked at a fundamental l...
Sometimes what goes without saying is best said anyway.
It seemed perverse to some, but for all their apparent militarism the Gzilt had remained peaceful over many millenia; it was the avowedly peaceful Culture that had , within living memory, taken part i...