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72d7072
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All very melodramatic. Your feud may inspire a not terribly good screen presentation at some point in the future, hopefully distant. I look forward to missing it.
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Iain M. Banks |
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b4541ec
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How long have we had space travel?" Breyguhn shouted, smacking her fist into the table surface; the chain whipped down, scattering chips of granite. Breyguhn didn't seem to notice. "Seven thousand years! Seven thousand years!" she roared, standing, throwing her arms wide, voice echoing from above. Sharrow heard a bell ringing somewhere. "Seventy centuries, Sharrow! Seven millennia of footling about in the one miserable system, crawling from..
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Iain M. Banks |
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36de417
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He] just wants [...] forgiveness?" "Sma, given all the things Zakalwe's done, just since we've known him, they'd have to invent a personal deity for him alone, to even start him." Sma turned away to look at the blank screen again. She shook her head and said quietly, "It doesn't work that way, Skaffen-Amtiskaw." Or any other way, the drone thought to itself, but didn't say anything."
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Iain M. Banks |
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1839b5b
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Although it was only four kilometers in height, the Plate class General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal was fully fifty-three in length, and twenty-two across the beam. The topside rear park covered an area of four hundred square kilometers, and the craft's overall length, from end-to-end of its outermost field, was a little over ninety kilometers. It was ship-construction rather than accommodation biased, so there were only two hundred and f..
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Iain M. Banks |
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00c4760
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This water's freezing. Get the servants to bring some more hot. And bring more wine! Where's my goblet? What have you done with it?' The goblet, sunk in the bath in front of YetAmidous, had left a red stain in the milky water, like blood.
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Iain M. Banks |
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a525725
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Yet my father died, I was forced to the throne, and although I knew I was not ready, I coped. I learned. I became a King by having to behave as one, not simply because I was my father's son and had been told long in advance that I would become so.
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Iain M. Banks |
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5abceff
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We are wasting time. Time wastes itself. Who are we to float in its way?
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time
wasted-time
wasting-time
waste
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Iain M. Banks |
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905c49f
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I have a feeling it is not a happy story.' 'Indeed. Anything but. It is just that of women, especially young women, caught up in a war.' 'Ah.' 'You see? A story that scarcely needs to be told. The ingredients imply the finished article, and the method of its making, do they not? It
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Iain M. Banks |
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6241ae1
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For are women not supposed to resist even those they would happily surrender to, so that when they resist a more brutal violation how can the man be sure that any struggle, any protestation is not merely for show?
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Iain M. Banks |
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1aa1895
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Which would you rather have, Lattens?' UrLeyn asked his son. 'Good giants and monsters, or bad ones?' 'Bad ones!' Lattens shouted. He drew his wooden sword from its scabbard. 'So I can cut their heads off!
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Iain M. Banks |
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d607cd8
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it was good for games. What seemed complicated became simple; what appeared insoluble became soluble; what had been unknowable became obvious. A utility drug; an abstraction-modifier;
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Iain M. Banks |
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77ca2e4
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Gurgeh felt grateful and cosseted, and both important and foolish, all at once.
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Iain M. Banks |
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71c35b1
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Action appealed to him most; it was the warriors' creed. When in doubt, do.
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Iain M. Banks |
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4a49469
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we have found that the underdisciplined child will bump up against life eventually and learn their lessons that way - albeit all the harder for their parents' earlier lack of courage and concern. The overdisciplined child lives all its life in a self-made cage, or bursts from it so wild and profligate with untutored energy they harm all about them, and always themselves. We prefer to underdiscipline, reckoning it better in the long drift, t..
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Iain M. Banks |
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00d23cf
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And suddenly it knew what it had to do. It de-coupled its engine fields from the energy grid and plunged those vortices of pure energy deep into the fabric of its own mind, tearing its intellect apart in a supernova of sentient agony.
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suicide
spaceship
scifi
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Iain M. Banks |
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235e034
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all was the game, everything was seen in its light, translated into the combative imagery of its language, evaluated in the context its structure imposed upon the mind.
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Iain M. Banks |
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5bd1ba7
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a recently made entertainment he'd heard people talking about. It concerned a planet whose intelligent inhabitants were sentient glaciers and their iceberg children. He had expected to despise its preposterousness, but found it quite amusing. He sketched out a glacier game, based on what sort of minerals could be gouged from rocks, what mountains destroyed, rivers dammed, landscapes created and bays blocked if--as in the entertainment--glac..
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Iain M. Banks |
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2d6750c
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Gurgeh never ceased to be fascinated by the way a society's games revealed so much about its ethos, its philosophy, its very soul.
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Iain M. Banks |
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b992573
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Tactics cohered into strategy, strategy disintegrated into tactics, in the sliding scale of their dialectical moral algebra.
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Iain M. Banks |
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be2d689
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The longest it had taken him to learn any game had been three days; he hadn't forgotten any rule of any game in all his life, nor ever had to learn one twice.
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Iain M. Banks |
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8d2eded
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It seemed to him to be an unbearably vivid tangle of contradictions; at the same time pathologically violent and lugubriously sentimental, startlingly barbaric and surprisingly sophisticated, fabulously rich and grindingly poor (but also, undeniably, unequivocally fascinating).
