Fantasy Authors

"“In my experience, mediocrity in life-or-death situations gets people killed.” He looked knowing. “Read your history. Greatness kills more.” There was nothing I could say to that."

"He’d played me very well. He’s sensed my misanthropy, and played up that aspect of his own personality. He’d even accused the Porrinyards of the same failing. But was that just the typical gamesmanship of a habitual manipulator, or the obfuscation of a sociopath?"

"When you get to the core of it, we’re all aliens to one another, raised according to some common precepts but otherwise ruled by paradigms far removed from those of the people around us. The tragedy is that we tend to judge others by standards that may make perfect sense to us but which are most likely totally irrelevant to them."

"You want to know why humanity’s never been involved in a serious interspecies conflict? Because it’s like going out to eat when you have a pantry full of food at home. Why bother sampling the buffets elsewhere when we haven’t worked out all the great ways to kill each other yet?"

"It was nobody’s idea of luxurious travel, but then I’d known luxurious travel once or twice in my life and found that it just got me to places at the same speed while forcing me to interact with the kind of people who could afford such passage."

"“What do you think about their position? Do you think it’s right for sentient creatures to be owned?” He emitted a short, cynical laugh, driven by the kind of anger that drives entire lives. “We’re all owned, Counselor. It’s just a matter of choosing who holds the deed.”"

"Assassination is just diplomacy by other means."

"I could only read the delay as a dramatic pause. Theatrics. Or diplomacy; wise men throughout history had already noticed that sometimes there wasn’t much of a difference between the two."

"Middle management has always favored underlings friendly to middle management. It’s corruption, all right, but of a minor and probably unavoidable sort."

"There had never been any violence in her life, up until those last few hours—and there seemed no reason beyond simple self-defense for her to feel the urgency she felt now. But she did hunger for it. She wanted to feel something alive turn to something dead. She wanted to stand above it at the moment of its dying, and feel the satisfaction of knowing that she’d been the one who drove it from the world of things that live and breathe and feel into the world of things that merely rot."

"Cottonmouth was the kind of small town that hugs its knees to its chest and shuts out all evidence of a greater world beyond."

"It occurred to me a long time ago, Mr. Lastogne, that diplomacy has very little to do with making friends."

"Management’s never been interested in really doing the job, not at any point in human history. Management’s true agenda has always been making things more pleasant for Management."

"They all wore the slack-bored expression of folks doomed to spend all of eternity on an infinitely long supermarket checkout line."

"“Any messages?” Oscin said, “Just a lot of people dreading whatever you plan to do next.”"

"In short, they were like the complacent everywhere: in that they were already dead, and did not yet happen to know it…"

"All of this had seemed so obvious and vital to them once. But then it changed, in the timeless time since putting their vessel together; some might even say, they’d degenerated. They were no longer the beings who’d set themselves an impossible task and built themselves a miraculous vessel to help them accomplish it. In that time they had forgotten all of their arcane and hard-won knowledge and become passengers, instead of engineers. Now the bubble piloted itself, without their input; and the glorious mission that had once been the whole reason for their existence now seemed nothing but an ancient folly, too far gone to change. They wouldn’t have understood Vietnam, but they would have sympathized."

"There was never any shortage of Despair; it had always been far more common than hope, and there was always more being manufactured, everywhere in the universe. That was what made it such a convenient, and inexhaustible, Fuel."

"“The question is, just how do we tackle this problem? Do we merely modulate your Ego so it’s less irritating? Admittedly, that might make you easier to take – but it won’t address the real core of the problem, which is that when all is said and done you really don’t have a lot to be egotistical about.” “That can’t be true! My Haiku alone –” “First rule of human social interaction, Mr. Porter: If you have to lead with Haiku, you’ve already lost.”"

"Talent’s cheap…historically, one of the cheapest things you can buy. And considering the sheer amount of angst you carry around on your back, you need it. After all, angst from a Talented person is fascinating; angst from a Common Everyday Nobody is just an annoyance."

"What Nancy Peabody can be blamed for was actually behaving like a crowbar, designed to pry open the locked places belonging to others. Not that she was interested in stealing material things. No, her sin was much more insidious than that. She thought everybody in the whole wide world was obligated to rearrange their lives to avoid doing anything that ran even a miniscule chance of offending her. That included reading the wrong books, seeing the wrong movies, wearing the wrong clothes, worshiping the wrong God, enjoying the wrong kind of sex, learning the wrong kind of knowledge, thinking the wrong kind of thoughts, and – most importantly, for our narrative’s sake – making music with the wrong kind of instruments. Nancy had spent her entire adult life pitilessly crusading against the right of anybody anywhere within her line of assault, to have even a thimble’s worth of fun without her approval. And because there were unfortunately all too many people running around who were (except for the regrettable crowbar-shaped nose) exactly like her, and were willing to support her in her various crusades, she was much more successful than she deserved to be. Before long, people who enjoyed things she didn’t begin wearing a hunted, apprehensive look similar to that worn by the lead cow entering the slaughterhouse."

