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c6cd3ae
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It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky.
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ethological-epicentre
snow-dark-sky
new-york-city
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Iain M. Banks |
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60aad7b
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Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for 'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious."
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Iain M. Banks |
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badca73
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His jaw was slack and his mouth open, and he wondered if perhaps he would drown eventually; drowned by the falling rain.
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Iain M. Banks |
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2d41a44
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As you say, DeWar, our shame comes from the comparison. We know we might be generous and compassionate and good, and could behave so, yet something else in our nature makes us otherwise." She smiled a small, empty smile. "Yes, I feel something I recognise as love. Something I remember, something I may discuss and mill and theorise over." She shook her head. "But it is not something I know. I am like a blind woman taking about how a tree mus..
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Iain M. Banks |
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ca44076
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It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders." "Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilizationally." --
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Iain M. Banks |
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cd240f0
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Almost every developing species had a creation myth buried somewhere in its past, even if by the time they'd become space-faring it was no more than a quaint and dusty irrelevance (though, granted, some were downright embarrassing). Talking utter drivel about thunderclouds having sex with the sun, lonely old sadists inventing something to amuse themselves with, a big fish spawning the stars, planets, moons and your own ever-so-special Peopl..
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Iain M. Banks |
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b7bcced
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They were enemies, they had both been very close to death and the other had done little or nothing to intervene, but actually to kill her would be very difficult. Or maybe he only wanted to pretend that he would find it very difficult; maybe it would be no bother at all, and the sort of bogus camaraderie of doing the same job, though on different sides, was just that: a fake.
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Iain M. Banks |
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8f8bb13
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conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?
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Iain M. Banks |
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3e4eedf
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It was rude, insulting and frequently infuriating, but it made such a refreshing change from the awful politeness of most people.
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Iain M. Banks |
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a8b4f19
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The swirling mist lay in the bottom of such great bowls like a broth of dreams.
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Iain M. Banks |
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8180af8
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though. 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 th..
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Iain M. Banks |
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0e7469a
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The Idirans themselves had evolved on their planet Idir as the top monster from a whole planetful of monsters.
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Iain M. Banks |
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76cdd84
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like a berserk raptor thrown into a nest of hibernating kittens...
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Iain M. Banks |
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5065d79
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The ship told you a guilty system recognises no innocents. I'd say it does. It recognises the innocence of a young child, for example, and you saw how they treated that. In a sense it even recognises the "sanctity" of the body... but only to violate it. Once again, Gurgeh, it all boils down to ownership, possession; about taking and having."
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tyranny
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Iain M. Banks |
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3e33708
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individual is obsolete. That's why life is so comfortable for us all. We don't matter, so we're safe. No one person can have any real effect anymore.
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Iain M. Banks |
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a392c7e
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Escape is a commodity like anything else.
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consumerism
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Iain M. Banks |
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a896828
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It was the Culture's fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which ensured they would not become enemies again. The
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Iain M. Banks |
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4367733
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Patience can be a means of letting matters mature to a proper state for action, not just a way of letting time slip away.
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Iain M. Banks |
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a61e565
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He became aware, very slowly, very gradually, that he held some impossibly complex model of the contest in his head, unknowably dense, multifariously planed. He looked at that model, twisted it. The game changed.
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Iain M. Banks |
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0f15eec
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The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they'd wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages." The avatar hesitated. It put its head a little to one side and narrowed its eyes. "How far do I have to..
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rock-climbing
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Iain M. Banks |
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7d29e19
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War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of ..
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simulation-hypothesis
solipsism
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Iain M. Banks |
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8317dde
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The good soldier did as he was told, and if he had any sense at all volunteered for nothing, especially promotion.
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Iain M. Banks |
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ec4258e
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he saw that which cannot be seen; a concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can be reached to that end, and to remove and to add and to smash and to create so that one particular collection of cells can go on, can move onwards and decide, and keeping moving, and keeping deciding, knowing that - if nothing else - at least it lives. And it had two shadows, it was two things; it was the need and it was the ..
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Iain M. Banks |
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16ac4e1
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If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.
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Iain M. Banks |
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57ff1b2
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The only sin is selfishness.
