I don’t think of myself as being particulary a subversive writer, but I like to think that my work could afford someone else, the extra degree of freedom that I found when I first found science fiction.
I’ve always been interested in people who aren’t from anywhere in particular. I think it’s all melting. This has been true for as long as I can remember in my adult life.
Silently, like thoughts that come and go, the snowflakes fall, each one a gem.
Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were.
Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.
Cliches became cliches for a reason; that they usually hold at least a modicum of truth, and the following cliche is truer than most: You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.
Encryption isn’t optional, when we address one another,” she said.
Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory...
They’re still a bit in advance of the pandemics, at least.” She took the seat opposite. “Nothing before the 2020s has ever seemed entirely real, to me. Hard to imagine they weren’t constantly happy, given all they still had. Tigers, for instance.” Picking.
If you fancy resenting the tedious, I recommend intentional communities, particularly those led by charismatics.” “You.
A middleman’s business is to make himself a necessary evil.
Be quiet, darling. Let pattern recognition have its way.
Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity.
There are tumults of the mind, when, like the great convulsions of Nature, all seems anarchy and returning chaos; yet often, in those moments of vast disturbance, as in the strife of Nature itself, some new principle of order, or some new impulse of conduct, develops itself, and controls, and regulates, and brings to an harmonious consequence, passions and elements which seem only to threaten despair and subversion.
The plus sign is a hipster ampersand.
When you raise the dead, they bring their baggage.
Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.
You can’t get clever men to fight such a system, as it makes too much sense to ’em.
Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-related. The.
Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool.