The empire survives, the barbarians survive, but the empire is no more and the barbarians are nowhere to be found.

Subtlety, which was heading back for the

Good grief, man; the Culture's been a spacefaring species for eleven thousand years; just because you've mostly settled down in idealized, tailor-made conditions doesn't mean you've lost the capacity...

Module," Za said, sprawling out over the seat and looking thoughtful, "I'd like a double standard measure of staol and chilled Shungusteriaung warp-wing liver wine bottoming a mouth of white...

All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be...

The Colonel talked into the mike near his shoulder again.

In a way Gurgeh's very weakness saved him; he played so that it was not worth taking him for a long time, letting the other four fight it out. Later he attacked the two admirals when they had grown...

One reason was that Gurgeh was speaking Eächic all the time. Flere-Imsaho was always a little dubious about trying to be so precise about human behavior, but it had been briefed that when Culture...

It seemed to him to be an unbearably vivid tangle of contradictions; at the same time pathologically violent and lugubriously sentimental, startlingly barbaric and surprisingly sophisticated,...

The longest it had taken him to learn any game had been three days; he hadn't forgotten any rule of any game in all his life, nor ever had to learn one twice.

Gurgeh never ceased to be fascinated by the way a society's games revealed so much about its ethos, its philosophy, its very soul.

a recently made entertainment he'd heard people talking about. It concerned a planet whose intelligent inhabitants were sentient glaciers and their iceberg children. He had expected to despise its...

all was the game, everything was seen in its light, translated into the combative imagery of its language, evaluated in the context its structure imposed upon the mind.

Gurgeh felt grateful and cosseted, and both important and foolish, all at once.

it was good for games. What seemed complicated became simple; what appeared insoluble became soluble; what had been unknowable became obvious. A utility drug; an abstraction-modifier;

Although it was only four kilometers in height, the Plate class General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal was fully fifty-three in length, and twenty-two across the beam. The topside rear park covered an...

This is not a heroic age," he told the drone, staring at the fire. "The individual is obsolete. That's why life is so comfortable for us all. We don't matter, so we're safe. No one person can have any...

The better I do the worse things get because the more I have to lose.

You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence.

We are what we do, not what we think.

It was clear that the delight being taken...was not the vicarious pleasure of watching people enjoying themselves and identifying with them, but in seeing people being humiliated while others enjoyed...

it had been briefed that when Culture people didn't speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other...

The breaks and the times when he slept were irrelevant; just the intervals between the real life of the board and the game. He functioned, talking to the drone or the ship or other people, eating and...

a Mind could hold any set of facts and opinions it wanted without having to tell anybody what it knew or thought, or why.

The ball itself was for over a thousand people, about half of them game-players; the rest were mostly partners of the players, or officials, priests, officers and bureaucrats who

it was the night when people got paid and didn't have to work the next day, and so by tradition went out to get drunk and into fights. Then

the rich just bribe their way out. So yes, as far as the rulers are concerned, it works.

one may be partially owned by another or others by having to sell one's labor or talents to somebody with the means to buy them. In

The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try...

Marain, the Culture's quintessentially wonderful language {so the Culture will tell you}, has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children,...