American Novels

"The guy in the corner kept reading poetry. For perhaps ten seconds, between the taste of the fish and the sound of the poetry, Shaftoe actually felt comfortable here, and forgot that he was merely instigating a vicious racial brawl."

"When Lawrence understood, it was as if the math teacher had suddenly played the good part of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor on a pipe organ the size of the Spiral Nebula in Andromeda."

"The modern world's hell on haiku writers: "Electrical generator" is, what, eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that onto the second line!"

"This ain't just your regular Friday p.m. Shanghai bank district money rush. This is an ultimate settling of accounts before the whole Eastern Hemisphere catches fire."

"A couple of days into the voyage it becomes apparent that Sergeant Frick has forgotten how to shine his boots.…Now in and of itself this is forgivable. Frick started out his career chasing bandolier-draped desperadoes away from mail trains on the High Chaparral, for God's sake. In '27 he got shipped off to Shanghai on very short notice, and no doubt had to display some adaptability."

"Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored."

"The last foreign devil to depart from the Middle Kingdom was a blond Victorian gentleman with gray eyes, who stood in the waves for some time looking back over Pudong before he turned around and continued his descent. As the sea rose over him, it lifted the bowler from his head, and the hat continued to bob on the tide for some minutes as the Chinese detonated strings of firecrackers on the shore and tiny shreds of the red paper wrappers drifted over the sea like cherry petals."

"New Chusan rose above them, a short swim away, and up on the mountain they could hear the bells of the cathedral ringing."

"There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily."

"Princess Nell stared out over the waves for a while, then looked Carl in the eye and said quietly, "I accept your credentials and request that you convey my warm thanks and regard to Her Majesty, along with my apologies that circumstances prevent me from composing a more formal response to her kind letter, which at any other time would naturally be my highest priority." "I shall do so at the earliest opportunity, Your Majesty," Carl Hollywood said. Hearing these words, Princess Nell looked a bit unsteady…Carl realized that she had never been addressed in this way before."

"Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and the rest of the band are up on the deck of the Nevada one morning, playing the national anthem and watching the Stars and Stripes ratchet up the mast, when they are startled to find themselves in the midst of 190 airplanes of unfamiliar design… This is an incredibly realistic training exercise even down to the point of using ethnically correct pilots, and detonating fake explosives on the ships. Lawrence heartily approves. Things have just been too lax around this place… …Waterhouse is vaguely aware of a lot of stuff coming at him really fast."

"One of the Boers, a wiry grandmother with a white bun on her head and a black bonnet…began to march toward the head of the advancing column of Celestials. She carefully got down on both knees in the middle of the road, clasped her hands together in prayer, and bowed her head. Then she became a pearl of white light in the mouth of the dragon. In an instant this pearl grew to the size of an airship. Carl Hollywood had the presence of mind to close his eyes and turn his head away, but he didn't have time to throw himself down; the shock wave did that."

"He threw his long coat down on the sand and sloshed out Into the Pacific, accompanied by the officer, and remained at a judicious distance, partly to show due respect, and partly because Nell had a sword in her waistband. Her face was inclined over the pages of her book like a focusing lens, and he half expected the pages to curl and smoke under her gaze."

"This morning [Imelda Marcos] offered the latest in a series of explanations of the billions of dollars that she and her husband, who died in 1989, are believed to have stolen during his presidency. "It so coincided that Marcos had money," she said. "After the Bretton Woods agreement he started buying gold from Fort Knox. Three thousand tons, then 4,000 tons. I have documents for these: 7,000 tons. Marcos was so smart. He had it all. It's funny; America didn't understand him.""

"He had been born without the ability to blend and socialize as some are born without hands."

"Some people come here because they are on a quest of some sort—trying to find a lost lover, let’s say, or to understand why something terrible happened in their lives, or why there is cruelty in the world, or why they aren’t satisfied with their career. Society has never been good at answering these questions — the sorts of questions you can’t just look up in a reference database."

"Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong associated with a particular ti that is…Western, and completely alien to us. For centuries, since the time of the Opium Wars, we have struggled to absorb the yong of technology without importing the Western ti. But it has been impossible…The result has been centuries of chaos. We ask you to end that by giving us the Seed."

"The tiny old houses and flats of this once impoverished quarter had mostly been refurbished into toeholds for young Atlantans from all around the Anglosphere, poor in equity but rich in expectations, who had come to the great city to incubate their careers. The lustre that was so evident near the approaches to the bridge began to wear thin in places, and the ancient character of the neighborhood began to assert itself, as the bones of the knuckles reveal their shape beneath the stretched skin of a fist."

