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Iain M. Banks Books

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Use Of Weapons

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Feersum Endjinn

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Inversions

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Excession

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Surface Detail

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Matter

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Transition

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The Algebraist

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“It is hard to believe, feeling as you do at the moment, that there will come a time when life seems good and worthwhile, but it will come.” “No, Custodian. I don’t think it will. Because I wouldn’t want to be the person who had felt as I do now and then walked—or drifted—away from that feeling until things felt better. That is precisely my problem. I prefer the idea of death to what I feel just now, but I would prefer to feel the way I do now forever than to feel better, because feeling better would mean that I am not the one who loved her anymore, and I could not bear that.”

GriefDepressionHeartbreak
Book:Look To Windward
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“I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway" - the man laughed - "people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And," the man said with a smile, "it's a good way of meeting people. So where are you from, anyway?”

PeopleDeathTimeStarsPleasureAchievementChoiceUtopiaThe UniverseMeeting PeopleWiping Tables
Book:Use Of Weapons
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“Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you?”

PhilosophyScience Fiction
Book:Consider Phlebas
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“He was starting to change his mind about the old warrior code stuff knights and princes used. Usually when they were drunk and in need of spilling their words, and trying to justify their core behavior. Behave honorably and wish for a good death. He'd always dismissed it as self-serving bullshit frankly. Most of the people he'd been told were his betters were quite vainly dishonorable. Greedy bastards wanted more the more they got. While those that weren't like that were better behaved partly because they could afford to be. Was it more honorable to starve than to steal? People would say yes. Though rarely those who actually experienced an empty belly or a child whimpering with its own hunger. Was it more honorable to starve than to steal when others had the means to feed you but chose not to? Unless, you paid with money you did not have. He thought not. If you chose to starve you became your own oppressor, keeping yourself in line, harming yourself for the temerity of being poor. When by rights that aught to be a constables job. Show any initiative or imagination, then you were called lazy, shifty, crafty, or incorrigible. So he dismissed talk of honor. It was just a way of making the rich and powerful feel better about themselves, and the powerless and poverty-stricken feel worse. But once you weren't living hand to mouth and had some ease, you had the pleasure of contemplating what life was really about and who you really were, and given that you had to die, it made sense to seek a good death. Even these Culture people, bafflingly, chose to die even when they didn't have to. With freedom from fear and wondering where your next meal was coming from or wondering how many mouths you'd have to feed next year, and whether you'd get sacked by your employer, or thrown into jail for some minor indiscretion. With freedom from that you had the choice of living a nice, calm, peaceful, ordinary life and die with your nightshirt on and impatient relatives making lots of noise around you. Or, you could end up doing something like this, however scared your body might feel, your brain could appreciate the experience... Given that you had to die, why want a bad one?”

PovertyHonorStealingHonourTheft
Book:Matter
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“what passed for useful information sharing within an organization was really just bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for upcoming failures and calamities, that were both entirely predictable, but seemingly completely unavoidable and telling each other what they all already knew. The trick was to be able to reengage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know that you stopped listening properly, shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.”

QuotesWorkOrganizationBureaucracyBanksCulture QuotesThe CultureIain M BanksSurface Detail
Book:Surface Detail
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“War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale.” Hyrlis looked expectantly at them. “You see?” he said. “By this reasoning we must, after all, be at the most base level of reality – or at the most exalted, however one wishes to look at it. Just as reality can blithely exhibit the most absurd coincidences that no credible fiction could convince us of, so only reality – produced, ultimately, by matter in the raw – can be so unthinkingly cruel. Nothing able to think, nothing able to comprehend culpability, justice or morality could encompass such purposefully invoked savagery without representing the absolute definition of evil. It is that unthinkingness that saves us. And condemns us, too, of course; we are as a result our own moral agents, and there is no escape from that responsibility, no appeal to a higher power that might be said to have artificially constrained or directed us.”

