Short Story Writers From Wales

"The virus was not helping. He had hoped that it would, but the feelings it brought were too superficial. When he most needed their succour he could feel them for the paper-thin façades they were. Just because the virus was tickling the parts of his brain that produced feelings of religious experience didn’t mean he was able to turn off the other parts of his mind that recognised these feelings as having been induced artificially. He truly felt himself to be in the presence of something sacred, but he also knew, with total clarity, that this was due to neuroanatomy. Nothing was really with him: the organ music, the stained-glass windows in the sky, the sense of proximity to something huge and timeless and infinitely compassionate were all explicable in terms of neural wiring, firing potentials, synaptic gaps."

"No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk."

"The battle sunk towards the horizon. Presently it would be gone, leaving a sky unsullied by human affairs."

"“I thought debate was supposed to be healthy,” she countered. “It is,” Auger replied, “so long as you don’t disagree with me.”"

"There were choices to be made, harder choices than I would have liked, and I realised that I had been neglecting them because of their very difficulty."

"“We’re flexible,” Campion said. “It’s the price we pay for being sentient.”"

"Clavain saw it all with sudden, heart-stopping clarity: all that mattered was the here and now. All that mattered was survival. Sentience that bowed down and accepted its own extinction—no matter what the long-term arguments, no matter how good the greater cause—was not the kind of sentience he was interested in preserving."

"Charm was what he excelled at. If anyone sensed his underlying shallowness, they usually mistook it for well-hidden great depth of character, like misinterpreting a radar bounce."

"As always, it was necessary to strike a balance between a cavalier disregard for the rules and a professional understanding that some rules were more flexible than others."

"People lived and died and did strange, pointless things to themselves. So did societies, be they city-sized states or galactic empires encompassing thousands of solar systems. 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."

"“What happened?” “Let’s just say my efforts to reprogram the weapon were not an unqualified success, shall we, and leave it at that?” She hated discussing failure almost as much as she hated the thing itself."

"Rashmika could tell when anyone around her was lying. But seeing through her own deceptions was another matter entirely."

"All machines knew what would happen to them when their masters lost faith in their infallibility."

"The future might have been crammed with miracles and wonders, but it also offered truly awesome opportunities for screwing up."

"This gets better, it really does. The odd thing is, I actually think you might be telling the truth. If you were going to lie, you’d at least come up with something that made sense."

"Why was it never good news that put problems into perspective? Why did it always take another set of problems?"

"“The central defect of the human mind,” Custine said, “is its unfortunate habit of seeing patterns where none exist. Of course, that is also its chief asset.” “But sometimes a very dangerous one.”"

"Don’t you start. It’s bad enough that one of us feels he could have done more. We’re human, Campion—that’s all it boils down to. Human and not nearly as clever as we thought we were when it counted. End of story. When they put up the gravestone for our species, that’ll be the epitaph."

"It was his experience that crises in space fell into two categories: those that killed you immediately, usually without much warning, and those that gave you plenty of time to ruminate on the problem, even if no solution was very likely."

"Nice girls don’t carry guns."

"But sanity, Vasko decided, was like the pattern of lights he could see through his cabin window. In almost any direction the only way to travel was into darkness, and there was a lot more darkness than light."

"They might have their airships and machine guns, but superstition wasn’t something that went away just because you had engines and bullets."

"To feel oneself so tiny, so fragile, so inherently losable, was at first spiritually crushing. But, by the same token, this realisation was also strangely liberating: if an individual human existence meant so little, if one’s actions were so cosmically irrelevant, then the notion of some absolute moral framework made about as much sense as the universal ether. Measured against the infinite, therefore, people were no more capable of meaningful sin—or meaningful good—than ants, or dust. Worlds barely registered sin. Suns hardly deigned to notice it. On the scale of solar systems and galaxies, it meant nothing at all. It was like some obscure subatomic force that simply petered out on those scales."

"“I’ll survive,” Floyd said. “I’m a private detective. If I don’t get clouted on the head at least once a week, I’m not doing my job properly.”"

"She must have walked through life with men like him falling at her feet, squashing them underfoot like autumn leaves. It probably happened so often that all she noticed was that nice crunching sound."

"I’m not asking you to open your mind to all manner of nonsense, Doctor, merely to allow for the possibility of things you might previously have dismissed, or failed to give any consideration to whatsoever. Such as the fact that the world was not always this way, and by implication doesn’t have to be this way in the future."

"Am I that fascinating to you, or are you just more bored than I imagined?"

