Unbelievable. I’m in a fucking Outside Context situation, the ship thought, and suddenly felt as stupid and dumb-struck as any muddy savage confronted with explosives or electricity.
One reason was that Gurgeh was speaking Eächic all the time. Flere-Imsaho was always a little dubious about trying to be so precise about human behavior, but it had been briefed that when Culture peop...
I am not answering these questions anymore, I said to him as I took my plate to the sink. We should have gone metric years ago.Iain Banks
The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking's immediate family by drowning them in the tears of the Continental Empathaur in its Sadness Season.
Just because that was the start of a thousand sentimental stories didn’t mean that it didn’t actually happen.
The one on the left," Worthil said, "is a male, carrying the testes and penis. The middle one is equipped with a kind of reversible vagina, and ovaries. The vagina turns inside-out to implant the fert...
In a way Gurgeh’s very weakness saved him; he played so that it was not worth taking him for a long time, letting the other four fight it out. Later he attacked the two admirals when they had grown st...
But there we are. Some things never do make perfect sense. There must be some explanation, and it is perhaps a little like the Doctrine of the Perfect Partner. We must be content to know that she exis...
But what if someone kills somebody else?Gurgeh shrugged. They're slap-droned.Ah! This sounds more like it. What does that drone do?Follows you around and makes sure you never do it again.Is that all?W...
Ferbin's father had had the same robustly pragmatic view of religion as he’d had of everything else. In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious...
He looked for the Culture ship, then told himself not to be stupid; it was probably still several trillion kilometers away. That was how divorced from human scale modern warfare had become. You could...
Horza recalled that the Culture's attitude to somebody who believed in an omnipotent God was to pity them, and to take no more notice of the substance of their faith than one would take of the ramblin...
The History Of The Universe In Three WordsCHAPTER ONEBang!CHAPTER TWOsssssCHAPTER THREEcrunch.THE END
We are what we do, not what we think.
Neeporlax presented something of a contrast.
Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.
The Idirans themselves had evolved on their planet Idir as the top monster from a whole planetful of monsters.
So how many infants have to grow up under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, and just possibly die screaming inside the radioactive rubble, just for us to be sure we’re doing the right thing? How certa...
Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, dro...
It seemed to him to be an unbearably vivid tangle of contradictions; at the same time pathologically violent and lugubriously sentimental, startlingly barbaric and surprisingly sophisticated, fabulous...
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