"Like all career diplomats, he’d spent a lifetime sculpting the truth into the shapes that best suited the needs of the moment, and would see nothing wrong with doing the same now."

"Every once in a while, some poor bastard get saddled with the kind of impossible decision that destroys his career and makes his name a curse for the next hundred years."

"It was the sort of platitude-laden gibberish that people learn to repeat so they can imagine themselves clever without ever bothering to think an original thought themselves."

"Art isn’t just technique, in any culture…it’s also Content. It’s understanding not just How, but also What, to express."

"Life with too many miracles is just another form of chaos."

"Since she was human she was doing it slowly (it was like watching algae grow)."

"I had archives of everything that had happened since I hacked my governor module, but I hadn’t had as much relevant experience in that time. But what I did have were thousands of hours of category mystery media, so I had a lot of theoretical knowledge that was possibly anywhere from 60 to 70 percent inaccurate shit."

"I can’t tell if that’s you being passive aggressive or you being willfully obtuse."

"Because change is terrifying. Choices are terrifying. But having a thing in your head that kills you if you make a mistake is more terrifying."

"Wow, that sounded pathetic. Like the “I want to be special! How come I’m not?” crap humans pull all the time."

"The big danger to humans is not raiders, angry human-eating fauna, or rogue SecUnits; it’s other humans. They kill each other either accidentally or on purpose and you have to clear that up fast because it jeopardizes the bond and determines whether the company has to pay out damages on it or not."

"Maybe exploring every possible outcome of each action in an inescapable loop of paranoia and anxiety wasn’t the most normal reaction-state but hey, if it was, there would be a lot fewer stupid murders."

"Self-determination was a pain in the ass sometimes but it beat the alternative by a lot."

"(If I got angry at myself for being angry I would be angry constantly and I wouldn’t have time to think about anything else.) (Wait, I think I am angry constantly. That might explain a lot.)"

"For a being as sophisticated as you are, it is baffling how little understanding you have of the composition of your own mind."

"She said that in the normal human adolescent exasperated and borderline whiney tone. (That’s actually statistically normal for human adults, too.)"

"Data suggests family dramas bear a less than 10 percent resemblance to actual human families, which is unsurprising and also a relief, considering all the murders. In the dramas, not Mensah’s family."

"“Was that a subtle threat?” I said, “No. It wasn’t subtle.”"

"It wasn’t a foolproof method but it was 90 percent effective. (Foolproof is another weird word. Shouldn’t it be smartproof? It’s not like you’re going to breach and seize control of a ship attached to a space dock by tripping or forgetting to bring your weapon or something.)"

"It was very dramatic, like something out of a historical adventure serial. Also correct in every aspect except for all the facts, like something out of a historical adventure serial."

"“I don’t want to be human.” Dr. Mensah said, “That’s not an attitude a lot of humans are going to understand. We tend to think that because a bot or a construct looks human, its ultimate goal would be to become human.” “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”"

"I’ve had clients who thought they needed an absurd level of security. (And I’m talking absurd even by my standards, and my code was developed by a bond company known for intense xenophobic paranoia, tempered only by desperate greed.) I’ve also had clients who thought they didn’t need any security at all, right up until something ate them."

"This lobby was on multiple levels and had large square biozones depicting different ecologies, with furniture arranged around them. It looked nice, inviting humans to sit around and discuss proprietary information in the hotel’s choked feed so the hotel could record it and sell it to the highest bidder."

"The company is like an evil vending machine, you put money in and it does what you want, unless somebody else puts more money in and tells it to stop."

"Disinformation, which is the same as lying but for some reason has a different name, is the top tactic in corporate negotiation/warfare."

"Humans have a bad tendency to use weapons unnecessarily and indiscriminately. Of the many times I had been shot, a depressingly large percentage of hits had come from clients who were trying to “help” me."

"But I couldn’t ignore it. I mean, I guess I couldn’t. Ignoring stuff is always an option, up until it kills you."

"This was another reason I didn’t like human security consultants. Some of them enjoyed their job too much."

"I know that’s actually not a permanent solution and pretending bad things aren’t happening is not a great survival strategy in the long run, but there was nothing I could do about it now."