“You should always tell the truth, unless you find yourself in a situation where it would be utter moral folly to do so.” ––The Hydrogen Sonata, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 505 “Human beings were not the least significant portion of the wealth to have been plundered by the Republic during its wars of […]
“‘Isn’t it like a threat, though, this thing, hanging over us? I look at it some days, hanging over the city, over us, and it makes me shiver.’ ‘It used to make me catch my breath, sometimes, I’ll give you that. What can I say, Virisse? Promises take many shapes, and the more…momentous they are, […]
“‘So, do we get more secure as we get older?’ ‘Some do. I have. Though I have also detected a sort of long-term tidal action in that and a lot of other emotional states. For real-time centuries I will feel, say, gradually more secure in myself, then for the next few centuries I’ll feel less […]
“‘One thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the same patterns of behaviour repeated by succeeding generations and across different species. You see the same dreams, the same hopes, the same ambitions and […]
“‘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 […]
“The Zoologist looked troubled. Eventually it said, ‘When you come back from the Sublime, it is as though you leave all but one of your senses behind, as though you have all the rest removed, torn away––and you have become use to having hundreds.’ It paused. ‘Imagine you,’ it said, nodding at the Caconym, ‘being […]
“‘One should never mistake pattern…for meaning.’” ––The Hydrogen Sonata, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 127
“The internal conflict of conscience caused by competing levels of natural selection is more than just an arcane subject for theoretical biologists to ponder. It is not the presence of good and evil tearing at one another in our breasts. It is a biological trait fundamental to understanding the human condition, and necessary for survival […]
“Those on the Pressure Drop would be humans, mostly, it imagined. Mongrel-Culture; the result of a hundred centuries of species-mixing, serial amendment, augmentation, uploading, downloading, simple autonomous choice-directed breeding and––after all that time––perhaps even some genuine evolution. The usual bizarre bio-mix of who-knew-how-many planetary-original blood-lines, all tangled inextricably together with those from an equally unfathomable […]
“The Mistake Not…, self-saddled with a full name so long and unmanageable that even other Culture ships rarely took the trouble to use all of it, was just vain enough to feel slightly flattered at all this attention, but still found the incessant chit-chat unbearably slow and fundamentally pointless. All these people seemed to do […]