703 books
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Mirela Mus
https://www.goodreads.com/mirelamus
“My name,’ she said. ‘Is Rasd-Coduresa Diziet Embless Sma da’ Marenhide.”
― Use of Weapons
― Use of Weapons
“during the ball he was quickly persuaded, principally by himself, that the definition of fruit juice might include wine”
― Inversions
― Inversions
“The Minds did not assume such distinctions; to them, there was no cutoff between the two. Tactics cohered into strategy, strategy disintegrated into tactics, in the sliding scale of their dialectical moral algebra. It was all more than they ever expected the mammal brain to cope with. He recalled what Sma had said to him, long long ago back in that new beginning (itself the product of so much guilt and pain); that they dealt in the intrinsically untoward, where rules were forged as you went along and were never the same twice anyway, where just by the nature of things nothing could be known or predicted or even judged with any real certainty. It all sounded very sophisticated and abstract and challenging to work with, but in the end it came down to people and problems.”
― Use of Weapons
― Use of Weapons
“Not at all. And what the hell’s a “very fast picket” anyway?’ ‘New name for a (Demilitarised) Rapid Offensive Unit,’ the drone said. She glanced at it. It wobbled, shrugging. ‘It’s supposed to sound better.’ ‘And it’s called the Xenophobe. Well that’s just fine.”
― Use of Weapons
― Use of Weapons
“Genar-Hofoen found himself wondering again about the trade-off between skill-honing and distraction that took place in the development of any species likely to end up as one of those in play in the great galactic civilisation game. The Culture’s standard assessment held that the Affront spent far too much time hunting and not nearly enough time getting on with the business of being a responsible space-faring species (though of course the Culture was sophisticated enough to know that this was just its, admittedly subjective, way of looking at things; and besides, the more time the Affront spent dallying in their hunting parks and regaling each other with hunting tales in their carousing halls, the less they had for rampaging across their bit of the galaxy being horrible to people). But if the Affront didn’t love hunting as much as they did, would they still be the Affront? Hunting, especially the highly cooperative form of hunting in three dimensions which the Affront had evolved, required and encouraged intelligence, and it was generally - though not exclusively - intelligence that took a species into space. The required mix of common sense, inventiveness, compassion and aggression required was different for each; perhaps if you tried to make the Affront just a little less enraptured by hunting you would only be able to do so by making them much less intelligent and inquisitive. It was like play; it was fun at the time, when you were a child, but it was also training for when you became an adult. Fun was serious.”
― Excession
― Excession
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