"There are only two industries. This has always been true....There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment....After people have everything they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything."

""They believe that information has an almost mystical power of free flow and self-replication, as water seeks its own level or sparks fly upward—and lacking any moral code, they confuse inevitability with Right. It is their view that one day… the Seed will develop inevitably from the Feed…. Of course, it can't be allowed…if everyone possessed a Seed, anyone could produce weapons whose destructive power rivaled that of Elizabethan nuclear weapons.”"

"You do these things not to serve your Queen but to serve your own nature, John Hackworth, and I understand your nature. For you cleverness is its own end, and once you have seen a clever way to do a thing, you must do it, as water finding a crack in a dike must pass through it and cover the land on the other side."

"But what if it isn't that clear-cut? What if the action is one that would merely be really improbable unless the Americans were breaking the code? What if the Americans, in the long run, are just too damn lucky?"

"It was a vast open marketplace with thousands of stalls, filled with carts and runners carrying product in all directions. But no vegetables, fish, spices, or fodder were to be seen here; all the product was information written down in books.... Book-carriers bumped into each other, compared notes as to what they were carrying and where they were going, and swapped books for other books. Stacks of books were sold in great, raucous auctions—and paid for not with gold but with other books. Around the edges of the market were stalls where books were exchanged for gold, and beyond that, a few alleys where gold could be exchanged for food."

"He nodded in the direction of China. "Been doing a bit of consulting work for a gentleman there. Complicated fellow. Dead now. Had many facets, but now he'll go down in history as just another damn Chinese warlord who didn't make the grade. It is remarkable, love," he said, looking at Nell for the first time, "how much money you can make shoveling back the tide. In the end you need to get out while the getting is good. Not very honourable, I suppose, but then, there is no honour among consultants.""

"“The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code — but their children believe it for entirely different reasons." "They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it." "Yes. Some of them never challenge it — they grow up to be small-minded people, who can tell you what they believe, but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel." "Which path do you intend to take, Nell? Conformity or rebellion?" "Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded — they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.""

"It was a bit too aggressive to be a reverie and too abstract to be a hallucination."

"“Yet how am I to cultivate the persons of the barbarians for whom I have perversely been given responsibility?" … "The Master stated in his Great Learning that the extension of knowledge was the root of all other virtues." "I cannot send the boy to school, Chang." "Think instead of the girl," Chang said, "the girl and her book.""

"What does it really mean when such a young person moves to another phyle? It means that they have outgrown youthful credulity and no longer wish to belong to a tribe simply because it is the path of least resistance—they have developed principle, they are concerned with their personal integrity."

""Your case is very serious," he said to the boy. "We will go and consult the ancient authorities…." The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel was what they called it when they were speaking Chinese. Venerable because of his goatee, white as the dogwood blossom, a badge of unimpeachable credibility in Confucian eyes. Inscrutable because he had gone to his grave without divulging the Secret of the Eleven Herbs and Spices. It had been the first fast-food franchise established on the Bund, many decades earlier."

"They wanted to carry her, but she jumped to the stones of the plaza and strode away from the building, toward her ranks, which parted to make way for her. The streets of Pudong were filled with hungry and terrified refugees, and through them, in simple peasant clothes streaked with the blood of herself and of others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the barbarian Princess with her book and her sword."

"Along with many other Midwesterners, Finkle-McGraw put in a few weeks building levees out of sandbags and plastic sheeting. Once again he was struck by the national media coverage—reporters from the coasts kept showing up and announcing, with some bewilderment, that there had been no looting. ... Finkle-McGraw began to develop an opinion that was to shape his political views in later years, namely, that while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed. It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those days, never voiced."

""And what makes one man's life more interesting than another’s?" "In general, I should say that we find unpredictable or novel things more interesting." …"You yourself said that the engineers in the Bespoke department—the very best—had led interesting lives, rather than coming from the straight and narrow. Which implies a correlation, does it not?” "Clearly." "This implies, does it not, that in order to raise a generation of children who can reach their full potential, we must find a way to make their lives interesting.”"

"The seed of this idea had been germinating in Hackworth's mind for some months now but had not bloomed, for the same reason that none of his ideas had ever developed into companies. He lacked an ingredient somewhere, and as he now realized, that ingredient was subversiveness. Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, the embodiment of the Victorian establishment, was a subversive…now he was trying to subvert his own granddaughter."

"He had some measure of the infuriating trait that causes a young man to be a nonconformist for its own sake and found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one’s life accordingly."

