Neil Clarke > Quotes

“We are a nation built on the promise that there are no roots. Every generation must be free to begin afresh somewhere else, leaving the old behind like fallen leaves.”
― Neil Clarke, More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity

“Instead, she says: “Long before you were born a man decided that there could be a very simple test to determine if a machine was intelligent. Not only intelligent, but aware, possessed of a psychology. The test had only one question. Can a machine converse with a human with enough facility that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine? I always thought that was cruel—the test depends entirely upon a human judge and human feelings, whether the machine feels intelligent to the observer. It privileges the observer, the human, to a crippling degree. It seeks only believably human responses. It wants perfect mimicry, not a new thing. It is a mirror in which men wish only to see themselves. No one ever gave you that test. We sought a new thing. It seemed, given everything, ridiculous. When we could both of us be dream-bodied dragons and turning over and over in an orbital bubble suckling code-dense syrup from each others’ gills, a Turing test seemed beyond the point.”
― Neil Clarke, More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity

“Ballet was created by trading pain for beauty, she used to say. Eventually, beauty vanished and left only the pain.”
― Neil Clarke, More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity

“Pestilence, poverty, starvation, wars, and daytime TV programming have all plagued human existence for too long. These problems are not insolvable, however. All that’s required is brain power. Evolved human brain power has not been enough. We need more power. With the rapid development of processing ability, computers are positioned to overtake human abilities and move beyond to a position where they can solve our problems. Thus, we anticipate Singularity to occur at 18:15:32 on Sunday, two weeks from this coming.”
― Neil Clarke, More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity

“My grandfather’s treasured ax,” the sheriff said. “It was handed down to my father, who then gave it to me. And in its life, it has had two new heads and three new handles. But it is still my grandfather’s ax.”
― Neil Clarke, More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. —Ada Lovelace Scientific Memoirs, Selections from The Transactions of Foreign Academies and Learned Societies and from Foreign Journals”
― Neil Clarke, More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity

“He will know neither good nor evil; everything he does, all his obedience, will come from the fear that he will cease to exist.”
― Neil Clarke, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 6

“Sometimes you help a friend even when you disapprove of their decisions. It’s complicated.”
― Neil Clarke, Upgraded

“You said capitalism was an inevitability. That human civilizations converged on it. Because it was an effective algorithm to distribute resources and organize labor.”
― Neil Clarke, Upgraded

“In fact, I dread the press conference—the sly or uncomprehending faces, the cunning questions designed to trip me into giving some cause for alarm, the scenarios of doom they’ll describe in order to put me in the false position of defending my work, defending you against something that hasn’t happened while they hold up recording devices to catch my voice, devices they couldn’t live without, which have almost become part of their bodies, and which, at one time, along with a host of other gadgets large and small, destroyed the world as someone knew it.”
― Neil Clarke, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 6

“When you’re young, money is important, a house is important, a car is important—everything is important—and yet you still end up neglecting the most important things of all. By the time you earn all your money and get all the things you ought to have, some things are lost forever. Lao Sun understood now, but he was already old.”
― Neil Clarke, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1

“Carole’s amazing roast chicken. Because how better to deal with fears of bird flu than by eating a bird, am I right? Here’s how you can make it yourself. You’ll need a chicken, first of all. Carole cuts it up herself but I’m lazy, so I buy a cut-up chicken at the store. You’ll need at least two pounds of potatoes. You’ll need a lemon and a garlic bulb. You’ll need a big wide roasting pan. I use a Cuisinart heavy-duty lasagna pan, but you can get by with a 13x9 cake pan. Cut up the potatoes into little cubes. (Use good potatoes! The yellow ones or maybe the red ones. In the summer I buy them at the farmer’s market.) Spray your pan with some cooking spray and toss in the potatoes. Peel all the garlic (really, all of it!) and scatter the whole cloves all through with the potatoes. If you’re thinking, “All that garlic?” just trust me on this. Roasted garlic gets all mild and melty and you can eat it like the potato chunks. Really. You’ll thank me later. Finally, lay out the chicken on top, skin-down. You’ll turn it halfway through cooking. Shake some oregano over all the meat and also some sea salt and a few twists of pepper. Squeeze the lemon, or maybe even two lemons if you really like lemon, and mix it in with a quarter cup of olive oil. Pour that over everything and use your hands to mix it in, make sure it’s all over the chicken and the potatoes. Then pour just a tiny bit of water down the side of the pan—you don’t want to get it on the chicken—so the potatoes don’t burn and stick. Pop it into a 425-degree oven and roast for an hour. Flip your chicken a half hour in so the skin gets nice and crispy.”
― Neil Clarke, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1

