Novelists From England

"She’s very good at misdirection, he thinks proudly. The Civil Service has a term for this art: being economical with the truth."

"You keep invoking some God but I don’t think he’s listening right now."

"We’re from the Ministry of Defense: our sense of humor is surgically excised at birth."

"Her heart pounds. Dating, with its conventions of multiple social encounters as a prelude to fucking, seems absurdly complex to her, like cooking your own food rather than having servants and poison-testers prepare it for you."

"She has only warped second-hand memories of motion pictures, none of them her own. It seems like a fantastically unproductive use of her time with Alex, staring vacantly at an elaborate visual lie."

"It’s all he can do to refrain from prayer. God probably doesn’t want to know what he’s doing here this morning, a borderline accomplice to evil in service to a greater cause."

"Y2K was a real end-of-civilization problem. And the people who could deal with it treated it as such, working flat-out on disaster management for the last year-long countdown. With the result that the end-of-the-world scenario didn’t happen…causing everyone not directly involved to conclude that it was a false alarm."

"Let’s say they get speech, and they got theory of mind, so they get religion pretty soon, too—an emergent side effect of ascribing intentionality to aspects of their environment. Animism, polytheism, whatever. They probably discover ritual magic pretty fast because their brains are predisposed to modeling complex entities. Abstract thinking."

"“Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence or overwork?” Alex asks, rising. “Something like that. But there’s a point at which sufficient incompetence is malice.”"

"In Agent First’s world, the ineluctable law of power is that you rule or you die. To Agent First, the puppet show of democracy that Cassie believes in is obviously a child’s tissue of attractive lies, set before the cattle to enable the secret rulers to dominate them without fear of uprisings."

"When they went looking for someone to represent the agency in public and picked me, they weren’t just scraping the bottom of the barrel, they were fracking for oil in the basement."

"This is the Forecasting Operations Department, where one is supposed to imagine that crystal-ball gazing precognitives may or may not tickle the tummy of Schrödinger’s cat while juggling ampoules full of hydrogen cyanide and giggling madly at the whirling fog bank of the uncertain future."

"It’s insane, but no more insane than Japan shutting down its entire nuclear reactor fleet in the middle of a heat wave because an extreme tsunami washed over one plant, or the USA invading a noninvolved Middle Eastern nation because a gang of crazies from somewhere else knocked down two skyscrapers. In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window."

"“I imagine looking after a sixteen-year-old must be a bit of a headache. ”“Oh, it’s mostly about building trust. She’s still in the ugh, parents, uncool stage, but she’s self-aware enough to know that it’s just something she’s going through. So I’m trying to give her enough space that she doesn’t feel the need to burn bridges she might want to maintain later. The best thing you can do is provide them with a support framework rather than a cage. Don’t try to micromanage and overprotect them, let them know they can come to you when they’ve got problems, and as long as they’ve got a reasonably level head, that’s what they’ll do.” He pauses. “And I try to keep a poker face whenever she introduces me to a boyfriend.”"

"The American mainstream news media have so far steered well clear of the subject because the phenomenon has been enthusiastically embraced by the talk radio fringe, leading to a death spiral of diminishing credibility."

"“I’m disappointed in you, Mo: How could you imagine that the militarization of the police might be seen as a huge potential growth market by defense contractors?” “How indeed.”"

"And she actually looks—well, I’m not sure how to describe her. Scary is such an inadequate word, don’t you think?"

"It’s amazing how much work you can get done in three days if you hold a blowtorch to each end of the candle."

"Unfortunately his IQ seems to be off the scale, in the wrong direction."

"There is no point in prioritizing doing your job when your organization faces being defunded in less than three months’ time if you don’t do something else: you do what’s necessary in order to ensure your organization survives, then you get back to work. (This is how the iron law of bureaucracy installs itself at the heart of an institution. Most of the activities of any bureaucracy are devoted not to the organization’s ostensible goals, but to ensuring that the organization survives: because if they aren’t, the bureaucracy has a life expectancy measured in days before some idiot decision maker decides that if it’s no use to them they can make political hay by destroying it. It’s no consolation that some time later someone will realize that an organization was needed to carry out the original organization’s task, so a replacement is created: you still lost your job and the task went undone. The only sure way forward is to build an agency that looks to its own survival before it looks to its mission statement. Just another example of evolution in action.)"

"If life hands your research department lemons and a recipe, you shouldn’t be surprised if they make lemonade for you. Or, better still, anti-lemonade countermeasures."

"(A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it’s parenthesized despair all the way down.)))"

"The home office hates vigilantes in Lycra fancy-dress outfits almost as much as they hate lawbreakers. You see, superheroes don’t follow the rules of evidence. They take procedural shortcuts, assault criminals, mess up crime scenes, and generally make it almost impossible to secure a conviction. Not to mention committing a basketload of offenses in their own right: aggravated trespass, assault, violating controlled airspace and flying without a license, breaking and entering, criminal damage..."

"Despair, dismay, disorientation, and delusion: the four horsemen of the bureaucratic apocalypse are coming my way."

"Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right now it has convinced Pete that it is harmless, but I know better: just give them thumbs and in no time at all they’ll have us working in the tuna mines, delivering cans from now until eternity."

"“The HomeSec’s focus group will take one look at this and tell you to sex it up.”... “Why do you think that’ll be a priority?” she asks. “You know perfectly well why—...For the same reason they want a balanced team rather than a competent one. It doesn’t fit the cultural agenda they’re trying to impose.”"

"“But has it occurred to you that there might be a reason for that?” “I can think of several.” I cross my legs. “Mostly ranging from the inane to the criminally irresponsible.”"

"Having a policy based on works of fiction is worse than having no policy at all."

"If pauses can be pregnant, this one’s on the run from a fertility clinic."

