As a child I’d believed there was an essential person, a sort of core personality around which the surface factors could evolve and change without damaging the integrity of who you were. Later, I star...
A weapon is a tool, she repeated, a little breathlessly. A tool for killing and destroying. And there will be times when, as an Envoy, you must kill and destroy. Then you will choose and equip yoursel...
A robe-straining belly offered itself. I stepped in and the Tebbit knife leapt upward, unzipping. I went eye to eye with the man I was gutting. A lined, bearded visage glared back. I could smell his b...
The tongues of men are not much leashed by concerns for accuracy or truth.
She said, a little bitterly, facing him in warm perfumed bathwater one evening,
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.
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...
Pull on the cold, clinking mail of your professional detachment, Archeth Indamaninarmal, inhabit it until it starts to feel warm and accustomed, and in time you’ll forget you’re wearing it at all. You...
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...
Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying.
It was like resolution. The circling antagonisms collapsed inward like orbitals crashing and burning, surrendering to a mutual gravity that had dragged like chains while it endured but in release was...
In order to bring about a convulsive political change, it was essential to intensify the existing social tensions to the point where all would be driven to choose sides in what would thus be establish...
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...
Basically, she argues that the Secession was an example of a nation-state going extinct because it failed to adapt. America couldn’t cope with modernity, it died from the shock and was torn apart by m...
Against the distant roar of the maelstrom I heard it. The hurrying strop of rotor blades on the fabric of the night.
A Man Down Is Not a Man Dead. Leave No Stack Behind.
The overwhelming impression I got was that if there was a line of least resistance in life, this face had never been along it.
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.