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...
The good soldier did as he was told, and if he had any sense at all volunteered for nothing, especially promotion.
It was a beautiful voice. He wanted to reply to it. But he couldn’t work out how to. It was very dark. ‘Cheradenine?’ A very patient voice. Concerned, somehow, but a hopeful voice; a cheerful, even lo...
One thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting—corruption and favoritism, mos...
Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.
Una verdad aparentemente tan trascendental que uno se asombra de que los oprimidos de la Tierra no se subleven envueltos en llamas y rabia. Pero no lo hacen, porque están tan infectados con el mito de...
It wasn’t a finite supply of promiscuity he was draining, it was an ever-replenishing fixation that was eating up his potential for future personal growth.
They are. But in Special Circumstances we deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal laws — the rules of right and wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe —...
They sought to take the unfairness out of existence, to remove the mistakes in the transmitted message of life which gave it any point or advancement...
At one end of the vast C bitten from the castle a single great bastion-tower stood, almost intact, five kilometres high, and casting a kilometre-wide shadow across the rumpled ground in front of the...
Humming to himself and looking for the flat wafer. He heard a sudden intake of breath, then what sounded like a rather embarrassed cough, just behind him. He turned round to see Mr. Dreltram behind hi...
He wept a little, and was proud of her, even though he knew such vicarious pride was mere sentimentality, arguably just a typically male attempt to appropriate some of her achievement for himself.
[A]ll her hardships had been self-inflicted and recreational in the past.
Thing about emergencies, he said, sounding weary. Rarely occur when they’d be convenient.
Can I cuddle up with you when you sleep? Sma stopped, detached the creature from her shoulder with one hand and stared it in the face. What? Just for chumminess’ sake, the little thing said, yawning w...
[I]t was really only in the generation or two before hers that the idea had started to traverse the spectrum of likelihood in the popular imagination, beginning at unthinkable, progressing to absurd,...
Three; - and this would be sufficient reason by itself - what are we supposed to be about, Sma? What is the Culture? What do we believe in, even if it hardly ever is expressed, even if we are embarras...
At least showed you were interested in trying to provide an explanation for the world around you, and so was generally held to be a promising first step towards coming up with the belief system that p...
Action appealed to him most; it was the warriors' creed. When in doubt, do.
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