Keith Stevenson > Keith's Quotes

“the Culture had placed its bets—long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture.”
― Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas

“It was the Culture’s fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which ensured they would not become enemies again. The”
― Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas

“The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless. The Culture’s sole justification for the relatively unworried, hedonistic life its population enjoyed was its good works; the”
― Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas

“They also,” [the drone] said, “refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value — carbon fascists.”
― Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons

“Zakalwe, in all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.”’ He”
― Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons

“But such consummate skill, such ability, such adaptability, such numbing ruthlessness, such a use of weapons when anything could become weapon . . .”
― Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons

“The environment could not be fixed by a mere change of heart. It was by then well known that future centuries would suffer greatly for the incontinence of their ancestors. That humanity would survive was never in doubt, but one would always prefer a palace to a barn. Long-term plans were founded to seek ways to fix the problem, and one of these included looking for alternatives elsewhere.”
― Sean Williams, Echoes of Earth

“Memory alone had proven elusive under such reduced conditions, defying all attempts to record it indirectly. The only efficient way it could be captured and simulated was secondhand, by interviewing the original at length about his or her past and using physical records to supply the images. Emotions could be attached later, during the fine-tuning phase, to color the recollection correctly, even though the details might still be slightly askew. Preawakening memory in such a mind was, at best, a patchwork quilt pieced together from a million isolated fragments.”
― Sean Williams, Echoes of Earth

“Not everywhere Spiked at the same time, of course; some regions resisted, but the spread of AI was inevitable. It bred and mutated—evolved—until it seemed likely to absorb everything. It was like a virus eating away at its host, killing everything in its search for nutrients. “Like a virus, though, it also outreached itself. No disease survives by killing its host. It had finished work on the Earth and was partway through absorbing Venus when it began to self-destruct. So”
― Sean Williams, Echoes of Earth

“Humanity had to evolve, jump up the ladder until it was on a more equal footing with some of the new minds in the system. This was hard, too. We were behind to start with, and slower to let go of traditional structures than machine intelligences with little or no past. Some of our allies among the AIs despaired of us ever catching up, even with their help. It”
― Sean Williams, Echoes of Earth

“Your problem could have happened to anyone. But it’s a definitional thing, as opposed to a fundamental thing, and it expresses itself differently depending on personality. Your engram is defined as Peter Stanmore Alander, even though it fundamentally cannot be. In some people, the definition imposed by the engram architecture is enough to overcome the conflict—they want to believe in it, perhaps, strongly enough to make it seem true—but in others, like you, the definition isn’t enough to erase the obvious discrepancy. The memories that you are told are yours belong to someone else; key concepts that you are supposed to believe no longer ring true; people you once knew and maybe even loved now seem like strangers. All because, deep down, you don’t believe it when you tell yourself—or are told from the outside—that you are the same as your original.”
― Sean Williams, Echoes of Earth

“A lifelong friend of left-wing political causes and supporter of Scotland’s full independence from the UK, he found England in the Thatcher years a hard place to like, an impossible place to live in, and a dark place to observe from next door, having to witness its influence on Scottish life. In”
― Simone Caroti, The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction

“You can’t be too prescriptive about what a writer does, but it’s important to me to get these ideas into the books, just for my own peace of mind, so that I feel I’m not just doing this to make money, I’m not just writing pageturners for people to skim through, put aside and forget. Like anybody else, I want to make the world a little more like the world I’d like to live in, sad though that is. So I put forward these ideas however subtly or cack-handedly to the extent that I can get away with it. The good thing about writing is that you can do this in a non-invasive, non-penetrative way, you’re not telling people this is what they should do, you’re just presenting ideas [Mitchell”
― Simone Caroti, The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction

“More relevantly, the revelation that Frank is Frances and that she became he because of a homegrown science experiment connects us to the practice, widespread in the Culture, of voluntary sex change. The difference in circumstances—in the Culture, the change is always completely successful, entirely reversible, and bioengineered inside the individual from birth—lies at the heart of Banks’ conviction that the ability to switch between genders at will is essential to the creation of a more just society—once one has lived as both man and woman, misogyny becomes substantially more difficult to embrace.”
― Simone Caroti, The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction

“If space is cold and dead, technology can make it warm and alive. If the universe doesn’t care, we can do so ourselves through an essentially altruistic system of ethics. If flesh-sentients are intrinsically less capable of developing this system of ethics than machine intelligence, then the distant descendants of the first self-aware AIs to which we gave birth will take over the running of our society and leave us free to enjoy ourselves without doing harm to others. If the only godlike beings are self-upgraded sentients originally born out of the same muck as everyone else, the implication is that it is indeed possible for us to be better than we once were. And”
― Simone Caroti, The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction

