That conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?

By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to...

In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after...

What difference does it make whether a mind's made up of enormous, squidgy, animal cells working at the speed of sound {in air!}, or from a glittering nanofoam of reflectors and patterns of...

My name,' she said. 'Is Rasd-Coduresa Diziet Embless Sma da' Marenhide.

In the old days people died and that was that; you might hope to see them in heaven, but once they were dead they were dead. It was simple, it was definite. Now … " He shook his head angrily. "Now...

I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're...

Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean towards the latter.

Part of the training of a Special Circumstances agent was learning a} that the rules were supposed to be broken sometimes, b} just how to go about breaking the rules, and c} how to get away with it,...

It seemed perverse to some, but for all their apparent militarism the Gzilt had remained peaceful over many millenia; it was the avowedly peaceful Culture that had , within living memory, taken part...

The Sublime. The almost tangible, entirely believable, mathematically verifiable nirvana just a few right-angle turns away from dear boring old reality: a vast, infinite, better-than-virtual...

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...

I had high hopes for that girl, but too much of that sort of nonsense and I think her intelligence will explosively dismantle

It also occurred to him that Minds wrote voluminous biographies of each other in order to cover the odd potentially valuable or embarrassing nugget of truth under a mountain of bullshit.

He looked for the Culture ship, then told himself not to be stupid; it was probably still several trillion kilometers away. That was how divorced from human scale modern warfare had become. You could...

Promises take many shapes, and the more … momentous they are, the more they might look like threats. All great promises are threats, I suppose, to the way things have been until that point, to some...

Your vessels believe they are intelligent and aware! Gloussa hamin. It is also a fairly common error among some of our human compatriots.

Money is a sign of poverty.