Alastair Reynolds Quotes

One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word.

Nonetheless, we offer our forgiveness. What is the point in being a superior civilisation if you can't do that once in a while? I

I'm fascinated by steam engines and with Victorian engineering generally, and as a corollary to that, I'm fascinated by the idea of long-lived technologies.

At best noise, at worse a potentially damaging input.

I think I've reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level.

I saw immediately what they were: human technology that had become haunted, possessed by quick, gleaming cleverness. I had seen smart machines before then, but nothing with the agility and cunning of true intelligence. I knew instantly that these were a different order of machine. Some alchemy of chaos and complexity had given their minds powers of consciousness and free will.

Truly, it was beautiful to watch. Cruel, too - I admitted that. But what was beauty without a little cruelty at its heart?

I am not cruel," he said. "Not in the sense you mean. But cruelty is a useful tool if one can only recognise the precise moment when it must be used.

So she talked, and Noah, to his credit, did not quibble. He interrupted once or twice, but only for the sake of amplification or clarification, never because he doubted the essential veracity of her story. She told him all of it, from the pod, to the aircraft, to Eunice and the Tantors. She told him what she had learned of Eunice's nature, and why she had no reason to doubt that she had been talking to a machine. She told him of Eunice's amnesia, and the thing called Arachne.

How did you . . . pass the time?' Sunday asked. 'You couldn't just ching out of it, could you?'

'We had a different form of chinging,' Eunice said. 'An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it "reading".

We're all Poseidon's children, Geoffrey: whether we like it or not."

"Poseidon's children," he repeated. "Is that supposed to mean something?"

"We came through. That's all. We weathered the absolute worst that history could throw at us, and we thrived. Now it's time to start doing something useful with our lives.

The two men
Fray and Malkin
were standing near each other. They were not unarmed. They were quite seriously not unarmed. Both men were carrying
or at least aiming
what could only be categorised as small artillery pieces: two bulky gas-powered spinguns, so heavy that they had to be strapped to their bodies via thick leather girdles. Malkin was aiming at the angels, more or less.

The first six million years had been all fun and games.

Sooner or later everything boils down to trust. You just have to make that leap of faith.

To Sky, Clown had become something to be understood; something to be dissected and parameterised. Clown, he now recognised, was something like the bubble-drawing the dolphin had made in the water: a projection carved from light rather than sound.

Weapons readiness?" "Nominal," Dalal

I couldn't ever write a straight crime novel: there'd be an intrusion of weirdness at some point.

I prioritise story over science, but not at the expense of being really stupid about it.

She longed to touch it, to stroke her fingers through that atmosphere, cleaving white billowing clouds and glittering salty seas, until she felt the hard scabbed crust beneath them.

Some promises are best broken. Trust me on this: I'm a politician.

The flare-watch in East Nekhebet had picked up an energy pulse, much brighter than anything seen previously. Briefly, there was the worrying possibility that Delta Pavonis was about to repeat the flare which had wiped out the Amarantin: the vast coronal mass ejection known as the Event. But closer examination revealed that the flare did not originate from the star, but rather from something several light-hours beyond it, on the edge of the system.

When two or more of their lighthuggers met, they would compare and update their respective nomenclature tables. If the first ship had assigned names to a group of worlds and their associated geographical features, and the second ship had no current entries for those bodies, it was usual for the second ship to amend its database with the new names. They might be flagged as provisional, unless a third ship confirmed that they were still unallocated.

I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.

The ship had always been vast and intricate, its topology as unfathomable as the abandoned subway system of a deserted metropolis. It had been a ship haunted by many ghosts, not all of which were necessarily cybernetic or imaginary. Winds had sighed up and down its kilometres of empty corridors. It was infested with rats, stalked by machines and madmen. It had moods and fevers, like an old house.

Is that what happened to Mercier?" "No - not quite. In so far as I understood Sukhoi's work, it appeared that the zero-mass state would be very difficult to realise physically. As it neared the zero-mass state, the vacuum would be inclined to flip to the other side. Sukhoi called it a tunnelling phenomenon." Clavain raised an eyebrow. "The other side?" "The quantum-vacuum state in which matter has imaginary inertial mass. By imaginary I mean in the purely mathematical sense, in the sense that the square root of minus one is an imaginary number. Of course, you immediately see what that would imply." "You're talking about tachyonic matter," Clavain said. "Matter travelling faster than light.

I always say that keeping abreast of science should never be seen as a chore. It should be something you do naturally. I don't sit there reading 'New Scientist,' putting post-it notes next to ideas.

Volyova did not like planets at the best of times, and gas giants struck her as an unreasonable affront to human scale and frailty. In that respect, they were almost as bad as stars.

Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid.
In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the *whole damned universe*!