"Relativity distorted classical expectations in a way that Clavain still did not find entirely intuitive. Slam two objects towards each other, each with individual velocities just below light-speed, and the classical result for their closing velocity would be the sum of their individual speeds: just under twice the speed of light. Yet the true result, confirmed with numbing precision, was that the objects saw each other approach with a combined speed that was still just below the speed of light. Similarly, the relativistic closing velocity for two objects moving towards each other with individual speeds of one-half of light-speed was not light-speed itself, but eight-tenths of it. It was the way the universe was put together, and yet it was not something the human mind had evolved to accept."

"Just because something had spawned a myth did not automatically mean it had to contain anything of substance."

"But when she tried to say something, the words always seemed trite and inadequate. Nothing measured up. When any moment might be their last, there was nothing she could ever imagine saying that had the necessary dignity to fill that instant. Silence was better. Silence had its own dignity."

"“That’s how it went, wasn’t it Zebra?” “It might,” she said. “If I happened to be colluding in your own delusions.”"

"“I don’t like this at all,” Hegazi said. “Believe me,” Sylveste said, “you’re about to like it a lot less.”"

"“Haven’t you ever heard of morale-building?” Khouri had asked. “Heard of it,” Volyova said. “Don’t happen to agree with it. Would you rather be happy and dead, or scared and alive?”"

"She had almost dared ask, but was perhaps too fearful of hearing something she could not refute."

"The mere fact that there could be danger in this is fascination in itself; almost an incentive to push further. That’s how you feel, isn’t it? Every argument they could use against you would only strengthen your resolve. Because knowledge makes you hungry, and it’s a hunger you can’t resist, even if you know that what you’re feasting on could kill you."

"“I imagine you feel insignificant,” Sajaki said, almost as if he had been listening in on the conversation. “Well; you’re justified in feeling that way. You are insignificant. That’s the majesty of this place. Would you choose it any other way?”"

"For someone admitting guilt she sounded remarkably void of repentance."

"Khouri did not need to be told that Hades was a neutron star, any more than she needed to be told that there was no such thing as a safe close encounter with one. You either kept away or you died; those were the rules, and there was no force in the universe capable of negating them. Gravity ruled, and gravity did not take into account circumstances, or the unfairness of things, or listen to eleventh-hour petitions before reluctantly repealing its laws. Gravity crushed, and near the surface of a neutron star gravity crushed absolutely, until diamond flowed like water; until a mountain collapsed into a millionth of its height."

"His parents had abdicated responsibility to an illusion."

"I learnt the true meaning of what was euphemistically described as close-quarters combat. No line-of-sight particle-beam weapons now; no delayed-detonation nano-munitions. What close-quarters combat meant was something which would have been infinitely more recognisable to a soldier of a thousand years earlier: the screaming fury of human beings packed so close together that the only effective way to kill each other was with sharpened metal weapons: bayonets and daggers, or with hands around each other’s throats; fingers pressed into each other’s eye-sockets. The only way to survive was to disengage all higher brain-functions and regress to an animal state of mind. So I did. And in doing so, I learned a deeper truth about war. She punished those who flirted with her by making them like herself. Once you opened the door to the animal, there was no shutting it."

"“Don’t you agree with me?” “On some distant theoretical level, just possibly.”"

"Who was it who said that a wise man speaks when he has something to say, but a fool speaks because he must?"

"“But you can be sure there are pockets of wealth and influence, and I’m willing to wager that a few people are wealthier and more influential than they were before.” “That’s always the way with disasters,” I said. “What?” “They’re never bad news for everyone. Something nasty always rises to the top.”"

"The one thing I never counted on was having luck on my side. It was generally simpler that way."

"“Besides—we all know guns don’t kill people, do they?” “No, it’s the small metal projectiles that generally do the killing,” Cahuella said, smiling."

"Evolution doesn’t greatly care about what happens to creatures once they’ve passed on their genetic heritage."

"“I gather you were all too busy killing each other.” “That’s a fairly reductive summary of our history, but I don’t suppose it’s too far from the truth.”"

"The poor didn’t have them and so the rich flaunted them, the larger and more conspicuous the better."

"“I don’t trust you.” “Of course you don’t. I know I wouldn’t. And I’m not asking you to. I’m not putting you in a situation in which your trust of me is even remotely relevant. I’m just pointing a gun to your head and giving you orders.”"

"Hopefully they’ll accept me for what I am, not what I was. That’s all we can ever hope for, isn’t it?"