"The bells of St. Mark's were ringing changes up on the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun."

"Bud's relationship with the female sex was governed by a gallimaufry of primal impulses, dim suppositions, deranged theories, overheard scraps of conversation, half-remembered pieces of bad advice, and fragments of no-doubt exaggerated anecdotes that amounted to rank superstition."

"What's a matter compiler?" "We call it the M.C. for short." "Why?" "Because M.C. stands for matter compiler, or so they say." "Why?" "It just does. In letters, I guess." "What are letters?" "Kinda like mediaglyphics except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't move, they're old and boring and really hard to read. But you can use 'em to make short words for long words."

"Apthorp was not a formal organization that could be looked up in a phone book; in financial cant, it referred to a strategic alliance of several immense companies, including Machine-Phase Systems Limited and Imperial Tectonics Limited. ... MPS made consumer goods and ITL made real estate, which was, as ever, where the real money was. Counted by the hectare, it didn't amount to much...but it was the most expensive real estate in the world outside of a few blessed places like Tokyo, San Francisco, and Manhattan. ...every new piece of land possessed the charms of Frisco, the strategic location of Manhattan, the feng-shui of Hong Kong, the dreary but obligatory Lebensraum of L.A. It was no longer necessary to send out dirty yokels in coonskin caps to chart the wilderness, kill the abos, and clear-cut the groves...."

"We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations."

""So, you're the UNIX guru." At the time, Randy was still stupid enough to be flattered by this attention, when he should have recognized them as bone-chilling words. Three years later, he left the Astronomy Department without a degree, and with nothing to show for his labors except six hundred dollars in his bank account and a staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of UNIX."

"Ordering matter was the sole endeavor of Life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona."

"Hollywood was merely a specialized bank — a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium."

"Bobby Shaftoe reports back to his ship, and is not granted any more shore leave. He does manage to have a conversation with Uncle Jack, the last of the Manila Shaftoes…who has always been an odd combination of salty waterfront trader and perfumed dandy. When Bobby repeats the latest rumors, Uncle Jack's face collapses. No one hereabouts is willing to face the fact that they are about to be besieged by Nips. Bobby watches as he putt-putts away on his little boat…knowing that he is probably the last member of his family who will ever see Uncle Jack alive."

"The fellow has a red beard, which makes it just a bit less probable that he is a Nipponese soldier. But what is he? He prods like a doctor and prays like a priest in Latin, even. Silver hair buzzed close to a tanned skull. Shaftoe scans the fellow's clothing for some kind of insignia. He's hoping to see a Semper Fidelis but instead he reads: Societas Eruditorum and Ignoti et quasi occulti. "Ignoti et…what the fuck does that mean?" he asks. "Hidden and unknown more or less," says the man."

"Enoch Root spends some time alone with Amy and suddenly her leg gets a lot better. He explains that he applied a local folk remedy, but Amy refuses to say anything about it."

"Someone arrives from the outside world and convinces Randy he's on the cover of both Time and Newsweek. Randy doesn't consider it to be good news…It did not enter his calculations that being on the cover of newsweeklies, and people standing in the jungle holding banners with his name on them, would in any way characterize his life. Now he never wants to leave the jungle."

"An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot ignore them just because they are ridiculous."

"Goto Dengo inquires about how Randy and Avi got into their current lines of work, and how they formed their partnership. This is a reasonable question, but it forces them to explain the entire concept of fantasy role-playing games. If Randy had known this would happen, he would have thrown himself bodily through a window instead of taking a seat. But Goto Dengo instantly cross-correlates it to developments in the Nipponese game industry…By the time he's finished, Goto makes them feel like geniuses who were ten years ahead of their time. His English started out minimal and is getting better and better…as if he is slowly dusting off substantial banks of memory and processing power, nursing them on-line like tube amplifiers."

"Gold is the corpse of value," says Goto Dengo. "I don't understand." "If you want to understand, look out the Window!" says the patriarch, and sweeps his cane around in an arc that encompasses half of Tokyo. "Fifty years ago, it was flames. Now it is lights! Do you understand? The leaders of Nippon were stupid. They took all the gold out of Tokyo and buried it in holes in the ground in the Philippines! Because they thought that The General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn't care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here—" he points to his head "—in the intelligence of the people, and in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold was the best thing that ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor."

"But before this war, all of this gold was out here, in the sunlight. In the world. Yet look what happened." Goto Dengo shudders. "Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell those men that if they want wealth, they should come to Nippon with me after the war. We will start businesses and build things."