Quotes from Ken MacLeod

maybe we can do better than this. And to ask yourself: where's the vulnerable point in this multiple-choice totalitarianism? It seems...seamless. What can an individual do against it?... I suggest that you doubt, disobey, desert. Particularly if you are called upon to fight against those who insist, against all the evidence, that we are one people.

White-hot needles stabbed through his eyes into his head, into his brain: a new environment for the information viruses, where they replicated, forming snarls of complex logic that entangled him, clanking mechanisms that pursued him from one thought to another, down corridors of memory and forgotten rooms of days.

Knowledge within the project was as compartmentalised as an insect's body.

The child turned to look at Elizabeth, then stood up. The head was more disproportionately large than that of a human baby. Upon some reassuring noises from the adults, the the young saur ran across the grass and tumbled into Elizabeth's lap. She crooned over it, tickling and stroking; it reached up its clawed fingers to her hair and whistled. "Her name is Blathora," said Salasso. "She is two years old." . . . "Sharp teeth," warned Salasso. "And a taste for mammal blood.

a sadness in living beyond extinction,

post mortem triste

You must rely on reason and science," she said, "and be guided by a likewise rational ethic of human concern. You must do your utmost as individuals to improve your understanding, ability and compassion.

there is only one way this can end: with the kind of defeat that makes a people feel that their preachers have lied to them, their leaders have deserted them, that the world is against them and that God is dead.

I was overcome by a wave of wonder at how much good was going on, and how you heard about the bad things that happened so much that you overlooked the immensely disproportionate majority of other acts done to the real benefit of self and others without which none of this would be here at all.

absolutely rocking fucks,

The defining element of hell was eternal conscious suffering. Here

Brides and babies and strong dark men and intellectual and sensual women and the prospect of wide-open spaces to populate with humanity had always made her weak at the knees.

Poor white trash quoting de Maistre and Carlyle and fancying themselves elite while they scrabbled to survive in a world where they were outstripped economically by the Chinese and intellectually by their own phones.

We're here now, we have the means to stop the suffering and therefore the duty to act.

Falling in love indicated that your genes were complementary to those of the loved one. It told you nothing about whether your personalities and sexualities were compatible.

Fascinating,' said Darvin. 'The mystery of life. The miracle of reproduction. I don't know why I didn't learn all this in school.' 'I did not,' said Orro. 'I read it in an imaginative but broadly accurate illustrated treatise inscribed, if memory serves, on the wall of a municipal pissery.

None of its components were conscious beings. As post-conscious AIs, they were well beyond that. They

Kindle, ah,' said Baxter, 'takes me back.

He'd written some of the movement's earliest manifestos ( No More Earthquakes , The Earth is a Harsh Mistress ) and numerous pamphlets, articles and books documenting what he called the counterconspiracy theory of history, which maintained that many otherwise incomprehensible historical events could be explained by identifying the conspiracy theories held by the protagonists.

What's that?' The one who'd hassled Kohn turned at a noise. He found his cheek meeting a gun muzzle. Muffled sounds came from all around. 'Your worst nightmare,' said a voice from the darkness, about a metre away. 'A yid kid with an AK and attitude .'

The discretion of the watcher versus the privacy of the watched was just another arms race; this one, I could see, would run and run.

David Reid and Myra Godwin are talking after the funeral of her ex-husband in Alma-Ta. Reid was an old lover of Myra: "There was still a genuine affection between them, attenuated though it was by the years, exasperated though it was by their antagonism. Reid had neer been a man to let enmity get in the way of friendship.

English is so past,' she said. 'Sure, we need people who can write about what we do, but they don't have to be English graduates. Theology graduates who don't believe any of it – that would be useful.

had always believed an immersive virtual reality afterlife was possible in principle. Maybe