Science Fiction Authors From The United Kingdom

"“They dug too far into physics and it bit them. Physics will do that. It’s an ungrateful piece of shit. It’s a fickle lover that will always betray you. It courts you, gives you rewards, coughs up little treats like fire and the wheel, telescopes and the secret of starflight, makes you think you’re worth it, that you’re the special one, that you really, really matter to it.…All the while it’s saving up this nasty little truth: that every thought, every deed, every hope you’ve ever held is futile. That the universe will end, and forget itself. That there is no such thing as meaning.… “Do you believe it?” Goma asked. “Of course I believe it. Physics doesn’t give a damn about how we feel. It doesn’t give a damn about a sleeping soundly in our beds, thinking we matter.”"

"Oh, I’m not perfect—not by a long stretch. I just make the rest of you look bad."

"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."

"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.”"

"His parents had abdicated responsibility to an illusion."

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

"If I’ve learned one thing in my long existence, it’s that hesitation gets you nowhere."

"“And when do we abandon negotiation and start hitting each other with increasingly large sticks?” Ru said. “Only when we’ve exhausted all the other options,” Vasin said."

"We have all made mistakes. The mark of intelligence is to learn from them, and not be bound by the errors of the past."

"“Are you impressed?” Goma dared ask. “I don’t really do impressed. But consider yourselves the recipients of grudging approval.”"

"Goma shook her head. “No. We don’t speak of souls. Not now, not ever. Souls aren’t real.” “Patterns, then. Abstract structures of experience and reaction, making up a consistent, continuous human identity.”"

"Of course there were no miracles to be had, except of the modest kind permitted by the exigencies of medicine and time."

"The sense of squandered possibility, of better paths now lost to them all, filled him with a sudden rising sadness. He wondered if it was too late to make something better of their world."

"“History’s a stopped clock,” Eunice said. “It’s nice to look at, but there’s only so much you can tell you.”"

"“I will say this, though—it’s a very odd thing not to be conscious. To be—to all intents and purposes—dead. Neither gathering nor generating information, as cold and changeless as eternity. How do you humans live with the thought of that hanging over every moment of your pitifully short existences?” “We don’t,” Kanu said. “We just get on with it.”"

"“There are no nasty surprises,” Swift said, “only degrees of unpreparedness.”"

"“Ideology is all there is.” “Really? I would have thought there were many other human qualities worth considering. Fairness. Generosity. A sense of humour. A willingness to see the best in people, even those we do not automatically agree with.”"

"I’m not on the side of elephants or people, Goma. I’m on the side against stupidity."

"Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators."

"“You weren’t there.” “I didn’t have to be—I know my history.”"

"It was a fault of the human condition—or perhaps a blessing—that there was no situation which did not eventually become the normal state of affairs."

"Kanu closed his eyes, opened them again, hoping that the world would have done the decent thing and changed into a less problematic version of itself."

"I can’t stop being a rationalist just because it upsets some people."

"“Clearly we missed something.” “You have a fine talent for understatement.”"

"“You’re taking this very well,” Goma said. Eunice gave a semi-shrug. “Experience. You can fight the odds up to a point, but sooner or later you have to face reality. The universe doesn’t care about temper tantrums or pity.”"

"Venus was a machine for making bad weather."

"Something that bad, it makes the headlines. They were idiots to bet against physics."

"Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential."

"Nature shouldn’t be able to do this, Sunday thought. It shouldn’t be able to produce something that resembled the work of directed intelligence, something artful, when the only factors involved were unthinking physics and obscene, spendthrift quantities of time. Time to lay down the sediments, in deluge after deluge, entire epochs in the impossibly distant past when Mars had been both warm and wet, a world deluded into thinking it had a future. Time for cosmic happenstance to hurl a fist from the sky, punching down through these carefully superimposed layers, drilling through these carefully superimposed layers, drilling the geological chapters like a bullet through a book. And then yesterday more time—countless millions of years—for wind and dust to work their callous handiwork, scouring and abrading, wearing the exposed layers back at subtly different rates depending on hardness and chemistry, util these deliberate-looking right-angled steps and contours began to assume grand and imperial solidity, rising from the depths like the stairways of the gods. Awe-inspiring, yesterday. Sometimes it was entirely right and proper to be awed. And recognising the physics in these formations, the hand of time and matter and the nuclear forces underpinning all things, did not lessen that feeling. What was she, ultimately, but the end product of physics and matter? And what was her art but the product of physics and matter working on itself?"