“Ah, we’re the infection, Sma.’ He turned and sat down on the steps, looking back towards the city and the sea. ‘We’re the ones who’re different, we’re the self-mutilated, the self-mutated. This is the mainstream; we’re just like very smart kids; infants with a brilliant construction kit. They’re real because they live the way they have to. We aren’t because we live the way we want to.”
― Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art

“Naturalness?’ I said, loudly. ‘This lot’ll tell you anything is natural; they’ll tell you greed and hate and jealousy and paranoia and unthinking religious awe and fear of God and hating anybody who’s another colour or thinks different is natural. Hating blacks or hating whites or hating women or hating men or hating gays; that’s natural. Dog-eat-dog, looking out for number one, no lame ducks . . . Shit, they’re so convinced about what’s natural it’s the more sophisticated ones that’ll tell you suffering and evil are natural and necessary because otherwise you can’t have pleasure and goodness. They’ll tell you any one of their rotten stupid systems is the natural and right one, the one true way; what’s natural to them is whatever they can use to fight their own grimy corner and fuck everybody else. They’re no more natural than us than an amoeba is more natural than them just because it’s cruder.”
― Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art

“Three; - and this would be sufficient reason by itself - what are we supposed to be about, Sma? What is the Culture? What do we believe in, even if it hardly ever is expressed, even if we are embarrassed about talking about it? Surely in freedom, more than anything else. A relativistic, changing sort of freedom, unbounded by laws or laid-down moral codes, but - in the end - just because it is so hard to pin down and express, a freedom of a far higher quality than anything to be found on any relevant scale on the planet beneath us at the moment.”
― Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art

“So how many infants have to grow up under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, and just possibly die screaming inside the radioactive rubble, just for us to be sure we’re doing the right thing? How certain do we have to be? How long must we wait? How long must we make them wait? Who elected us God?”
― Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art

“Earth is a silly and boring planet. If not, then it is too deeply unpleasant to be allowed to exist! Dammit, there’s something wrong with those people! They are beyond redemption and hope! They are not very bright, they are incredibly bigoted, and unbe-fucking-lievably cruel, both to their own kind and any other species that has the misfortune to stray within range, which of course these days means damn nearly every species; and they’re slowly but determinedly fucking up the entire planet . . .”
― Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art

“We’re fine now,” Sanjrani said. “We’ll be fine for three years. Maybe three and a half. Then the recycling systems stop being able to meet demand. We won’t have infrastructure in place to fill the gaps. And then we’ll starve. Not just Earth. Not just Mars. The Belt too. And once we start, we’ll have no way to stop.” “All right,” Michio said. “How do we fix it?” “I don’t know,” Sanjrani said.”
― James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes

“Come on now,” Arankadash says, “I’m halfway through my pregnancy and you don’t see me whining about it.” “I thought there weren’t any child-bearers in your settlement,” I say. “Didn’t say I was pregnant with a child,” Arankadash says. “Most people don’t give birth to children. We give birth to things the world needs.” She gestured expansively to the ruins around us. “The world always needs bits and pieces of itself to be reborn. That’s why we’re here.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Stars Are Legion

“Comrades and friends,’ he begins, the translation and lip-synch software maxing his street-cred as usual in all the languages of the Community. For this particular nation and region, he comes across speaking English with a gravely Central Belt Scottish accent, which I know for a fact has been swiped from old tapes of the Communist trade union leader and authentic working class hero Mick MacGahey.”
― Ken MacLeod, Cosmonaut Keep

“Outwardly, the Municipality had come back to life in rather sprightly fashion. You just had to ignore the all pervading air of criminality.”
― Dave Hutchinson, Europe In Autumn

“(Friends do not exist. The Fulcrum is not a school. Grits are not children. Orogenes are not people. Weapons have no need of friends.)”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“We cut off their long hair, for I liked to caulk my ships’ planks with the hair of slain enemies,”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom Series #1-6

“Men are cruel,’ I said, ‘and the gods made us like themselves,”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom Series #1-6

“Children are easily swayed by religion, which is why it is a good thing that most eventually grow into sense.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom Series #1-6

“What the Leaving proved was that the Earth could sustain billions, if we simply shared resources and responsibilities in a sensible way.”
― N.K. Jemisin, Emergency Skin

“What it couldn’t sustain was a handful of hateful, self-important parasites, preying upon and paralyzing everyone else.”
― N.K. Jemisin, Emergency Skin