|
e83f2d9
|
The Xinthia were regarded with something approaching affection by even the most ruthless and unsentimental of the galaxy's Involved, partly because they had done much great work in the past - they had been particularly active in the Swarm Wars of great antiquity, battling runaway nanotech outbreaks, Swarmata in general and other Monopathic Hegemonising Events - but mostly because they were no threat to anybody any more and a system of the g..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
afc60a3
|
High in a turret of a great castle rising on a black crag above snowy plains, besieged and grand, crammed full of an empire's treasure, and he sitting by a log fire with a sad and lovely princess. . . . I used to dream about such things, he thought. I used to long for them, ache for them. They seemed the very stuff of life, its essence. So why does all this taste of ashes?
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
07f43a1
|
She was one of the unfortunates trying to get some sort of human grasp of Earth's economics, and deserved all the light relief she could get. I recall that all through that year you could tell the economists by their distraught look and slightly glazed-looking eyes.
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
53ce63b
|
The ball itself was for over a thousand people, about half of them game-players; the rest were mostly partners of the players, or officials, priests, officers and bureaucrats who
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
32c9328
|
If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking amongst yourselves seemed to be the way you convinced yourself of it.
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
422f429
|
Ulver Seich woke up in the best possible way. She surfaced with a languorous slowness through fuzzy layers of luxurious half-dreams and memories of sweetness, sensuality and sheer carnal bliss... to find it all merging rather splendidly into reality, and what was happening right now.
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
2d1fae9
|
At sunset above the plains of Kwaalon, on a dark, high terrace balanced on a glittering black swirl of architecture forming a relatively microscopic part of the equatorial Girdlecity of Xown, Vyr Cossont - Lieutenant Commander (reserve) Vyr Cossont, to give her her full title - sat, performing part of T. C. Vilabier's 26th String-Specific Sonata For An Instrument Yet To Be Invented, catalogue number MW 1211, on one of the few surviving exam..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
cb5cf91
|
This isn't Ospin! These aren't the Dataversities!
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
8070307
|
a Mind could hold any set of facts and opinions it wanted without having to tell anybody what it knew or thought, or why.
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
f4c8644
|
bob-nodded toward the open module door. "After you."
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
5b4181d
|
paid with money you did not have? He thought not. By choosing to starve you became your own oppressor, keeping yourself in line, harming yourself for having the temerity to be poor, when by rights that ought to be a constable's job. Show any initiative or imagination and you were called lazy, shifty, crafty, incorrigible. So he'd dismissed talk of honour; it was just a way of making the rich and powerful feel better about themselves
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
30474d6
|
The breaks and the times when he slept were irrelevant; just the intervals between the real life of the board and the game. He functioned, talking to the drone or the ship or other people, eating and sleeping and walking around...but it was all nothing; irrelevant. Everything outside was just a setting and a background for the game.
|
|
playing
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
cd71074
|
He felt great. spa'dassins digladiate; ziffidae and xebecs contend! gol-iard dunking!
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
bd75024
|
I'm a fucking razor-arsed starship, you maniac! I'm not male, female or anything else except stupendously smart and right now tuned to smite. I don't give a fuck about flattering you. The few and frankly not vitally important sentiments I have concerning you I can switch off like flicking a switch.
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
3d76f07
|
Meanwhile the Mind of Pittance watched over them, and looked out into the resounding silence and the sun-freckled darkness of the spaces between the stars, forever content and ineffably satisfied with the absence of anything remotely interesting happening.
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
14e7eba
|
First person singular obtaining colloquial orgasm within a Caledonian sandwich,' it said, then looked annoyed, and spoke incoherently into a grille set in its belly, which replied. It looked up and said, 'Sorry. As I was saying: I come in peace.
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
77b9337
|
humming to himself and looking for the flat wafer. He heard a sudden intake of breath, then what sounded like a rather embarrassed cough, just behind him. He turned round to see Mr. Dreltram behind him, looking oddly awkward. Gurgeh frowned as Mr. Dreltram, just returned from the bathroom, his eyes wide with the mixture of drugs he was glanding, and followed by a tray bearing drinks, sat down again, staring at Gurgeh's hands. It was only th..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
7f7e2d4
|
it had been briefed that when Culture people didn't speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other language, they lost the carefully balanced interpretative structure of the Culture language, left its subtle shifts of cadence, tone and rhythm behind for, in virtually every case, something much cruder.
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
f58c2ce
|
The ship left the construction bay of the factory craft with most of its fitting-out still to be done. Accelerating hard, its course a four-dimensional spiral through a blizzard of stars where it knew that only danger waited, it powered into hyperspace on spent engines from an overhauled craft of one class, watched its birthplace disappear astern with battle-damaged sensors from a second, and tested outdated weapon units cannibalized from y..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
cca2836
|
It was clear that the delight being taken...was not the vicarious pleasure of watching people enjoying themselves and identifying with them, but in seeing people being humiliated while others enjoyed themselves at their expense.
