Novelists From Wales

"They had been in love, desperately in love, but the universe cared nothing for the vicissitudes of the human heart."

"But make no mistake. My counterpart is capable of a great deal of ruthlessness in pursuit of a just cause. He believes he has right on his side. And men who think they have right on their side are always the most dangerous sort."

"“I’m not a bad man, Ilia. I’m just someone who knows exactly what needs to be done.” “Like you said, always the most dangerous sort.”"

"She would worry, just as you worry. It’s the people who don’t worry—those who never have any doubts that what they’re doing is good and right—they’re the ones that cause the problems."

"Clavain felt little in the way of regret; more a sense of quiet relief that they were past the negotiating stage and into the infinitely more honest arena of actual battle."

"“Can I still wish you good luck?” “You can wish me what the hell you like. It won’t make any difference. If it did, it would mean I hadn’t prepared well enough."

"And even if what they showed you is true, that doesn’t begin to make it right. The cause might be just, Felka, but history’s littered with atrocities committed in the name of righteousness."

"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."

"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."

"“For all you know, no one even remembers what you did by now.” “No one remembers anything, in the end.”"

"You wish things were different from the way they are. That’s a refrain as old as time. I’ve lived a long and strange sort of life, Kanu, and I’ve known that feeling a few times. Generally it’s best to accept that things are exactly as bad as they look. At least that way you know it’s time to start digging your way out."

"Believe me, Kanu—the one thing you don’t do in emergencies is think things through. Thinking things through gets you a headstone and a nice epitaph. She thought things through. See how that worked out for her."

"“What could be colder than being made to feel the utter futility of existence? To know that not only is there no meaning to anything, but there never can be? That life itself is completely devoid of purpose? That nothing will be remembered? That despite our grandest efforts our boldest endeavours, nothing can or will ever be preserved? That the kindest acts are doomed to be forgotten, along with the cruelest? All loves, all hates erased from the record? Yes, what could be worse than that?” “You tell me.” “Nothing. Nothing at all in the whole of creation. And if death troubles me—which, I am pleased to say, it most certainly does—then the idea of not even being remembered, not even leaving the tiniest quantum ripple in the wake of the coming vacuum fluctuation…well, that is a great deal more than troubling. We live by our deeds, whether we are machines or people or elephants. And if our deeds are meaningless and forgotten what does that make us?” “Nothing,” Kanu answered, fiercely enough that he spoke the word aloud. “Pointless interactions between matter and energy, doomed to be erased. That’s the message, Swift. That there’s no meaning. That we don’t matter.” “No,” Swift answered with corresponding force. “We do matter. This truth does not rob us of meaning—it gives it back to us. It liberates us from the burden of posterity, from the burden of deluding ourselves that our acts have some chance of outlasting eternity. If we are kind to each other now, it’s not because we are hoping to be remembered well, to be lauded in some great accounting of things. It’s not because we want to be rewarded for our behaviour, or to be admired for the wonderful things we did during our brief span of existence. Exactly the opposite! Now that we know there is no chance of that, our deeds have no higher meaning than the context of the moment in which they occur. One decent deed, one kind gesture, enacted without thought of recompense or remembrance, performed in the full and certain knowledge that it will be forgotten, that it cannot be otherwise—that single deed refutes the entire message of the M-builders. They were wrong! There is no Terror, only enlightenment! Only liberation! And we will continue to refute their message with every gracious act, every decent thought, every human kindness—until the moment the vacuum rips.” “Just a fancy speech, Swift. That’s all it is.” “More than a speech, Kanu. A viable moral strategy for negating the M-builders’ nihilism. It’s a choice. A question of free will. Do you choose it, or reject it?”"

"For whatever reason, I am now fully conscious. Perhaps all beta-levels are capable of this, or perhaps my sheer connectional complexity ensured that I exceeded some state of critical mass. I have no idea. All I know is that I think, and therefore I’m exceedingly angry."

"“But you seem so nonchalant about it all,” Teal said. Merlin pondered this for a few seconds. “Do you think being not nonchalant would make any difference? I don't know that it would. We’re here in the moment, aren’t we? And the moment will have its way with us, no matter how we feel about things.” “Fatalist.” “Cheerful realist. There’s a distinction.”"

"“So you've no qualms.” “Qualms?” Merlin set down the papers he had been leafing through. “I've so many qualms they’re in danger of self-organizing. I occasionally have a thought that isn’t a qualm. But I’ll tell you this. Sometimes you just have to do the obvious thing. They have an item I need, and there’s a favor I can do for them. It’s that simple. Not everything in the universe is a riddle.”"

"Maybe if you weren’t busy throwing rocks at each other, you could spend a little time on the other niceties of life, such as cooperation and mutual advancement."

"Even time travel becomes normal when it’s your day job."

"I had never understood mathematics with any great agility, but now I sensed it as a hard grid of truth underlying everything: bones shining through the thin flesh of the world."