GodSolipsismSimulation Hypothesis
Book:Matter
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“He tried to decide if he was really ashamed of being afraid, and decided that he was not. Fear was there for a purpose. It was wired into any creature that had not completely turned its back on its evolutionary inheritance and so remade itself in whatever image it coveted. The more sophisticated you became, the less you relied on fear and pain to keep you alive; you could afford to ignore them because you had other means of coping with the consequences if things went badly.”

FearHuman NatureInstinctFight Or Flight
Book:Look To Windward
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“The burden of my argument is that to set oneself up like this in such a defeatingly vast and intimidatingly inhuman structure is merely to announce the coming to rest of one's progress, and without that we are lost." "Di burdin ov mi argumint is dat 2 set Iself up like dis in such a defeetinly vast & intimidaytinly inhumin structyir is meerly 2 anounce di cumin 2 rest ov 1s progress, & witout dat we r lost.”

PhilosophyWisdomHumanityTechnologyProgressSocietyFutureScience FictionArchitectureExistentialism
Book:Feersum Endjinn
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“In those days the world was not a garden and the people were not idle as they are now. Then on the face of the world there was real wilderness, empty of humanity, and the wilderness that humanity created, the wilderness that it packed with itself and which it called City. People toiled and people idled and the toilers worked for themselves and yet not for themselves and the idle did no work or little work and what they did, did only for themselves; money was all-powerful then and people said they made it work for them but money cannot work, only people and machines can work.”

WisdomHuman NaturePhilosophy Of LifeDeep ThoughtsSocial CommentaryUrban LifeWork LifeAnti CapitalismEconomic HistoryFuture Perspectives
Book:Feersum Endjinn
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“Everything was a metaphor; all things were something other than themselves. The pain, for example, was an ocean, and he was adrift on it. His body was a city and his mind a citadel. All communications between the two seemed to have been cut, but within the keep that was his mind he still had power. The part of his consciousness that was telling him the pain did not hurt, and that all things were like other things, was like...like...he found it hard to think of a comparison. A magic mirror, maybe.”

PainMetaphor
Book:Use Of Weapons
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“There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and particularly the understanding of that part of the then-existing group-civilization which called itself the West. That idea, to my mind, met its materialist apotheosis in Berlin at the time of the Wall. Perhaps I go into some sort of shock when I experience something deeply; I'm not sure, even at this ripe middle-age, but I have to admit that what I recall of Berlin is not arranged in my memory in any normal, chronological sequence. My only excuse is that Berlin itself was so abnormal - and yet so bizarrely representative - it was like something unreal; an occasionally macabre Disneyworld which was so much a part of the real world (and the realpolitik world), so much a crystallization of everything these people had managed to produce, wreck, reinstate, venerate, condemn and worship in their history that it defiantly transcended everything it exemplified, and took on a single - if multifariously faceted - meaning of its own; a sum, an answer, a statement no city in its right mind would want or be able to arrive at.”

CitiesMankindBerlinRealpolitikThe WestThe Berlin WallDiziet SmaMarterialist ApotheosisMultifariously Faceted
Book:The State of the Art
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“Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed," he said. "And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses." "Excuses, eh?" Well, if this ain't cynicism, what is?" Erens snorted. "Yes, excuses," he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. "I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place." He looked at Erens. "You've attacked the wrong thing.”

BeliefInstinctExcusesArgumentsJustificationsErens
Book:Use Of Weapons
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“Imagine a vast and glittering ocean seen from a great height. It stretches to the clear curved limit of every angle of horizon, the sun burning on a billion tiny wavelets. Now imagine a smooth blanket of cloud above the ocean, a shell of black velvet suspended high above the water and also extending to the horizon, but keep the sparkle of the sea despite the lack of sun. Add to the cloud many sharp and tiny lights, scattered on the base of the inky overcast like glinting eyes: singly, in pairs or in larger groups, each positioned far, far away from any other set.”

OceanImageryHyperspaceFtl
Book:Consider Phlebas
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“At one end of the vast C bitten from the castle a sin­gle great bastion-tower stood, almost intact, five kilometres high, and casting a kilometre-wide shadow across the rum­pled ground in front of the convoy. The walls had tumbled down around the tower, vanishing completely on one side and leaving only a ridge of fractured material barely five hundred metres high on the other. The plant-mass babilia, unique to the fastness and ubiquitous within it, coated all but the smoothest of vertical surfaces with tumescent hanging forests of lime-green, royal blue and pale, rusty orange; only the heights of scarred wall closest to the more actively venting fissures and fumaroles remained untouched by the tenacious vegetation.”

