Science Fiction Authors From England

"Next, the stalled cars had their windows opaqued with a cheap commercial compound used for etching glass, and slogans were painted on their doors. Some were long: THIS VEHICLE IS A DANGER TO LIFE AND LIMB. Many were short: IT STINKS! But the commonest of all was the universally known catchphrase: STOP, YOU’RE KILLING ME!"

"We cannot allow quibbles to stand in the way of the truth."

"Most of the drivers, however, had the sense to stay put, fuming behind their blank windshields as they calculated the cost of repairs and repainting. Practically all of them were armed, but not one was stupid enough to pull a gun. It had been tried during a Trainite demonstration in San Francisco last month. A girl had been shot dead. Others, anonymous in whole-head masks and drab mock-homespun clothing, had dragged the killer from his car and used the same violent acid they applied to glass to write MURDERER on his flesh. In any case, there was little future in rolling down a window to curse the demonstrators. Throats didn’t last long in the raw air."

"The Gottschalks aren’t government contractors, they’re catering for the domestic market. So what? Right this minute, if your credit rating is good, you can walk down the street to an arms store and buy a bandolier of micronukes, and those would be enough to clear the average city block. We’ve just been lucky so far that not many people can afford to lay out sixty thousand tealeaves for the privilege of killing their neighbors. Improve your production methods, cut your costs, and you can make this available to anyone in the middle income grades. Lovely! Especially if your customers have had it dinned into them that the local knee enclave already has this particular goody in its armory. Don’t bother to argue—you know that’s how it’s worked.”"

"“But what brought about this ‘decline of civilization’?” Conroy demanded. “It can’t just have been the introduction of these weapons you’ve been talking about, this System C equipment.” “The maximization of arms sales implied the maximization of inter-human hostility,” Madison/Gottschalk said. “All the existing sources of this phenomenon were tapped, and those proving particularly fruitful were patriotism, parochialism, xenophobia, ochlophobia, racial, religious and linguistic differences, and the so-called ‘gulf between the generations.’ It was found readily feasible to emphasize these pre-existent attitudes to the point where a System C integrated weaponry unit was so desirable among the informed populace that the possibility of another individual acquiring this virtually indestructible equipment sufficed to provoke an attack on him before he purchased one.”"

"Even though he wasn’t entirely convinced of the truth of what he was saying, the fact of saying it was curiously reassuring to his mind."

"Damn it, man: anyone who can treat another human being as an object for target practice is stuck even further back in the infantile stage than somebody who’s frightened to move on from the masturbation phase and go to bed with a girl!"

"Another of their damnable promotions, presumably! It was the regular Gottschalk technique: select an area where sales were below average, saturate it with rumors until someone’s temper reached the breaking point and the inevitable division occurred into blank and kneeblank, and then the following day take advantage of people’s frayed nerves to sell guns, grenades and mines."

"It was his hope and ambition to cause many deaths. He was an arms salesman by choice, calm and even a little happy to see his products in such demand, capable of trying to clinch a sale at the bedside of a fresh corpse."

"I don’t usually talk much about this, Chester, because my grandfather dinned it into me as a child that it doesn’t make any difference who you’re descended from unless you can do something yourself to match what your ancestors did to gain their own notoriety."

"What’s happened to us that we take killings for granted among our children? Don’t give me that hogwash about students at college having to be treated as adults—there’s nothing adult about playing with guns and grenades!"

"Like all neo-puritans you have a mind like an open drain."

"The sound of a code being broken is usually the same as that of somebody snapping his fingers."

"Well-intentioned men don’t run for office any more! They have too much sense to expose themselves to assassination, and only delusible idiots like our current chief executive can be persuaded to don the robes of high office. Nice guys don’t crave power."

"It’s okay to be a responsible member of society if only you know what you’re going to be held responsible for."

"The screen was a polychrome swirl, like a rainbow that had been through an electric blender."

"His brief and frustrating dialogue with them had convinced him that they must divide the human race into three categories: staff, patients and potential patients."

"“Mother Superior couldn’t be drearier! Life is oppressive and lonely and dun! Little Miss Celia envied Ophelia—Hamlet ignored her and then there was none! Rat-ta-ta-ta, rat-ta-ta-ta, rat-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta. Penny a look, goobledegook, you can’t live the life that you read in a book. Pouncing and bouncing hear what I’m announcing—it’s true and you’ll never hide from it. You may think you’re knowing in coming and going but you can’t take the ‘come’ out of ‘comet.’ As I was going down the drains I met a man with seven brains. Every brain had seven lives, every life had seven wives, every wife told seven lies, who will win the liars’ prize?”"

"The sound of shutters going up around her mind, armored against anything short of a nuke, was very nearly audible in the room."

"It’s common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it were on your side rather than theirs."

"It was a great image, especially for areas where there was strong Muslim influence and the concomitant view prevailed that women had no souls."