"The Jugglers store patterns, but they seldom show any sign of comprehending actual content. We’re dealing with a mindless biological archiving system, a museum without a curator."

"A single data point—even a single clutch of measurements—could not usually prove or disprove anything, but it might later turn out to play a vital role in a chain of argument, even if it was only in the biasing of some statistical distribution closer to one hypothesis than another. Science, as Naqi had long since realised, was as much a swarming, social process as it was something driven by ecstatic moments of personal discovery. It was something she was proud to be part of."

"Naqi suspected that the ability to turn drunkenness on and off like a switch must be one of the most hallowed of diplomatic skills."

"“Tell me, scientist to scientist, do you honestly think it will work?” “We won’t know until we try,” Naqi said. Any other answer would have been politically hazardous: too much optimism and the politicians would have started asking just why the expensive project was needed in the first place. Too much pessimism and they would ask exactly the same question."

"We don’t aspire to genetic unity, no matter what your propagandists think. The pursuit of optima leads only to local minima. We honour our errors. We actively seek persistent disequilibrium."

"Afterwards, when Clavain tried to imaging how he might describe it, he found that words were never going to be adequate for the task. And that was no surprise: evolution had shaped language to convey many concepts, but going from a single to a networked topology of self was not amongst them."

"Clavain had been a soldier. He had killed more people than he could remember, even though those days had been a long time ago. It was really a lot less difficult to do when you had a cause to believe in."

"“Only trying to make conversation, friend.” “Don’t bother—it’s an overrated activity at the best of times.”"

"“All right, Marius—I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it, filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate onetime pad and wrote a fucking two-hundred-page report on it. Satisfied?” “I’m never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn’t in my nature.”"

"Is this a personal grudge or are you just psychotic?"

"You’ve been good to me, Inigo. But I really am like the weather. You can admire me, even love me, in your way, but I can’t love you back. To me you’re like a photograph. I can see right through you, examine you from all angles. You amuse me. But you don’t have enough depth ever to fascinate me."

"Grafenwalder shoots a sidelong glance at Ursula Goodglass, wondering what their marriage must be like. Clearly sex isn’t in the cards, but he doubts that it was ever the main interest in their lives. Games, especially those of prestige and subterfuge, are amongst the chief entertainments of the Rust Belt moneyed."

"War does strange things to truth."

"Pretty smart piece of thinkware by all accounts: full Turing compliance; about as clever as you can make a machine before you have to start giving it human rights."

"“Is he dead?” Irravel asked. “Depends what you mean by dead.”"

"Loosen up. I need reverence like I need a skateboard."

"She rapped on for a while about how the nineties milieu was best addressed as a system of infections: sexual illnesses, rogue advertising slogans, computer viruses, proliferating junk mail…the kind of jive that had spread into all the glossy style magazines, as if, she mused, the viral paradigm was a metavirus in its own right."

"“The old murals came from the heart,” Zima said. “I painted on a huge scale because that was what the subject matter seemed to demand.” “It was good work,” I said. “It was hack work. Huge, loud, demanding, popular, but ultimately soulless. Just because it came from the heart didn’t make it good.”"

"Some people get it. Most people never will. But that’s art."

"Truth is truth, no matter who else believes it."

"Ghosts are not the souls of the dead, but the souls of people written out of history when history changes."

"“Still don’t trust us?” “First rule of complex systems,” I said. “You can’t tell friends from enemies.”"

"“You’re quite right: that theory is taken a bit less seriously.” “But it isn’t discredited, is it?” “You can’t discredit an untestable hypothesis.”"

"But you know what? I don’t care If transferring your anger onto me helps you, go ahead. I was the billionaire CEO of a global company. I was doing something wrong if I didn’t wake up with a million knives in my back."

"The only thing driving us on was greed. Fucking greed. The only thing in the universe stronger than fear."

"The universe always feels old, though. That’s a universal truth, a universal fact of life. It felt old for her, already cobwebbed by history. Hard for us to grasp, I know. Human civilisation, it’s just the last scratch on the last scratch on the last scratch, on the last layer of everything. We’re noise. Dirt. We haven’t begun to leave a trace."

"It was the wrong approach. But it was the only way we—they—could see at the time. So we mustn’t mock them for their mistakes. In two hundred years, someone will be just as quick to mock us for ours, if we’re not careful."

"That was my plan. But there is an old saying about plans and war. I would have done well to heed it."

"You owned the world when you were a young man, felt it like it was fashioned to fit your hands. You could do anything with it you wanted to. But the world kept changing, and sooner or later there came a day when it didn’t feel like you were the one the world was interested in any more."

"“And what keeps you going, exactly?” “Insulting my friends. Making new ones, to compensate for the ones I already insulted just a bit too much. You’d be surprised how much work those activities demand of me—it’s practically a full-time occupation.” “In fairness, you’re getting very good at it.”"

"There’s nothing like a stupid, accidental death to remind you of the supreme futility of everything."