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 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...
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.
He saw a chair, and a ship that was not a ship; he saw a man with two shadows, and he saw that which cannot be seen — a concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can...
He felt great. spa'dassins digladiate; ziffidae and xebecs contend! gol-iard dunking!
He could not believe that ordinary people in the Culture really wanted the war, no matter how they had voted. They had their communist Utopia. They were soft and pampered and indulged, and the Contact...
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...
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 I don’t know what the right thing to do is; I sometimes think I know too much, I’ve studied too much, learned too much, remembered too much. It all seems to average out, somehow; like dust that se...
A federated disgust, a galaxy of scorn. Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.
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...
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...
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...
[M]y determined and strenuous endeavours to take in absolutely nothing of what I had regarded as entirely the most irrelevant part of my schooling had patently not met with total success
Was Fergus Urvill anywhere, still? Apart from the body - whatever was left of him physically, down there in that dark, cold pressure - was there anything else? Was his personality intact somehow, some...
Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.
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...
Thing about emergencies, he said, sounding weary. Rarely occur when they’d be convenient. May
They spend time. That’s just it. They spend time traveling. The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives. They persist in hoping that something th...
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...