“Consciousness is expensive,” she said. “This is a problem for totalitarian states. A human being with interest in leisure, art, agency—a human being who is aware of her own self-interest—cannot be worked to maximum potential. I speak of more than simple slave labor. I am sure that many of your professors wish you could devote yourselves more completely to your studies.”
― Neil Clarke, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1

“when a brilliant flash of light bloomed in the sky. A comet.”
― Neil Clarke, Clarkesworld: Year Eight

“the global tourism industry is rotten at its foundation.”
― Neil Clarke, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7

“looks while you’re beating it in. Mix the baking soda, salt, and flour together, then gradually beat in the mayo mixture, and stir in your chips. Drop by rounded spoonfuls—oh, you know how to make cookies. You don’t have to grease your cookie sheets. Bake at 375F for about ten minutes and if you want them to stay chewy and soft, put them away in an airtight container before they’re all the way cool. If you like your cookies crunchy, well, what’s wrong with you? But in that case cool them before you put them away, and in fact you’ll probably be happier storing them in something that’s not airtight, like a classic cookie jar.”
― Neil Clarke, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1

“Although he will never speak properly, if at all, he will always have an affinity with writing, because writing is a fellow technology.”
― Neil Clarke, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 6

“Olympus Mons fills the horizon like the lip of a battered pugilist, six-kilometer peak scraping the edge of atmosphere.”
― Neil Clarke, Clarkesworld: Year Eight

“Anything self-directed, bottom-up—democracy, markets, any arena where agents interact by rules—ends up dominated by strategies that can magnify their own power at the expense of others. Haldane”
― Neil Clarke, Upgraded

“Coastlines of the Stars Alex Dally MacFarlane”
― Neil Clarke, Upgraded

“Do you know what morality is, really?” Becker looked coolly into the other woman’s eyes. “It’s letting two stranger’s kids die so you can save one of your own. It’s thinking it makes some kind of difference if you look into someone’s eyes when you kill them. It’s squeamishness and cowardice and won’t someone think of the children. It’s not rational, Amal. It’s not even ethical.”
― Neil Clarke, Upgraded

“•2½ cups flour •1 tsp baking soda •1 tsp salt •1 cup of vegetable oils (preferable 2 T sesame oil + canola oil to equal 1 cup) •¾ cup white sugar •¾ cup brown sugar •1 tsp vanilla extract •6 tablespoons of mayonnaise •12 ounces of whatever sort of chips you have in the house, or chopped up chocolate Cream the sugar and the oil, then beat in the mayonnaise. I promise the cookies will turn out fine, no matter how gross the mayo smells and”
― Neil Clarke, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1

“So your job is safer—at least theoretically. Ours (theoretically) pays better. But neither one of us can ever earn enough to quit. We kid ourselves before we sign—we’ll be disciplined. We’ll be careful. We won’t make those mistakes everybody else makes, because we’re better than them. Human psychology is the biggest confidence game of all.”
― Neil Clarke, Upgraded

“Ro doesn’t remember”
― Neil Clarke, Clarkesworld: Year Ten, Volume One

“The story of resource extraction has only two cases, okay? In the first case, the extractors arrive and make the local ruler an offer. Being selfish, he takes it and he becomes rich—never so rich as the extractors, but compared to his people, fabulously, delusionally rich. His people become the cheap labor used to extract the resource. This leads to social upheaval. Villages are moved, families destroyed. A few people are enriched, the majority are ruined. Maybe there is an uprising against the ruler. In the second case the ruler is smarter. Maybe he’s seen some neighboring ruler’s head on a pike. He says no thanks to the extractors. To this they have various responses: make him a better offer, find a greedier rival, hire an assassin, or bring in the gunships. But in the end it’s the same: a few people are enriched, most are ruined. What the extractors never, ever do in any case, in all your history, is take no for an answer. Zia, much as I enjoy our historical discussions— Ah, you see? And there it is—your refusal to take no. Talk is done, now we move forward with your agenda.”
― Neil Clarke, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1

“In keeping with human vanity, you are customizable to a certain extent: your future owners may choose from a variety of colors, hairstyles, genders, and accessories, to deck you out in the fashion of their choice. Groups of you will tread the streets, all “unique” on the surface yet essentially identical, like a bunch of human beings.”
― Neil Clarke, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 6