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fbb2861
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Naturally, also, both sides were convinced they had right on their side, not that either was remotely naive enough to think that had any possible bearing on the outcome whatsoever.
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Iain M. Banks |
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cdf3681
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Horza recalled that the Culture's attitude to somebody who believed in an omnipotent God was to pity them, and to take no more notice of the substance of their faith than one would take of the ramblings of somebody claiming to be Emperor of the Universe. The nature of the belief wasn't totally irrelevant - along with the person's background and upbringing, it might tell you something about what had gone wrong with them - but you didn't take..
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horza
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Iain M. Banks |
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6b0220a
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You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter's place was, and I looked across it and there was a little notice on the wall saying it was forbidden to take photographs of the courtyard without the man's permission. [..] They want to own the light!
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observation
science-fiction
human-nature
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Iain M. Banks |
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3a36022
|
Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.
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story
trope
safety
technology
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Iain M. Banks |
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1f47337
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Though drones, avatars and even humans are one thing; the loss of any is not without moral and diplomatic import, of course, but might be dismissed as merely unfortunate and regrettable, something to be smoothed over through the usual channels. Attacking a ship, on the other hand, is an unambiguous act of war.
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Iain M. Banks |
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d0c3a83
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Just before the went back into warp and its crew sat down at the table, the ship expelled the limp corpse of Zallin. Where it had found a live man in a suit, it left a dead youth in shorts and a tattered shirt, tumbling and freezing while a thin shell of air molecules expanded around the body, like an image of departing life.
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death
life
zallin
vacuum
shell
space
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Iain M. Banks |
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7a53cdd
|
I'm too drunk to recall much of what I've said. Which, come to think of it, is probably just as well, judging by the way people who are normally quite sensible dissolve into gibbering, rude, opinionated and bombastic idiots once the alcohol molecules in their bloom-stream outnumber the neutrons, or whatever. Luckily, one only notices this if one stays sober oneself, so the solution is as pleasant (at the time, at least) as it is obvious.
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Iain M. Banks |
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e0cb41c
|
Hey, Wrobik; cheer up, yeah? You're going to shoot down a fucking starship. It'll be an experience.
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Iain M. Banks |
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0de49cb
|
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 section's evangelical materialism provided their conscience-salving good works. What more could they want? The war had to be the Mind's idea; it was part of their clinical drive to clean up the galaxy, make it run on nice, efficient lines, wit..
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Iain M. Banks |
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ccb82e4
|
There was something comforting about having a vast hydrogen furnace burning millions of tons of material a second at the centre of a solar system. It was cheery.
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Iain M. Banks |
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776f9a8
|
I let myself into the cellar, locked the door behind me. The cellar was cold. I found the whisky, let myself out of the cellar and locked it, turned all the lights out, gave Mrs McSpadden the bottle, accepted a belated new-year kiss from her, then made my way out through the kitchen and the corridor and the crowded hall where the music sounded loud and people were laughing, and out through the now almost empty entrance hall and down the ste..
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Iain M. Banks |
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fa3bccf
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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.
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Iain M. Banks |
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0280bd4
|
My greatest enemies are Women and the Sea. These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them, and the Sea because it has always frustrated me, destroying what I have built, washing away what I have left, wiping clean the marks I have made.
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Iain M. Banks |
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a5f5b57
|
Changers] were a threat to identity, a challenge to the individualism even of those they were never likely to impersonate. It had nothing to do with souls or physical or spiritual possession; it was, as the Idirans well understood, the behavouristic copying of another which revolted. Individuality, the thing which most humans held more precious than anything else about themselves, was somehow cheapened by the ease with which a Changer could..
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Iain M. Banks |
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c51d923
|
Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.
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Iain M. Banks |
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f901181
|
Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.
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solipsism
|
Iain M. Banks |
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e3cc7bf
|
He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.
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|
Iain M. Banks |
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e3cfed9
|
Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.
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Iain M. Banks |
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c463e27
|
Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you're not doing it right.
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Iain M. Banks |
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d5c4c92
|
it hung above the livid, bruised land like an admonition
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Iain M. Banks |
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615c58e
|
He might come in useful.' 'Yeah. So's a broken leg if you want to kick yourself in the back of the head.
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unwanted
usefulness
|
Iain M. Banks |
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3c94753
|
for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not yet fully woken up, and events within its sleek hull still moved to another, slower tempo, made half of dreams.
