Alastair Reynolds Quotes

Across the land, the semaphore towers stood deathly still. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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

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? ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Without risk in our lives, we're scarcely better than machines ourselves. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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 ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

We've had science fiction novels where China is dominant; we've had novels where India is dominant, and I suppose it's all about getting away from that cliched old tired idea that the future belongs to the West. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

Khouri had never really given much thought to the slowness of light. There was nothing in the universe that moved faster ... but, as she now saw, it was glacial compared to the speed that would be needed to keep their love alive. ~ Alastair Reynolds

It's one thing to be given a big boxful of theory and quite another to make an engine out of it. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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? ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Weyl curvature tensor ... but consciousness was no ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

She loved sarcasm, especially from engineers. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

That's what love is – sacrifice. Sacrificing everything ... ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Cyphel knew exactly how he felt about her as well - it was there in her expression whenever they spoke that beguiling combination of amusement and haughtiness that she carried off so well. It was a look that expressed disdain at Campion's guarded advances but also a kind of measured probationary respect as well. It was a look that said You dare to think that I will find you as interesting as you obviously find me Well perhaps in that very act of daring you become interesting to me if only fleetingly. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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 ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Surely you can hear him now? ~ Alastair Reynolds

But beyond a certain scale vast was simply vast. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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

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? ~ Alastair Reynolds

War was about yawning chasms of inactivity, punctuated by brief, screaming interludes of action. And in those brief, screaming interludes, events happened both quickly and with dreamlike slowness, every instant burned into memory. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Adapt and survive. Make do and mend. These were good mottos for a time traveller. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Nothing endures, except nothing itself. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Quantum reality is a nest of snakes, Clavain, and we are already poking it with a very sharp stick. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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 ~ Alastair Reynolds

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*! ~ Alastair Reynolds

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... ~ Alastair Reynolds

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 ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

There was another intelligence out there, close enough to touch. And even if they were now gone, then the mere existence of their handiwork was wonder enough to fundamentally change humanity's view of the universe. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

To be remembered at all is an achievement of sorts. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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

No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Masai and elephants. The rest is dust. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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". ~ Alastair Reynolds

Weapons readiness?" "Nominal," Dalal ~ Alastair Reynolds

I was never strong at maths, but I eventually got onto a university physics/astronomy course, and that led on to my Ph.D. and eventual employment. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ 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? ~ Alastair Reynolds

It was that same old spiralling argument, and again he didn't have the energy to fight his corner. 'When you put it like that, I guess it doesn't sound too ridiculous. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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 ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

You didn't weld it shut or anything like that?"
"Yes, stupid me, I forgot. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Niagara made a careful gesture, like some religious benediction: a diagonal slice across his chest and a stab to the heart. 'A slash and a dot,' he said. 'I doubt it means anything to you, but this was once the mark of an alliance of progressive thinkers linked together by one of the very first computer networks. The Federation of Polities can trace its existence right back to that fragile collective, in the early decades of the Void Century. It's less a stigma than a mark of community. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Rise to the occasion. Roar like a lion. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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. ~ Alastair Reynolds