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Iain M. Banks |
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5a24c42
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From up here they could see for hundreds of kilometres across Frettle Plate. The system's star, Lacelere, was still rising and slowly yellowing to full brightness, shining through the continents of air to anti-spinward, its radiance obliterating any detail on the lands still in shade.
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Iain M. Banks |
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3375649
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Don't you have a religion?" Dorolow asked Horza. "Yes," he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. "My survival." --
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Iain M. Banks |
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3062947
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that was a tough position to hold when at the back of your mind was the niggling doubt that you really might not be saved when the time came, while at the back of everybody else's mind was a little device that was guaranteed to do precisely that.
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Iain M. Banks |
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f974ce7
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Oh no," Ximenyr said, looking almost serious. "One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve."
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Iain M. Banks |
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6edd8a3
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One reason was that Gurgeh was speaking Eachic all the time. Flere-Imsaho was always a little dubious about trying to be so precise about human behavior, but 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 la..
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Iain M. Banks |
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16f65fd
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He walked along Street Six, in the heart of Night City Tier. There were Night Cities throughout the developed galaxy; it was a kind of condominium franchise, though nobody seemed to know to whom the franchise belonged. Night Cities varied a lot from place to place. The only certain things about them was that it would always be night when you got there, and you'd have no excuse for not having fun.
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Iain M. Banks |
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368a368
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In a way Gurgeh's very weakness saved him; he played so that it was not worth taking him for a long time, letting the other four fight it out. Later he attacked the two admirals when they had grown strong enough to threaten a complete takeover, but were more vulnerable to his small force than to the greater powers of the general and the minister.
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Iain M. Banks |
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aec4d8e
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I agree we cannot yet bruit our suspicions abroad; there probably never was a proper moment for that, but if there was, the war has negated its relevance),
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Iain M. Banks |
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413ed20
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Money is a sign of poverty. This is an old Culture saying I remember every now and again, especially when I'm being tempted to do something I know I shouldn't, and there's money involved (when is there not?).
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Iain M. Banks |
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d6f7041
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Once upon a time there was a magical land where every man was a king, every woman a queen, each boy a prince and all girl princesses. In this land there were no hungry people and no crippled people. Were there any poor people? - asked Lattens That depends what you mean. In a way no, because they could all have any amount of riches they wanted, but in a way yes, for there were people who chose to have nothing. Their hearts' desire was to be..
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Iain M. Banks |
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6d35688
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There is a saying that some foolish people believe: What does not kill you makes you stronger. I know for a fact, having seen the evidence - indeed, often enough having been the cause of it - that what does not kill you can leave you maimed. Or crippled, or begging for death or in one of those ghastly twilights experienced - and one has the hope that that is entirely not the right word - by those in a locked-in or persistent vegetative stat..
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Iain M. Banks |
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8e1defe
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It wasn't a finite supply of promiscuity he was draining, it was an ever-replenishing fixation that was eating up his potential for future personal growth.
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Iain M. Banks |
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9b8e8fe
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Little textual note for you here (bear with me). Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of personal pronouns, so I'd better explain that bit of the translation. 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, ne..
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Iain M. Banks |
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4438133
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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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7037fa6
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what passed for useful information sharing within an organization was really just bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for upcoming failures and calamities, that were both entirely predictable, but seemingly completely unavoidable and telling each other what they all already knew. The trick was to be able to reengage quickly and seamless..
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work
culture-quotes
iain-m-banks
surface-detail
the-culture
bureaucracy
quotes
organization
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Iain M. Banks |
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d09dd9f
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We're losing, he thought again. There is a war in heaven and we are losing it. The war was amongst the Heavens, between the Afterlives, if you wanted to be pedantic about it. And it was over the Hells.
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Iain M. Banks |
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366c219
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at least showed you were interested in trying to provide an explanation for the world around you, and so was generally held to be a promising first step towards coming up with the belief system that provably worked and genuinely did produce miracles: reason, science and technology.
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Iain M. Banks |
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762d30a
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Genar-Hofoen had arrived a few days after the end of Tier's annual Festival. There was an air of autumnal desuetude mixed with high-summer torpor about the place when he arrived; people were cleaning up, calming down, getting back to normal and generally behaving themselves. He'd signalled ahead and succeeded in booking the services of an erotroupe as well as reserving a garden penthouse in the View, the best hotel on Level Three.
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Iain M. Banks |
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e8363ce
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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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7ddab14
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The black bird Gravious made to settle on her shoulder; she shooed it off and it landed flapping uproariously on the edge of the opened trap door. 'My tree!' it screamed, hopping from leg to leg. 'My tree! They've - I - my - it's gone!' 'Too bad,' she said. The sound of another great tumble of falling rock split the skies. 'Stay wherever it puts me,' she told the bird. 'If it'll let you. Now get out of my way.' 'But my food for the winter! ..
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Iain M. Banks |
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438e6ad
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The old male drew himself up as though getting ready to go. "I hate romantics, Quilan. They do not really know themselves, but what is worse they do not really want to know themselves--or, ultimately, anybody else--because they think that will take the mystery out of life. They are fools. You are a fool. Probably your wife was a fool, too." He paused. "Probably you were both romantic fools," he said. "Fools who were doomed to a life of disi..
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Iain M. Banks |
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49ee27d
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All societies are like that; the damping hand of the old and the firebrand youth together.
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Iain M. Banks |
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0aabf85
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clasp/
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Iain M. Banks |