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cf79dfa
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Money is a sign of poverty.
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Iain M. Banks |
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8783dc1
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The right place; that was what he was looking for. The right place. Place was all important, place meant everything. Take this rock... "Take you, rock," he said. He squinted at it. Ah yes, here we have the nasty big flat rock, sitting doing nothing, just amoral and dull, and it sits like an island in the polluted pool. The pool is a tiny lake on the little island, and the island is in a drowned crater. The crater is a volcanic crater, the v..
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science
science-fiction
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Iain M. Banks |
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17678e3
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Promises take many shapes, and the more ... momentous they are, the more they might look like threats. All great promises are threats, I suppose, to the way things have been until that point, to some aspect of our lives, and we all suddenly become conservative, even though we want and need what the promise holds, and look forward to the promised change at the same time.
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Iain M. Banks |
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8f15960
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He looked for the Culture ship, then told himself not to be stupid; it was probably still several trillion kilometers away. That was how divorced from human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off...and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.
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Iain M. Banks |
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91ec9bc
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It also occurred to him that Minds wrote voluminous biographies of each other in order to cover the odd potentially valuable or embarrassing nugget of truth under a mountain of bullshit.
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Iain M. Banks |
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4dfc490
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I had high hopes for that girl, but too much of that sort of nonsense and I think her intelligence will explosively dismantle
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Iain M. Banks |
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bed0bf0
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Ah, we're the infection, Sma.' He turned and sat down on the steps, looking back towards the city and the sea. 'We're the ones who're different, we're the self-mutilated, the self-mutated. This is the mainstream; we're just like very smart kids; infants with a brilliant construction kit. They're real because they live the way they have to. We aren't because we live the way we want to.
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Iain M. Banks |
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2f15bda
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The Sublime. The almost tangible, entirely believable, mathematically verifiable nirvana just a few right-angle turns away from dear boring old reality: a vast, infinite, better-than-virtual ultra-existence with no Off switch, to which species and civilizations had been hauling their sorry tired-with-it-all behinds off to since - the story went - the galaxy had still been in metaphorical knee socks.
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sublimation
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Iain M. Banks |
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139c3f1
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Naturalness?' I said, loudly. 'This lot'll tell you anything is natural; they'll tell you greed and hate and jealousy and paranoia and unthinking religious awe and fear of God and hating anybody who's another colour or thinks different is natural. Hating blacks or hating whites or hating women or hating men or hating gays; that's natural. Dog-eat-dog, looking out for number one, no lame ducks . . . Shit, they're so convinced about what's na..
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Iain M. Banks |
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766cd2a
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It seemed perverse to some, but for all their apparent militarism the Gzilt had remained peaceful over many millenia; it was the avowedly peaceful Culture that had , within living memory, taken part in an all-out galactic war against another civilisation.
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cynical-humor
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Iain M. Banks |
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b305085
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Part of the training of a Special Circumstances agent was learning a) that the rules were supposed to be broken sometimes, b) just how to go about breaking the rules, and c) how to get away with it, whether the rule-breaking had led to a successful outcome or not.
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Iain M. Banks |
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547b932
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Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean towards the latter.
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Iain M. Banks |
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fbaf373
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I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place.
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Iain M. Banks |
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9b51e4e
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In the old days people died and that was that; you might hope to see them in heaven, but once they were dead they were dead. It was simple, it was definite. Now ... " He shook his head angrily. "Now people die but their Soulkeeper can revive them, or take them to a heaven we know exists, without any need for faith. We have clones, we have regrown bodies--most of me is regrown; I wake up sometimes and think, Am I still me? I know you're supp..
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Iain M. Banks |
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3313b82
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At one end of the vast C bitten from the castle a single great bastion-tower stood, almost intact, five kilometres high, and casting a kilometre-wide shadow across the rumpled ground in front of the convoy. The walls had tumbled down around the tower, vanishing completely on one side and leaving only a ridge of fractured material barely five hundred metres high on the other. The plant-mass babilia, unique to the fastness and ubiquitous with..
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fastness
serepha
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Iain M. Banks |
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50c2b64
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My name,' she said. 'Is Rasd-Coduresa Diziet Embless Sma da' Marenhide.
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Iain M. Banks |
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f35f579
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By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word.
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Iain M. Banks |
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70ffa7c
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Can't machines build these faster?" he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell."Why, of course!" she laughed."Then why do you do it?""It's fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think, I helped build that. The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn't alter the fact that it was yo..
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Iain M. Banks |
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193e43e
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That conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?
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Iain M. Banks |
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9d7ab0f
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Look, Horza," Yalson said, turning to him, "when you come on board this ship you don't have a past. It's considered very bad manners to ask anybody where they came from or what they've done in their lives before they joined. Maybe we've all got some secrets, or we just don't want to talk or think about some of the things we've done, or some of the things we've had done to us. But either way, don't try to find out. Between your ears is the o..