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sin
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Iain M. Banks |
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b7ef67c
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Yet at the same time there is something about her deportment which I - and I suspect most other males - find off-putting, and even slightly threatening. A certain immodest forthrightness in her bearing is the cause of this, perhaps, plus the suspicion that while she pays flawless lip service to the facts of life which dictate the accepted and patent preeminence of the male, she does so with a sort of unwarranted humour, producing in us male..
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Iain M. Banks |
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555f525
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Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves
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wisdom
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Iain M. Banks |
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ebb3897
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Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
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Iain M. Banks |
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b2a854e
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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 wide and blinking. "I'm not being rude; it's a good bonding procedure." Sma was aware of Skaffen-Amtiskaw glowing red just behind her. She brought the yellow and brown device closer to her face. "Listen, Xenophobe--" "Xeny." "Xeny. You..
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humor
kawaii
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Iain M. Banks |
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fd35c89
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Vos vaisseaux se croient intelligents et conscients ! gloussa Hamin. C'est aussi une erreur assez communement repandue parmi certains de nos compatriotes humains.
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Iain M. Banks |
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b4779f9
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What difference does it make whether a mind's made up of enormous, squidgy, animal cells working at the speed of sound (in air!), or from a glittering nanofoam of reflectors and patterns of holographic coherence, at lightspeed? (Let's not even think about a Mind mind.) Each is a machine, each is an organism, each fulfills the same task.
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Iain M. Banks |
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0fc097c
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In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made.
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Iain M. Banks |
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52d3114
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A new collection of matter and information to present to the universe and to which it in turn will be presented; different, arguably equal parts of that great ever-repetitive, ever-changing jurisdiction of being.
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ever-changing
ever-repetitive
jurisdiction-of-being
repetitive
the-universe
changing
procreation
pregnancy
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Iain M. Banks |
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d033be6
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It's luck. All is luck when skill's played out. It was luck left me with a face that didn't fit in Contact, it's luck that's made you a great game-player, it's luck that's put you here tonight. Neither of us were fully planned, Jernau Gurgeh; your genes determined you and your mother's genofixing made certain you would not be a cripple or mentally subnormal. The rest is chance. I was brought into being with the freedom to be myself; if what..
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luck
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Iain M. Banks |
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ec66519
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Where do you keep your memories of love, past lovers?" QiRia looked at her. "In my head, of course." He looked away. "There are not so many of those, anyway," he said, voice a little quieter. "Loving becomes harder, the longer you live, and I have lived a very long time indeed." He fixed his gaze on her again. "I'm sure it varies across species - some seem to do quite well with no idea of love at all - but you soon enough come to realise th..
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Iain M. Banks |
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253dcad
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Thing about emergencies," he said, sounding weary. "Rarely occur when they'd be convenient." "May"
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Iain M. Banks |
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def225c
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now he realized... now he knew why the Empire had survived because of the game; Azad itself simply produced an insatiable desire for more victories, more power, more territory, more dominance...
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Iain M. Banks |
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e5261d3
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I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away.
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wallowing
self-pity
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Iain M. Banks |
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a56a5ff
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the Fate had moved, or had been moved, thirty light years in less than a picosecond.
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Iain M. Banks |
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a50f8cb
|
The majority of species, too, could scrape together some sort of metaphysical framework, a form of earlier speculation - semi-deranged or otherwise - regarding the way things worked at a fundamental level which could later be held up as a philosophy, life-rule system or genuine religion, especially if one used the excuse that it was really only a metaphor, no matter how literally true it had declared itself to be originally.
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Iain M. Banks |
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07d18de
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Division was the only order.
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state-of-nature
|
Iain M. Banks |
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23b50af
|
Just as one might do useful work without fully understanding the job one was engaged in, or even what the point of it was, so the behaviour of devotion still mattered to the all-forgiving God, and just as the habitual performance of a task gradually raised one's skills to something close to perfection, bringing a deeper understanding of the work, so the actions of faith would lead to the state of faith. Finally, she was shown the filthy, s..
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Iain M. Banks |
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c28593a
|
Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess.
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western-civilization
privilege
|
Iain M. Banks |
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c0ca6f7
|
T]here is an osmosis from fiction to reality, a constant contamination which distorts the truth behind both and fuzzes the telling distinctions in life itself, categorizing real situations and feelings by a set of rules largely culled from the most hoary fictional cliches, the most familiar and received nonsense.
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Iain M. Banks |