As her psychosis took hold she moved deeper and deeper into the house, putting as much distance as possible between herself and the outside world. This became her world. To begin with it was just a few rooms. Then it contracted down to just this one, and then to just this tank. Even that wasn't enough. She constructed barriers to fool and delay the ghosts. Corridors that don't lead anywhere, or which spiral back on themselves. Hidden stairways that they won't see. Mirrors everywhere, to baffle and confuse her tormentors. Doors that open onto walls. Of course, even that isn't sufficient by itself. The ghosts are clever and resourceful, and they'll keep trying to find a way in. That's why the house has to keep changing, so that they never get used to one particular configuration.

This is life. It's not a dress rehearsal. If we don't do this now, we may as well start planning our own funerals.

It's called optimism - but I'm losing the hang of it fast.

Where no man has gone before - who said that - William Shakespeare?"
"I've no idea.

Sluka shook her head. We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.

I'm always serious about my fun. I

And the knowledge that humanity was not alone in the universe would be as relevant to most as the knowledge that protons were built of quarks.

Then they'd be wrong. It's only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they're what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings. But what are a few bad deeds compared to a life, especially the kinds of lives we can live now?

History is what we write, not what we remember. Why should we tarnish the memory of our planet by enshrining our less then noble deeds?

I'll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason.

The games enthralled the public and diverted their attentions from the Halo wars. And - unlike the arts - they could not be used as vehicles for subversion. For gamers like myself it was a near-utopian state of affairs. We were pampered and courted by the houses and made immensely rich.

But the trouble with simulations is that they put up with far too much shit.

They would continue to live in New Tiamaat, orbiting Crucible.

Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished.

Everyone has their fulcrum, Chiku. You can bend anyone to any cause with the right timing.

Birth and death frame a life, give it shape. Without that border it just becomes a kind of sprawling mess, a thing with no edge, no definition, no centre.

I live each day as it comes." "It's the only way. Pedro

It's an ancient technique known as lying, Khouri.

She loved sarcasm, especially from engineers.

Making love was a game of echoes. We had shared memories so many times that when I made love to her, I knew exactly how it felt to be Purslane. I could taste and feel her other lovers and she could taste and feel mine, each experience reaching away like a reflection in a hall of mirrors, diminishing into a kind of carnal background radiation, a sea of sensuous experience. I had been a girl once, then a thousand men and women and all their lovers. The stasis field locked on. The Synchromesh took hold. I hurtled into my own future, while my ship ate space and time.

- "House of Suns" by Alastair Reynolds

But you will come to regret this, Abigail. This won't be like one of the memories that fritters away into nothing when you come out of that game. This will leave a stain. You'll carry for it for ever, when you could have had a few more years of blissful innocence. Are you sure, now?

It was a wartime story, goodies versus baddies, lots of explosions and shooting. The Germans always shouted 'Aiiieeee!' as they died. Atkins wondered what he would choose, confronted with similar circumstances. 'Aiiieeee!' seemed to him to lack the necessary gravitas and originality, as well as sounding a bit, well, German. But then who knew what might come to mind, in those final moments?

We have made some collective mistakes as a species, it's true – invested too much power in things we can't see, let alone control. But look at the world we have, Chiku. For all its failings, things could be a great deal worse. No one's died in any wars lately, or been murdered, or left to rot in a prison, or been denied the basic allocation of fresh food and drinking water. No one's been tortured for their beliefs or made to feel like a pariah because of their sexual preferences.

Might you show me how to project a schematic of the entire inner solar system? I appear to be unable to zoom out from the immediate neighbourhood of Paladin." "Access that sub-menu, then select the logarithmic scale factor," Nissa said. "Thank you - I should have seen that." The

At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred around until it reduced the problematic brain tissue to non-functioning porridge.

The place is of no concern to them. They've left it to fester. An informational dead zone. The abstraction doesn't penetrate here, by design. The dome rebuffs it. The family craved their privacy, their insularity. My alert was a simple radio frequency trigger, with just enough power to reach beyond the estate. A risk even in that, but one worth taking."
"You keep saying them," Dreyfus said.
"For a reason," Stasov answered.

Wind snapped at me, warm and fragrant. The atmosphere was thick with pollen and micro-organisms, goading my body's ancient defences.

observing the way the rig needed only occasional human intervention to stay locked on the road. Doubtless it could have managed with none at all, were it not for local union laws. Very

The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off - it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feel a damn about these people.

You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse.

I don't know. That was typical Sajaki; like all the genuinely clever people Sylveste had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed.

We don't own them, and we don't have any claims on moral superiority. But after all we've done to them in the past we do have an obligation to shepherd them through to better times.' He

Then centrifugal gravity took over, and with something close to majesty the skeletal spacecraft descended out of the repair bay as smoothly and elegantly as a falling chandelier.

Clavain was looking at a hyperpig: a genetic chimera of pig and human.

It was an exceedingly odd thing to see an elephant in a spacesuit.