"Almost everything in the pop culture lexicon of vampirism is basically fiction—and fiction is the art of telling entertaining lies for money."

"The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up."

"Superficial appearances are misleading precisely because, so much of the time, they’re accurate."

"Pete is clearly mildly perturbed by this, as so he should be: his faith doesn’t have much room for sanguinary magic, unless you count holy communion."

"You win some, you lose some. And when you lose, you have to pull yourself together and go back for more. Otherwise, the other side wins by default."

"Vampires can’t exist. There’d be detailed records in the archives; they couldn’t possibly evade detection by the state for any significant period. Besides which...there’d be corpses everywhere. Human blood is a poor nutrient source; it’s about 60 percent plasma by volume and only provides about 900 calories per liter, so your hypothetical blood-sucking fiend is going to have to drink about two and a half liters per day. Those calories don’t come in the form of useful stuff like glucose and fat: it’s mostly protein from circulating red blood cells. Dracula would have to exsanguinate a victim every day just to stay alive, and would suffer from chronic ketoacidosis. The total number of intentional homicides for the whole country is around 700 a year; a single vampire would cause a 50 percent spike in the murder rate. Or they’d have to take transfusion-sized donations about two thousand times a year."

"I promise not to hammer a stake through your heart or set you on fire, as long as you promise not to rip my throat out. Okay? We in the twenty-first century have this marvelous technical innovation; it’s called civilization, and it means we don’t have to make promises like that to everyone we meet because we can usually take it for granted."

"“Is the weather always like this?” “It could be worse. They could be looking at relocating to Manchester, where the locals are evolving webbed fingers and gill slits.”"

"One of the great besetting problems of the modern age is what to do with too much information."

"The Other Place, the astral plane, the land of dreams—it’s not a real place like, say, Walsall. But it’s a metaphor for a mathematical abstraction, a manifold containing an n-dimensional space where everything is the product of geometrical transformations, including mass and energy and time. Leakage between dimensions occurs there: it’s how we summon demons from the vasty deep, communicate with aliens, and try to extract our tax codes from the Inland Revenue."

"Another problem with godheads, Johnny reflects, is that they can’t quite understand how anyone could not believe their shit. (He knows this because he started out as one, although he lost his faith before his balls dropped.) Consequently, they have immense difficulty in grasping, at an intuitive level, that someone who used to be one of them might no longer be completely in tune with their ideology."

"Me, I’m here because I can’t get out, and while I’m locked in the asylum I might as well take notes on the inmates."

"The trouble with godheads, in Johnny’s experience, is that they can’t quite understand how anyone could not believe their shit. It seems as obvious as gravity to them, as normal as water flowing downhill and rain following sunshine; everything works the way it says in the book because the book is the inerrant word of God. Leaving aside the idolatry implicit in taking a mere book as a more authoritative source of truth than divine revelation, there are damaging consequences when such a belief system collides with reality. If the world was created in six days six-thousand-odd years ago, then a whole bunch of evidence relating to geology, biology, paleontology, genetics, and evolution has to be ignored—or, much harder, refuted. Which is easy enough if you don’t hold with school-book larnin’, but it’s difficult to practice general medicine if your religion says bacteria can’t evolve antibiotic resistance, and hard to be a geologist if your cosmology is incompatible with continental drift. And then there’s the picking and choosing. Men who lie with men are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. But then, so is the eating of shellfish, if you go back to the original text. And the wearing of garments made from different types of fiber. And tattooing. And witchcraft—or is it poisoning? Different translations disagree. (And what on earth does the bit about what to do if your house contracts leprosy mean?) The early Church fathers cut through the Gordian knot by declaring the Old Testament obsolete: version 1.0, superseded by the new, improved version 2.0. But they couldn’t make it stick, hence the thousand-page prologue you have to wade through before you get to read the Gospel of Matthew. And even there, even in the prologue, even after weeding out the obvious Bible fanfic, there’s no rhyme nor reason: some churches can’t be arsed with the Book of Judith, while some of them cancelled the Maccabees after season two because of dwindling Nielsen ratings. So you end up with divergent sects reading from subtly different versions of the same book—which in turn is a third-generation translation of something which might have been the original codification of an oral tradition—and all convinced that their interpretation overrides such minor obstacles as observable reality. Which still wouldn’t be a problem except that some of the readers think the books are an instruction manual rather than a set of educational parables, a blueprint instead of a metaphor."

"I am at a loss for words to describe my lack of eagerness to go there."

"It is a government agency. And government agencies are run as bureaucracies. There is a role for bureaucracy; it’s very useful for certain tasks. In particular, it facilitates standardization and interchangeability. Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake."

"We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty."

"They’re believers, Mr. Howard. Pentecostalist dispensationalists—they are saved, but they are surrounded by the unsaved, and they think their master is returning imminently, and anyone who isn’t saved by the time of his arrival is doomed. So they intend to save everyone whether or not they want to be saved, one brain parasite at a time."

"I’d call them dangerously loopy heretics who are well down the slippery slope to hell, Bob. A hell of their own creation, even if you don’t believe in the literal sulfur-and-brimstone variety presided over by a big red guy with horns and cloven hooves. Which these people very likely do, but they think they’re on the side of the angels, which makes them doubly bad."

"They’re outside the Nicene Creed and they’re not actually Christians, although they think they are—like the Mormons. But while the Book of Mormon is just a nineteenth-century fabrication there’s stuff in here that’s, uh, disturbing. Very disturbing, Bob."

"A man so wrapped in secrecy that his shadow doesn’t have a high enough security clearance to stick to his heels."

"We’re up the highway from Colorado Springs. The holy rollers are big in Colorado. Mostly they’re harmless, ’long as you’re not a young woman in search of an abortion."