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silence
dreams
jernau-morat-gurgeh
made-half-of-dreams
mothballed
warship
waking
|
Iain M. Banks |
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8e513e9
|
Jernau Gurgeh," the machine said, making a sighing noise, "a guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody's either for it or against it, we're against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try t..
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Iain M. Banks |
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175daa6
|
Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!
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Iain M. Banks |
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4b84c1f
|
A guilty system recognizes no innocents.
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|
Iain M. Banks |
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653385f
|
But what if someone kills somebody else?" Gurgeh shrugged. "They're slap-droned." "Ah! This sounds more like it. What does that drone do?" "Follows you around and makes sure you never do it again." "Is that all?" "What more do you want? Social death, Hamin; you don't get invited to too many parties." "Ah; but in your Culture, can't you gatecrash?" "I suppose so," Gurgeh conceded. "But nobody'd talk to you."
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Iain M. Banks |
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ea8da9f
|
Once one survives the trough that comes with the understanding that people are going to go on being stupid and cruel to each other no matter what, probably for ever - if one survives; many people choose suicide at this point instead - then one starts to take the attitude, Oh well, never mind.
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Iain M. Banks |
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9e3f035
|
In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it.
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life
wants
|
Iain M. Banks |
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0ffbfe7
|
On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those ..
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limited
limiting
fuel
sustenance
shelter
energy
economics
space
food
|
Iain M. Banks |
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fde9602
|
We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it.
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leaders
monsters
|
Iain M. Banks |
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d91a705
|
It could all be unreal - how could you ever tell otherwise? You took it on trust, in part because what would be the point of doing anything else? When the fake behaved exactly like the real, why treat it as anything different? You gave it the benefit of the doubt, until something proved otherwise.
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reality
virtual-reality
scepticism
|
Iain M. Banks |
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9cbe81e
|
and was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her. Ulver laughed. 'It looks,' she snorted, 'like a dildo!' 'That's appropriate,' Churt Lyne said. 'Armed, it can fuck solar systems.
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Iain M. Banks |
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2ed84bf
|
He lay, often, looking at her sleeping face in the new light that fell in through the open walls of the strange house, and he stared at her skin and hair with his mouth open, transfixed by the quick stillness of her, struck dumb with the physical fact of her existence as though she was some careless star-thing that slept on quite unaware of its incandescent power; the casualness and ease with which she slept there amazed him; he couldn't be..
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love
incandescent-power
star-thing
shias-engin
|
Iain M. Banks |
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8af1adb
|
there came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.
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|
Iain M. Banks |
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ff05982
|
One should never mistake pattern ... for meaning.
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|
Iain M. Banks |
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8a60608
|
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...
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|
Iain M. Banks |
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2e64b89
|
Does identity matter anyway? I have my doubts. We are what we do, not what we think. Only the interactions count (there is no problem with free will here; that's not incompatible with believing your actions define you). And what is free will anyway? Chance. The random factor. If one is not ultimately predictable, then of course that's all it can be.
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Iain M. Banks |
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fe90b07
|
Thing about emergencies," he said, sounding weary. "Rarely occur when they'd be convenient."
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Iain M. Banks |
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413379d
|
then there's nothing worse I can wish on you than to be exactly the fuckhead you so obviously are.
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|
Iain M. Banks |
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f8e8d74
|
All reality seemed to hinge on those infinitesimal bundles of meaning.
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|
Iain M. Banks |
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33325e0
|
The point is: what happens in heaven?' 'Unknowable wonderfulness?' 'Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn't represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.' 'If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alter..
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heaven
religion
look-to-windward
iain-m-banks
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
f214689
|
There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and particularly the understanding of that part of the then-existing group-civilization which called itself the West. That idea, to my mind, met its materialist apotheosis in Berlin at the time of the Wall. Perhaps I go into some sort of shock when I experience something deeply; I'm not sure, even at this ripe middle-age, but I hav..
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mankind
diziet-sma
marterialist-apotheosis
multifariously-faceted
the-berlin-wall
the-west
cities
realpolitik
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
9f29437
|
The story," the intruder said, settling back in the chair. "Once upon a time, over the gravity well and far away, there was a magical land where they had no kings, no laws, no money and no property, but where everybody lived like a prince, was very well-behaved and lacked for nothing. And these people lived in peace, but they were bored, because paradise can get that way after a time, and so they started to carry out missions of good works;..
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Iain M. Banks |
|
80549dc
|
It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and appare..
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Iain M. Banks |