If they want you, a youngish Quell had once written of the Harlan’s World ruling elite, sooner or later they’ll scoop you up off the globe, like specks of interesting dust off a Martian artifact. Cros...
If they cannot have what might, what could, what should, and perhaps most awful of all what should have been, then they will dream it up instead, imagine it into being in whatever twisted or beautiful...
I said—do you want to kill a fucking dragon? More yells, and more punch behind them this time. Egar eased up out of his crouch and filled his lungs. I can’t hear you! Do you—or do you not—want to kill...
I don’t think I really believe in paradise, Carl. You want to know the truth, I don’t think any of us do really. Deep down, down where it counts, I think we all know it’s a crock of shit. That’s why w...
He’d already made her for Kiriath and was backing off like a poet asked to wash dishes. Ringil
Got a brother served up at the Dhashara pass, he always did say you lot let your women run riot. Mouthing off like they were men, riding horses, carrying weapons, shit like that.Been known to happen,...
Freed hands both rising for the pommel now, so natural, so smooth, it was like Kiriath machinery, as if he machinery, a cunningly crafted clockwork Kiriath mannequin, built to complement the steel.He...
Fortified with self-loathing, with the reserves of sardonic contempt he’d absorbed in his time spent around Milacar, he’d gone to the gate tight-lipped and filled with a strange, queasy energy, as if...
The overwhelming impression I got was that if there was a line of least resistance in life, this face had never been along it.
Like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying.
You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you’re God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well, they don’t reall...
You know what you stupid fucking conspiracy assholes just don’t get? No one is that well organized. There is no big Deep State evil, no Corporate Earth Plot to Enslave Humanity. It’s just a bunch of c...
Which part of get the fuck out didn’t you understand, hard man? I got the fuck out.
There's a general hate in the hearts of men. You went to war, Gil, you should know that better than anyone. It's like the heat of the sun. Men like Kaad are just the focal figures, like lenses to gath...
The only problem they had ... was in drawing the fine differences between war-mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own; justifiable loss-mass murder of your own troops, but with substantia...
The difference between virtuality and life is very simple. In a construct you know everything is being run by an all-powerful machine. Reality doesn't offer this assurance, so it's very easy to develo...
The Lady Ishil gestured. Oh, we asked. It wasn't difficult. Everyone in this pigsty of a town seems to know where you sleep. A delicately curled lip. She let him go. And with who.Ringil ignored that o...
So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry.
See, once upon a time, Yavuz was saying, fear was a unifying force. Back then, you could make a country strong with xenophobia. That’s the old model, the nation-state fortress thing. But you can’t liv...
Look at that, Kovacs. We’re drinking coffee so far from Earth you have to work hard to pick out Sol in the night sky. We were carried here on a wind that blows in a dimension we cannot see or touch. S...