Quotes from Ken MacLeod

Oh, no," Hope said. "I'm not. No, I don't believe in all that , but it's - well, it's two things. One is my job, you know? In China? So I'm all for that side of it, the war and so on; we really have to, you know, defeat those people. And the other is, uh, my husband. He's from the Highlands and he's half native, as he puts it, and I don't know if you know what the people up there are like, but I swear if he even thought I was going to vote any other way he'd walk out on me.

The eighties?' I said. 'As in, the nineteen -eighties? The decade that taste forgot? Honest, Sophie, ask your granny. Ask mine, if you like. She'll tell you the only good thing about it was that the internet and phone cameras weren't invented, well hardly anyway, so most of the awful photos are lying out of sight in drawers and shoeboxes.

it is possible that we are the only persons,> said another robot.

the only way to get there was to burn through capitalism, to get through that unavoidable stage as fast as possible.

The fourteen conscious robots contemplated their cosmic loneliness for several milliseconds.

Everyone's an equal shareholder. Birth shares are inalienable, and death duties are unavoidable. The estate tax is one hundred per cent. In between, you can buy and sell and earn as much as you like.

sensationalism of the vulgar.

software development was insecurities all the way down. Even

Comrades and friends,' he begins, the translation and lip-synch software maxing his street-cred as usual in all the languages of the Community. For this particular nation and region, he comes across speaking English with a gravely Central Belt Scottish accent, which I know for a fact has been swiped from old tapes of the Communist trade union leader and authentic working class hero Mick MacGahey.

the clique, the caucus, and the conspiracy were as ineradicable features of civility as the council or the committee.

Behind him the holograms above the Palace faded in the early sun. In his mind, they burned.

These days you couldn't keep things separate even in your mind. If we could only disconnect—

It bordered Norlonto in a high-intensity contrast between freedom and slavery, war and peace, ignorance and strength. Which was which depended on whose side you were on.

He made himself as small as possible behind the parapet, holding the gun awkwardly above it, and aimed by the screensight image patched to his glades. His trigger finger pressed Enter. The weapon took over, it aimed him. In a second the head-up image showed four bodies, sprawled, stapled down like X- and Y- chromosomes.

The fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small." Everybody here has got here by intense competition, moderated by character assassination.

Let's give our people what they want, which means fast food, cheap television, cars, and Levi jeans.

The screen blazed with the light of recognition. The eyes met yes the Is met the answer sparkled so it was you all the time and it was a seen joke a laugh a tickling tumble a gendered engendering of a second self a you-and-me-baby from AI-and-I to I-and-I. There was a flowering, and a seeding: a reflection helpless to stop itself reflecting again and again in multiple mirrors. The stars threw down their spears. Someone smiled. His work to see. The connection broke.

We will live in big habitat spinning in the sun, natural environment for self-reliant conscious primate.

Terror has to be random...that's how to really break people, when they don't know what rules to follow to keep them out of trouble.

The Christians had an almost miraculous talent for turning wine into water.

I want to attack all these cults and ideologies. I have this, this vision that life could be better if only people could see how things really are. That it's your one life. It's yours, you have this inexhaustible universe to live it in and God damn it isn't that enough? Why do we have to wander around in these invented worlds of our own devising, these false realities that are just clutter, dross, dirt on the lens?--all these beliefs and identities that people throw away their real lives for.

Conscious of each other's subjectivity in a direct and immediate way, they experienced no conflict between resolute solidarity and riotous individuality: they were indeed an association in which the free development of each was the condition for the free development of all.

S]he had difficulty crediting it could really happen in her own lifetime. She knew this was exactly how people would feel just before the real apocalypse, that nearly everyone who'd faced some intrusive threat to their everyday existence – war, revolution, genocide, purges, disaster – had faced it with the firm conviction that things like this just didn't happen or didn't happen here or didn't happen to people like them.

ideas are exactly as interested in the brains they're in as genes are in the bodies they're in: just enough to get themselves copied...Like computer viruses.