Nightside, cities glistened in chains, and a spray of tinkertoy habitats girdled the planet. Gossamer starbridges reached from the equator towards orbit.

Dimly
at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream
she remembered Resurgam. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as as landslide, but as a slow, squelching slippage: a disembowelment of the past.

She hesitated, aware that an ill-judged phrase might anger Triumvir Hegazi; not that she particularly cared. Dared she call it the Melding Plague, now that the Yellowstoners had given it a name? Perhaps that would be unwise.

To be remembered at all is an achievement of sorts.

Rise to the occasion. Roar like a lion.

I think the danger with using the term 'trilogy' is that it sets up particular expectations in the reader's mind.

All data is stale. The photons reaching your eyes are stale. They tell you that you are looking at something real, but you have no information that the objects before you still exist. They may have vanished into oblivion the instant those photons took wing.

First rule of complex systems," I said. "You can't tell friends from enemies.

Masai and elephants. The rest is dust.

You look older, son." "Yes, well, some of us have to get on with the business of being alive in the entropic universe.

Do you have to sound so damned indifferent to it all? Here we are talking about how we're likely to be dead in a few hours and you're acting like it's only a minor inconvenience.
~"Spirey & the Queen

Weyl curvature tensor ... but consciousness was no

All I do know is that in six hours I could be suffering from acute existence failure.

It was a mansion of ghosts and monsters, with ghouls in the shadows and demons scuttling behind the wainscotting.

Surely you can hear him now?

It's the people who don't worry - those who never have any doubts that what they're doing is good and right - they're the ones that cause the problems.

There's a vorg loose," Meroka explained. "In case that escaped your attention. Ricasso's doing his bit for Swarm, trying to kill the thing before it sucks someone's brains out. Now he might be able to find time in his schedule to file that paperwork you need, but I'm guessing it's going to be a stretch, what with a monster on the loose and the ship being in a state of fucking emergency and all." She smiled sweetly. "So, what's it going to be? You going to let them out, or do I have to get, you know, truculent.

Cowards were exactly the kind of people you wanted around nuclear technology.

In less than twelve hours, Purslane's ship would be travelling so close to the speed of light that the fastest ship ever built would still need a hundred thousand years to catch up with her.

Banking and Prosperity in the Thirteenth Occupation or even A Child's Treasury of Economics or The Young Person's Illustrated Omnibus of Fiscal Prudence.

Behold the wedding gun,' the Ordinator said, holding the box aloft.

Has a control system so perilously close to intelligence that a government agent must be on hand at all times, ready to destroy the machine if it slips over the threshold into consciousness.

No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.

Across the land, the semaphore towers stood deathly still.

But beyond a certain scale vast was simply vast.

I've seen marvelous things, Sunday. I've looked back from the edge of the system and seen this planet, this Earth, reduced to a tiny dot of pale blue. I know what that feels like. To think that dot is where we came from, where we evolved out of the chaos and the dirt. And I know what it feels like to imagine going further. To hold that incredible, dangerous thought in my mind, if only for an instant. To think: what if I don't go home? What if I just keep traveling? Watching that pale-blue dot fall ever further away, until the darkness swallowed it and there was no turning back. Until Earth was just a blue memory.

Everything came and went, everything was new and bright with promise once and old and worn out later, and everything left a small, diminishing stain on eternity, a mark that time would eventually erase.

Having created these cognitively enhanced creatures, the safest option at the time appeared to be to launch them into interstellar space.

Clavain looked around the room, taking in the gruesome menagerie of wraithlike seniors, wizened elders and obscene glass-bottled end-state Conjoiners. They were all hanging on his answer, even the visible brains seeming to hesitate in their wheezing pulsations.

Mathematics is a terrible calling. It's as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There's a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in the universe can stop you falling all the way in. That's what happened to your mother – she swam too close to theory, fell below the last stable orbit.

Matter is lazy. It resists change. It wants to keep on doing whatever it's doing, whether that's sitting still or moving. We call that laziness inertia, but that doesn't mean we understand it. For a thousand years we've labelled it, quantified it, caged it in equations, but we've still only scratched the surface of what it really is.

I am Chiku Akinya. I am the daughter of Sunday Akinya; I am the grand-daughter of Eunice Akinya – Senge Dongma, the lion-faced one, mother of us all...

But a constant, low-level background of crime may help a society become more robust, more resilient.

We have worlds to save, Doctor Aziba."
"That sounds ... compelling," the physician allowed.

I've never had much interest in spinoffery - the idea of writing in someone else's universe generally leaves me cold - but 'Doctor Who' is different. I've grown up with it. It's been part of my life since I was tiny, watching Jon Pertwee on a grainy black and white television in Cornwall and being terrified out of my mind.

The trouble with the dead, Triumvir Ilia Volyova thought, was that they had no real idea when to shut up.

Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential.