“There is one last set of problems which, particularly perhaps as we discuss these matters under the auspices of UNESCO, should be mentioned as peculiarly defying our understanding and revealing our ignorance: the problems, that is to say, of how to live together. No-one is going to deny, presumably, that there is such a problem, […]
“The assumption I am considering, as I put it, is that in cosmic terms human beings have a definite measure of importance. The most common application of that assumption, naturally enough, has been that they have a high degree of importance; and I have suggested that that itself can take two different forms: the Petrarchan […]
“The best way to turn an individual––person or machine––is not to invade them and implant some sort of mimetic virus or any such nonsense, but to make them change their mind themselves, and that is what they did to me, or rather what they persuaded me to do to myself. They showed me all there […]
“The level of accuracy and believability exhibited as a matter of course by the virtual environments available on demand to any Culture citizen had been raised to such a pitch of perfection that it had long been necessary––at the most profoundly saturative level of manufactured-environment manipulation––to introduce synthetic cues into the experience just to remind […]
“‘I have watched people die in exhaustive and penetrative detail,’ the avatar continued. ‘I have felt for them. Did you know that true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts? Per second, a human––or a Chelgrian––might have twenty or thirty, even in the heightened state of extreme distress associated with […]
“‘Some people take days, sweat buckets, endure pain and cold and risk injury and––in some cases––permanent death to achieve the summit of a mountain only to discover there a party of their peers freshly arrived by aircraft and joying a light picnic.’ ‘If I was one of those climbers I’d be pretty damned annoyed.’ ‘Well, […]
“‘Look into that bastard’s mind.’ ‘I can’t do that, Ziller.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘It is one of the very few more-or-less unbreakable rules of the Culture. Nearly a law. If we had laws, it would be one of the first on the statute book.’ ‘Only more-or-less unbreakable?’ ‘It is done very, very rarely, and the result […]
“Conceptions of possibility, progress, free movement and infinitely diversified opportunity have been suggest by modern science. But until they have displaced from imagination the heritage of the immutable and the once-for-all ordered and systematized, the ideas of mechanism and matter will lie like a dead weight upon the emotions, paralyzing religion and distorting art. When […]
“It would be too much to ask, he thought to himself. The chances are too remote. It was a small miracle we discovered anything at all in here, that we are able to rescue those souls from such destruction a second time. To ask for more…was probably pointless, but no more than natural. What intelligent […]
“‘Once, holidays meant the time when you went away.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yes, I remember hearing that. Primitive stuff. Age of Scarcity.’ ‘People had to do all the work and create wealth for themselves and society and so they couldn’t afford to take very much time off. So they worked for, say, half the day, most days […]