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Iain M. Banks |
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9ca8f69
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Jase, which deep down was a hopeless romantic, thought her laughter sounded like the tinkling of mountain streams,
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Iain M. Banks |
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40f9c68
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But if you're God," Sharrow said to Elson Roa, "why do you need the others?" "What others?" Roa said. Sharrow looked exasperated. "Oh, come on." Elson Roa shrugged. "My apparences? They are the sign that my will is not yet strong enough to support my existence without extraneous help. I am working on this."
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Iain M. Banks |
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d380638
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To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of we..
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Iain M. Banks |
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cddd068
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I don't care how self-righteous the Culture feels, or how many people the Idirans kill. They're on the side of life--boring, old-fashioned biological life; smelly, fallible, short-sighted, God knows, but real life. You're ruled by your machines. You're an evolutionary dead end.
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Iain M. Banks |
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19f1c93
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The drone Unaha-Closp was fully repaired. It applied to join the Culture and was accepted; it served on the General Systems Vehicle Irregular Apocalypse and the Limited Systems Vehicle Profit Margin until the end of the war, then transferred to the Orbital called Erbil and a post in a transport systems factory there. It is retired now, and builds small steam-driven automata as a hobby.
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Iain M. Banks |
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c1e5aa7
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The Mind rescued from the tunnels of the Command System could remember nothing from the period between its warp into the tunnels and its eventual repair and refit aboard the GSV No More Mr. Nice Guy,
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Iain M. Banks |
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24d7672
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The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking's immediate family by drowning them in the tears of the Continental Empathaur in its Sadness Season.
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tears
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Iain M. Banks |
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9738d92
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He had to treat him as the maniac he obviously was. The fact that his insanity was dressed in religious trappings meant nothing.
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Iain M. Banks |
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fafcec5
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Somehow, later, exhausted and dismayed by these sapping, abrasive, attriting episodes, they came to a sort of truce; but it was at the expense of any closeness.
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relationships
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Iain M. Banks |
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89b19ec
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Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn't stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detai..
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Iain M. Banks |
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b299acb
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It meant something to climb, to haul this sack of bones and flesh all this way, and then look, then think, then be. She could have taken a flyer here any time when she'd been recovering, but she hadn't, even though Jase had suggested it. That was too easy. Being here wouldn't have meant anything.
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Iain M. Banks |
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bdf5040
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the Culture had placed its bets--long before the Idiran war had been envisaged--on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture.
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Iain M. Banks |
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dc9353c
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When in Rome; burn it.
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Iain M. Banks |
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59d4e07
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Life buzzed in, fumed about, rattled around and quite thoroughly infested the entire galaxy, and probably - almost certainly - well beyond. The vast ongoingness of it all somehow put all one's own petty concerns and worries into context, making them seem not irrelevant, but of much less distressing immediacy.
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Iain M. Banks |
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2061517
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You mean, if you lose a game... you have... these things done to you?" "Exactly. One might bet, say, the loss of a finger against aggravated male-to-apex rectal rape." Gurgeh looked levelly at the machine for a few seconds, then said slowly, nodding, "Well... that is barbaric." "Actually it's a later development in the game, and seen as a rather liberal concession by the ruling class, as in theory it allows a poor person to keep up in the b..
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Iain M. Banks |
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04448ae
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That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your Off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome.
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Iain M. Banks |
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21076ce
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You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you're doing.
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Iain M. Banks |
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e2685c7
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To touch this abomination with anything less perfectly attuned to its nature than the carefully dispersed wings of an engine field would be like an ancient, fragile rocket ship falling into a sun, like a wooden sea-ship encountering an atomic blast.
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Iain M. Banks |
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5cc3ad9
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Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying all this wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.
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future
life
triumphs
tragedies
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Iain M. Banks |
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51a7a98
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the ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces.
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poverty
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Iain M. Banks |
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5504d52
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Shut up!" Bettlescroy shouted, one tiny fist thudding down on the desk beneath the screen. "The Culture vessel has also already worked out how to get the fabricaria-built ships to set about destroying each other, which might result in the ships annihilating themselves even quicker; within a matter of hours. It would appear only to be holding back from this course because it fears some of the ships might accidentally or mistakenly damage the..
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Iain M. Banks |
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87d0149
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Holse wasn't about to get involved in any theological arguments. He looked serious and nodded, hoping this would do.
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Iain M. Banks |
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5559967
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The Culture gives us so much, but in fact it's only taking things away from us, lobotimizings everybody in it, taking away their choices, their potential for being really good or even slightly bad.
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Iain M. Banks |
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ec90100
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Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain. And what the Idirans
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Iain M. Banks |