Having now read almost all of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, I can safely say that they should be required reading for all humans. Was Banks the smartest or most creative science fiction writer of all time? Definitely not. Was his grasp of science and futurism vastly superior to that of his many talented contemporaries? [...]
“Ah yes, here we have the nasty big flat rock, sitting doing nothing, just amoral and dull, and it sits like an island in the polluted pool. The pool is a tiny lake on the little island, and the island is in a drowned crater. The crater is a volcanic crater, the volcano forms part [...]
“You could see anything in the rain. The individual drops became streaks with the slowness of the eye; they merged and re-emerged as ciphers for the shapes you carried inside you; they lasted less than a heartbeat in your sight and they went on forever. He saw a chair, and a ship that was not [...]
“She’d talk to him about her old loves and old hopes and new hopes and he half listened, knowing she thought he didn’t really understand what she was saying. When he talked it was in another language, and the story was even less believeable. The woman would lie close to him, her head on his [...]
“Just once, he thought, I’d like to know whose side I’m really on in something like this. Here I am, in this absurd fortress, packed with riches, crammed with concentrated nobility––such as it was, he thought, watching Keiver’s vacant-looking eyes––facing out the hordes beyond (all claw and tackle, brute force and brute intelligence) trying to [...]
In the last decade, the twin topics of technological unemployment and the automation revolution have found their way out of esoteric discussions between specialists and into the public consciousness. Plenty of good books are coming out every year to help us analyze these issues and gauge the degree of impact and pace at which they [...]
“The sum of human knowing is beyond any one man; any thousand men. With the destruction of our social fabric, science will be broken into a million pieces. Individuals will know much of exceedingly tiny facets of what there is to know. They will be helpless and useless by themselves. The bits of lore, meaningless, [...]
For fans of speculative fiction, the early 21st century has been both a triumph and a challenge: a triumph because our beloved genre has gained popularity and respect, and a challenge because sorting through the ever-increasing surfeit of new works can be paralyzing. It helps immensely when an enterprising author takes the time to identify [...]
“‘I fell in love with you that summer. I remember lying on the beach, looking up at the stars, and listening to you describe the way the world should be, the way the world would be. It was magical, prescient even. I’ve never stopped admiring your ability to not take the world as it is, [...]
“Books and articles commonly state that one of the central issues of evolutionary cognition is to find out what sets us apart. Entire conferences have been organized around the human essence, asking ‘What makes us human?’ But is this truly the most fundamental question of our field? I beg to differ. In and of itself, [...]