"We have been clever, and on occasion we have been foolish. For smart monkeys, we can, when the mood takes us, be exceedingly stupid. But it was cleverness that brought us to this point, and it is only cleverness that will serve us from now on. We have no time for anything else."

"Autocratic governments are masters of self-contradiction. They say one thing, do another."

"All her concerns, all her fears, began to feel trifling. It was just a trick of perspective, really, seeing things as they truly were."

"The boundary between art and kitsch was negotiable, even porous."

"What you encountered was an abomination, a military intelligence. It was designed to be insidious and spiteful and inimical to life, and it wasn’t smart enough to have a conscience."

"She was pointing into the empty, angel-less heavens beyond. Everything else. The universe."

"“We’re pushing into deep space now—Trans-Neptunian, the inner boundary of the Kuiper belt, and we’ve even got machines in the Oort cloud. That’s where it gets stickier. If we’re going to do anything useful out there, we’ll need smart machines and lots of them. Machines that break right through the existing cognition thresholds, into post-artilect computation. Human-level thinkers that can live with us, be our equals as well as our workers.” “You’re not sounding any less scary than you were five minutes ago,” Geoffrey said. “Look, in a thousand years, the difference between people and machines…It’s going to seem about as relevant as the difference between Protestants and Catholics: some ludicrous relic of Dark Age thinking.”"

"In a flash she understood herself for what she was: an exceedingly smart monkey. She was a smart monkey who had travelled across interplanetary space in a thing made by other smart monkeys. And the fact of this was enough to make her laugh out loud, as if she had suddenly, belatedly, grasped the punchline to a very involved joke. I’m the punchline, Sunday thought. I’m the period, the full stop at the end of an immensely long and convoluted chain of happenstance and contingency stretching from the discovery of fire down in the Olduvai Gorge, through the inventions of language and paper and the wheel, through all the unremembered centuries to…this. This condition. Being brought out of hibernation aboard a spaceship orbiting another planet. Being alive in the twenty-second century. Being a thing with a central nervous system complex enough to understand the concept of being a thing with a central nervous system. Simply being. Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid. In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to be a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the whole damned universe. She had threaded the needle of creation and stabbed the cosmic bullseye."

"Welcome to politics, Doctor. We don’t get to pick our allies. The best we can hope for is that we don’t despise them quite as much as our enemies."

"“Do you think it means anything?” “Probably not," Ricasso said, wiping his dust-smeared hands on his knees. “I’m all for looking for meaning in ancient texts. But now and then you have to just accept the fact that you’re dealing with so much religious gibberish.”"

"She looked at him, marvelling. “Sometimes it’s as if you’re living a century behind the rest of us.” “Elephants don’t care what century it is. They care what season it is.”"

"The air crackled with rivalry and the potential for swift backstabbing. Geoffrey hadn’t sensed anything like it since his last academic conference."

"You’ll have to excuse our customs and immigration staff: they preach courtesy and respect while demonstrating exactly the opposite."

"“I worry that it’s me they’re really after.” “You don’t exist. At the risk of wounding your ego, not everyone in the known universe is obsessed with you and your secret history.”"

"She worked quickly, but not because she considered the commission beneath her. It was simply the way she always approached her art. Preparation, forethought, hours of meditation, then an explosion of swift and decisive action, like the quick and merciful descent of a sword. Execution, in every sense of the word."

"The world had absorbed the dizzying lessons of modern science easily enough, hadn’t it? Reality was a trick of cognition, an illusion woven by the brain. Beneath the apparently solid skin of the world lay a fizzing unreality of quantum mechanics, playing out on a warped and surreal Salvador Dali landscape. Ghost worlds peeled away from the present with every decision. The universe itself would one day simmer down to absolute entropic stasis, the absolute and literal end of time itself. No action, no memory of an action, no trace of a memory, could endure for ever. Every human deed, from the smallest kindness to the grandest artistic achievement, was ultimately pointless. But it wasn’t as if people went around thinking about that when they had lovers to meet, menus to choose from, birthdays to remember. The humdrum concerns of normal life trumped the miraculous every time.…And the knowledge that humanity was not alone in the universe would be as relevant to most as the knowledge that protons were built of quarks."

"I’ll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason."

"They had hardly ever spoken of her life before the the day they met in Belém. It was what they had both agreed on, a relationship built on a solid foundation of mutual ignorance."

"I ran an experiment and I got a result. That’s more useful to us than fifty years of theorising."

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