“The root of our morale is: ‘Everybody works, everybody fights.’ An M. I. doesn’t pull strings to get a soft, safe job; there aren’t any. Oh, a trooper will get away with what he can; any private with enough savvy to mark time to music can think up reasons why he should not clean compartments […]
“‘Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage. ‘And that is the one practical difference.’ ‘He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue. But his average performance is enormously better […]
“The mind’s a weird piece of business.” ––Runaway: Stories, by Alice Munro, pg. 308 “If you can accept that a person without a penis can peaceably live life as they please (including as a man), then you should be able to accept that a person without a physical form can peaceably live life as […]
“It was all spoiled in one day, in a couple of minutes, not by fits and starts, struggles, hopes and losses, in the long-drawn-out way that such things are more often spoiled. And if that’s true that things are usually spoiled, isn’t the quick way the easier way to bear? But you don’t really take […]
“That is what happens. You put something away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of […]
“The strange and terrible thing coming clear to her about that world of the future, as she now pictured it, was that she would not exist there. She would only walk around, and open her mouth and speak, and do this and do that. She would not really be there. And what was strange about […]
“It strikes me that although we occasionally carp about Having To Suffer, and moan about never producing real Art, and become despondent or try too hard to compensate, we are indulging in our usual trick of synthesizing something to worry about, and should really be thanking ourselves that we live the life we do. We […]
This collection of stories is a small but significant contribution to Iain M. Banks’s inimitable Culture Series. I didn’t have much of a reaction one way or another to the smattering of Culture-based short stories, so this review will focus entirely on the book’s eponymous novella. “The State of the Art” is a brief but […]
“‘What is the Culture? What do we believe in, even if it hardly ever is expressed, even if we are embarrassed about talking about it? Surely in freedom, more than anything else. A relativistic, changing sort of freedom, unbounded by laws or laid-down moral codes, but––in the end––just because it is so hard to pin […]
“‘How long do you think this place is going to stay the way it is now? Ten years? Twenty? Can’t you see how much this place has to alter…in just the next century? We’re so used to things staying much the same, to society and technology––at least immediately available technology––hardly changing over our lifetimes that…I […]