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
e08045c
|
Lying here, during all this time after my own small fall, it has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We'll pluck significance from the least consequential happenstance if it suits us and happily ignore the most flagrantly obvious symmetry between separate aspects of our lives if it threatens some cherished prejudice or cosily comforting belief; we are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illu..
|
|
prejudice
meaning
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
cbf35b3
|
If I had to guess, nephew, I would surmise that you are not in direct trouble as such. However, I will confess to the distinct and unsettling feeling that very large, very ponderous and most momentous wheels have been set in motion. When that happens I believe the lessons of history tend to indicate that it is best not to be in their way. Even without meaning harm, the workings and progress of such wheels are on a scale which inevitably red..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
662e942
|
Did that make him a bad man? Perhaps, though if so then arguably all men were bad. A proposition his wife would probably agree with, as would most of the women Holse had known, from his poor mother onwards. That was not his fault either, though. Most men - most women, too, no doubt - lived and died under the general weight of the drives and needs, expectations and demands they experienced from within and without, beaten this way and that by..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
45be195
|
He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who'd taken a notion to help out for a while. "Of course I don't have to do this," one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a l..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
35fd059
|
Marain, the Culture's quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying ..
|
|
language
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
aff58c6
|
Even as a raft, of course, it could have been made from gold, or any element with a molecular number lower than mercury. Lead would still sink in mercury, but gold shouldn't. It was one number down the Periodic Table and so ought to float. Veppers looked over the side of the vessel at where his ingot of gold had entered the liquid metal, but it showed no sign of surfacing yet.
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
693c9bc
|
But there we are. Some things never do make perfect sense. There must be some explanation, and it is perhaps a little like the Doctrine of the Perfect Partner. We must be content to know that she exists, somewhere in the world, and try not to care overmuch that we will probably never meet her.
|
|
soulmate
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
9b97de1
|
Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot," muttered"
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
237757d
|
She killed, yeah?" The woman's voice sounded flat. She seemed to sigh. Horza drew in a breath, was about to start talking again, but Gow spoke in the same monotone. "I thought I hear she." Suddenly she brought her gun hand up, flashing in the blue and pink of the morning sky. Horza saw what she was doing and started forward, reaching out instantly with one hand even though he knew he was too far away and too late to do anything. "Don't!" ..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
df32c3b
|
We are what we do, not what we think.
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
b5fc8da
|
Don't!" he had time to shout, but the gun was already in the woman's mouth and an instant later, as Horza started to duck and his eyes closed instinctively, the back of Gow's helmet blew out in a single pulse of unseen light, throwing a sudden red cloud over the mossy wall behind. Horza sat down on his haunches, hands closed round the gun barrel in front of him, eyes staring out at the distant jungle. What a mess, he thought, what a fucking..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
b4a121c
|
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 t..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
2819103
|
He dallied a moment, soaking up the fresh, clean smell of the wood--he remembered a time when they'd taken a hunting cabin in the Loustrian Hills, just the two of them. The axe that came with the cabin was blunt; he'd sharpened it with a stone, hoping to impress her with his handiness, but then when he'd come to swing it at the first piece of wood the head had sailed off and disappeared into the trees. He could still exactly recall her laug..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
636e8b1
|
You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence.
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
f420c1b
|
You know, Balveda, for such a sensitive species you show remarkably little empathy at times." "Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot,"
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
46c48f1
|
But in the end, it's still just cleaning a table." "And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?" the man suggested. He smiled in response to the man's grin, "Well, yes." "But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And ..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
c90261a
|
The better I do the worse things get because the more I have to lose.
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
dff07e5
|
This is not a heroic age," he told the drone, staring at the fire. "The 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."
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
f40c126
|
Solotol is a city of arches and bridges, where steps and pavements wind past tall buildings and lance out over steep rivers and gullies on slender suspension bridges and fragile stone arches. Roadways flow along the banks of water courses, looping and twisting over and under them; railways splay out in a tangle of lines and levels, swirling through a network of tunnels and caverns where underground reservoirs and roads converge, and from a ..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
5dae765
|
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. Nothing was ever identical to anything else because it didn't share the same spacial coordinates; nothing could be identical to anything else because you couldn't share the property of uniqueness.
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
3dbd7a1
|
The drone told him one in ten of the people he passed on the street would be treated for mental illness at some point in their lives. The figure was higher for males than for apices, and higher for females than either. The same applied to the rates of suicide, which was illegal. Flere-Imsaho directed him to a hospital. It was typical, the drone said. Like the whole area, it was about average for the greater city. The hospital was run by a c..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
b14a153
|
The method was that taking and bending of materials and people to one purpose, the outlook that everything could be used in the fight; that nothing could be excluded, that everything was a weapon, and the ability to handle those weapons, to find them and choose which one to aim and fire; that talent, that ability, that use of weapons.
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
96b9dd5
|
there 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. Hence the soap operas, and those who try to live their lives as soap operas, while believing the stories to be true; hence the qui..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |
|
3452e83
|
Then the machine started to reel off infant-mortality rates and life-expectancy figures, sex ratios, types of diseases and their prevalence in the various strata of society, average incomes, the incidence of unemployment, per capita income as a ratio of total population in given areas, birth-tax and death-tax and the penalties for abortion and illegitimate birth; it talked about laws governing types of sexual congress, about charitable paym..
|
|
|
Iain M. Banks |