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ef3bc4f
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The Colonel talked into the mike near his shoulder again.
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Iain M. Banks |
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6016060
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Genar-Hofoen found himself wondering again about the trade-off between skill-honing and distraction that took place in the development of any species likely to end up as one of those in play in the great galactic civilisation game. The Culture's standard assessment held that the Affront spent far too much time hunting and not nearly enough time getting on with the business of being a responsible space-faring species (though of course the Cu..
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Iain M. Banks |
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74f4814
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All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the ..
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Iain M. Banks |
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f416343
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Still guarding against threats and possibilities even it found difficult to specify, some of the Culture's stored warvessels were harboured not in or around highly populated Orbitals full of life and the comings and goings of cruise ships and visiting GSVs, but in places as far out of the way as it was possible to find amongst the cavernously cold and empty spaces of the great lens; quiet, secret, hidden places; places off the beaten track,..
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Iain M. Banks |
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0207323
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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.
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Iain M. Banks |
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6cf3edb
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Module," Za said, sprawling out over the seat and looking thoughtful, "I'd like a double standard measure of staol and chilled Shungusteriaung warp-wing liver wine bottoming a mouth of white Eflyre-Spin cruchen-spirit in a slush of medium cascalo, topped with roasted weirdberries and served in a number three strength Tipprawlic osmosis-bowl, or your best approximation thereof." "Male or female warp-wing?" the module said. "In this place?" Z..
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Iain M. Banks |
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b4f426f
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SPADASSINS DIGLADIATE! ZIFFIDAE AND XEBECS CONTEND! GOL-IARD DUNKING! Slogans, signs, announcements, odours and personal greeters vied for attention, advertising emporia and venues. Stunning 'scapes and scenes played out in sensorium bubbles bulging out into the centre of the street, putting you instantly into bedrooms, feast-halls, arenae, harems, seaships, fair rides, space battles, states of temporary ecstasy; tempting, prompting, sugges..
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Iain M. Banks |
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11e34fd
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Contact was the part of the Culture that handled more or less every aspect of the Culture's interactions with everything and everybody that wasn't the Culture, from the investigation of unexplored star systems to relations with the entire panoply of other civilisations at every developmental level, from those still unable to scrape together the plan for a world government or a functioning space elevator to the elegantly otiose but neverthel..
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Iain M. Banks |
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79772cb
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The Culture had a problem with the Affront. The Affront had a problem with the Culture, too, for that matter, but it was a pretty plain thing in comparison; the Affront's problem with the Culture was simply that the older civilisation stopped it doing all the things it wanted to do. The Culture's problem with the Affront was like an itch they couldn't scratch; the Culture's problem with the Affront was that the Affront existed at all and th..
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Iain M. Banks |
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18dc30c
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Birds and airfish, singly and in vast flocks that dimmed the sun, filled the spaces between the ocean and the clouds, lazily trailing one long wing across the brief smooth curvings between the waves before disappearing amongst the long rolling troughs again, or weaving columnar patterns like grey, fractal shadows against the soaring architecture of cloud.
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Iain M. Banks |
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6d4b35b
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Two hundred and thirty-three thousand times the speed of light. Dear holy fucking shit. The Yawning Angel thought there was something almost vulgar about such a velocity. Where the hell was it heading for? Andromeda?
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Iain M. Banks |
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c772bc2
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Even once the Culture as an entity had been established and the use of conventional currency had come to be seen as an archaic hindrance to development rather than its moderating enabler, appreciable amounts of energy and time - both biological and machine - had been spent perfecting the various methods by which the human sensory apparatus could be convinced that it was experiencing something that was not really happening.
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Iain M. Banks |
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3ba1f03
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An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful..
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Iain M. Banks |
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fc6a188
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Good grief, man; the Culture's been a spacefaring species for eleven thousand years; just because you've mostly settled down in idealized, tailor-made conditions doesn't mean you've lost the capacity for rapid adaptation. Strength in depth; redundancy; over-design. You know the Culture's philosophy.
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Iain M. Banks |
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390a3f2
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Subtlety, which was heading back for the
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Iain M. Banks |
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57eba1e
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She wanted to tell him that it was all okay, that there was nothing to worry about, that the universe was a terrible, utterly uncaring place and then people came along and added suffering and injustice to the mix as well and it was all so much worse than he could imagine and she knew because she had studied it and lived it, even if just a little. You could make it better but it was a messy process and then you just had to try - you were obl..
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Iain M. Banks |
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31e10fd
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The world was on fire; walls of smoke filled the sky, making a night lit up like hell, flames leaping from a hundred different places, trees and outbuildings all on fire or silhouetted against the fires beyond.
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Iain M. Banks |
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00ed384
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you needed ear defenders, and the swirling slipstream caused total havoc to any hairstyle worth the name.
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Iain M. Banks |
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840ede7
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Might, fury, decisive force, the willingness to smite; how her father had loved such terms and ideas, and how shallow they began to look when you saw them played out time and time again over the centuries and millennia by a thousand different species. This is how power works, how force and authority assert themselves, this is how people are persuaded to behave in ways that are not objectively in their best interests, this is the kind of th..
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Iain M. Banks |
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56d3964
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Our Azadian friends are always rather nonplussed by our lack of a flag or a symbol, and the Culture rep here--you'll meet him tonight if he remembers to turn up--thought it was a pity there was no Culture anthem for bands to play when our people come here, so he whistled them the first song that came into his head, and they've been playing that at receptions and ceremonies for the last eight years." "I thought I recognized one of the tunes ..
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Iain M. Banks |
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3adc734
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I'm the smartest thing for a hundred light years radius, and by a factor of about a million ...... but even I can't predict where a snooker ball's going to end up after more than six collisions.
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Iain M. Banks |
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be1a991
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Even the most urbanely sophisticated, scrupulously empathic and excruciatingly polite civilisation, it had been suggested, was just a hegswarm with a sense of proportion.
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Iain M. Banks |
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1146898
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Contest is formative; battle is a testing, war a part of life and the evolutionary process. In its extremity, we find ourselves." "Usually in the shit."
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Iain M. Banks |
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dda9204
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He also believed that it was a deliberate scheme of their mentors to encourage those who were in power, or who would one day assume power, to witness the wonders that they were not being shown, so that they would never be tempted to get above themselves, so that they would always know that no matter how magnificent they appeared to themselves or those around them and regardless of what they achieved, it was all within the context of this gr..
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Iain M. Banks |
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9676449
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Always try to avoid setting up future opportunities for kicking yourself.
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Iain M. Banks |
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4f9869e
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All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.
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Iain M. Banks |
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e99eeec
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The empire survives, the barbarians survive, but the empire is no more and the barbarians are nowhere to be found.
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Iain M. Banks |
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7badcfe
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You judged your own attractiveness - physically, psychologically and in terms of status - then you knew your level and could either raise or lower your sights accordingly, risking rejection but with the possibility of advancement, or settling for a more reliably stable life but never knowing what you might have achieved.
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Iain M. Banks |