"That, chiefly, was why Flamen put up with him. He had never dared tarnish his own image of himself by learning the whore’s-trading skills required to keep afloat in the cut-throat ocean of modern business, yet he correspondingly did not dare to forgo them altogether. Prior was a perfect compromise: the epitome of self-deluded honor, who could dismiss the most flagrant kind of cheating from his conscience on the grounds that he had thought of it and he could not possibly be a dishonest man."

"What people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don’t know know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree."

"Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser. Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.“"

"So what shape was the world in this morning? Even flatter than yesterday."

"If “media” is the plural of “medium” the question is: how many of them are fraudulent?"

"Western culture is undergoing a process of transition from guilt-oriented, with a conscience, to shame-oriented, with a morbid fear of being found out."

"He had decided it was better to be a volcano than a man; at least one set no store by what one’s acts destroyed."

"I never thought of asking anyone to do it for me. Something’s wrong with me. In a time of trouble should people not be able to ask help without feeling demeaned?"

"Isn’t it typical? We train one man—one ordinary, inoffensive, retiring little man—to be an efficient killing machine and he kills the one person who stood a chance of saving us from ourselves!"

"LOGIC The principle governing human intellection. Its nature may be deduced from examining the following propositions, both of which are held by human beings to be true and often by the same people: “I can’t so you musn’t,” and “I can but you musn’t.”"

"She was on a pediflow, and—like so many of the devices which twenty-first century ingenuity had made available to mankind—that was something which seemed to have been destined for an altogether more rational species than the one she belonged to."

"If the evidence says you’re wrong, you don’t have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence."

"What in God’s name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?"

"You’ve been competing against the past, and that’s a contest no one can win because the past has all the advantages. We’ve forgotten all its fiddling little drawbacks: the lice, the skin infections, the disgusting personal habits and the rest of it."

"UNFAIR Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn’t manage."

"You have many years to live—do things you will be proud to remember when you're old."

"“It would have been a longer and slower job, I’m sure, and probably there would have been a high price to pay. But what is the price of freedom?” “What’s the price of life?” Donald countered bitterly."

"But there isn’t an outside. Talking about “society’s outcasts” or “opting out” is so much whaledreck. The fact that we generate huge quantities of waste is all that allows people to go outside; they’re benefiting from the superficial affluence which conformists use to alleviate boredom. In essence, using the term “out” is as meaningless as trying to define a location outside the universe. There’s no place for “outside” to be."

"They surely are condemned to Hell Who rule their lives by greed and lust And Satan waits for those as well Who in machines repose their trust."

"SHALMANESER That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say he's apt to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he's as intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn't really saying much, because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave."

"Your country, mine, every other country in the world, has the same cause and what it does is, it takes people who don’t give a pint of whaledreck for it and sends them off to kill women and children. Yes, it’s the cause of every country on earth! And you know what I call that cause? I call it naked stinking greed."

"“Governments don’t change things,” she said. “Only time does that.”"

"First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ...? Then you serve machines."

"LEADERSHIP A form of self-preservation exhibited by people with autodestructive imaginations in order to ensure that when it comes to the crunch it’ll be someone else’s bones which go crack and not their own."

"Watching their sets in a kind of trance were people in Mexico, people in France. They don't chase Jones but the dreams are the same — Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, that's the right name! Herr und Frau Uberall or les Partout, A gadget on the set makes them look like you. When the Everywhere couple crack a joke It's laughed at by all right-thinking folk. When the Everywhere couple adopt a pose It's the with-it view as everyone knows. It may be a rumor or it may be true But a gadget on the set has it said by you! "What do you think about Yatakang?" "I think the same as the Everywhere gang." "What do you think of Beninia then?" "The Everywheres will tell me but I don't know when." Whatever my country and whatever my name A gadget on the set makes me think the same."

"I can make a guess. There’s going to be trouble. Come to think of it, that’s a safe catch-all prophecy. Whatever happens in present circumstances there’s going to be trouble."

"“I can at least comfort myself with the idea that whatever I’ve done I’ve helped to nail a lie, and I’m coming to think that lying is among the worst of all human failings. Next to actual killing. And experience has made us almost equally good at both of them.” “I have killed many people and seen many more killed on my orders,” Jogajong said. “It is what must be paid to buy what we want.” “What we’ve been told we want, by liars more skilled than ourselves.”"

"“The whole of modern so-called civilised existence is an attempt to deny reality insofar as it exists. When did Don last look at the stars, when did Norman last get soaked in a rainstorm? The stars as far as these people are concerned are the Manhattan-pattern!” He jerked his thumb at a window beyond which the city’s treasure-house of coloured light glimmered gaudily."

"Any society which gives lip-service to the idea of equal opportunity is going to generate jealousy of others who are better off than you are, even if the thing that’s in short supply can’t be carved up and shared without destroying it."