CastleFastnessSerepha
Book:Feersum Endjinn
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“But I don’t know what the right thing to do is; I sometimes think I know too much, I’ve studied too much, learned too much, remembered too much. It all seems to average out, somehow; like dust that settles over... whatever machinery we carry inside us that leads us to act, and puts the same weight everywhere, so that always you can see good and bad on each side, and always there are arguments, precedents for every possible course of action... so of course one ends up doing nothing. Perhaps that’s only right; perhaps that’s what evolution requires, to leave the field free for younger, unencumbered minds, and those not afraid to act.”

WisdomThe Right Thing
Book:Use Of Weapons
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“I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you're just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it's not about you. It's what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. 'Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs' – oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not.”

PhilosophyScience FictionIain M Banks
Author:Iain M. Banks
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“Iss like sinkin in2 thi sky on thi other side ov thi Erf wifout goin thru thi whole fing furst. Iss like flotin in2 thi erf & thi sky @thi time, becomin a line not a point, plumin thi depths & assendin thi hites & then branchin out like a tree, like a plane tree, like a hooj bush interminglin wif every bit ov thi erf & thi sky, & then iss like every 1 ov those bits isnt juss a bit ov erf or a molicule ov air eny more, iss like ol ov them is suddenly a littl system ov ther own; a book, a library, a persin; a world ... & yoor connectid wif ol ov it, ignorin barryers, like u r a brain sell deep in thi grainy grey mush ov thi brain all closed in but joined up 2 loadsa uthir sells, awash in ther communicashin-song & set free by that trapt meshin.”

InspirationalPoetrySpiritualityInner PeacePhilosophy Of LifeMetaphysicalCreative WritingTranscendenceDigital SoulUniversal Connection
Book:Feersum Endjinn
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“Look into the bastard's mind." "I can't do that, Ziller." "Why not?" "It is one of the very few more-or-less unbreakable rules of the Culture. Nearly a law. If we had laws, it would be of the first on the statue book." "Only more-or-less unbreakable?" "It is done very, very rarely, and the results tend to be ostracism. There was a ship called the Grey Area, once. It used to do that sort of thing. It became known as the Meatfucker as a result. When you look up the catalogs that's the name it's listed under, with its original, chosen name as a footnote. To be denied your self-designated name is a unique insult in the Culture, Ziller. The vessel disappeared some time ago. Probably killed itself, arguably as a result of the shame attached to such behavior and resulting disrespect." "All it is is looking inside an animal brain." "That's just it. It is so easy, and it would mean so little, really. That is why the not-doing of it is probably the most profound manner in which we honor our biological progenitors. This prohibition is a mark of our respect. And so I cannot do it." "You mean you won't do it." "They are almost the same thing." "You have the ability." "Of course.”

Mind ReadingThe Culture
Book:Look To Windward
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“The mist was the world was the data corpus was the Crypto-sphere was the history of the world was the future of the world was the guardian of undone things was the summation of intelligent purpose was chaos was pure thought was the untouched was the utterly corrupted was the end and the beginning was the exiled and the resiled, was the creature and the machine was the life and the inanimate was the evil and the good was the hate and the love was the compassion and the indifference was everything and nothing and nothing and nothing. He dived within, becoming part of it, surrendering completely to it to accept it into him and dissolve himself within it. He was a flake within the fall, an insect sucked up into the whirlwind, a bacterium caught within a water droplet forced whirling within the hurricane's howl. He was a particle of dust from the plain thrown up by the hoof of one horse within the charging line, a grain of sand upon the storm-besieged beach, a fleck of ash from the eruption's endless detonations, a mote of soot from the continent afire, a molecule within the encroaching dust, an atom from the star's heart thrown out in its last, majestic, exhaustive blast. Here was the meaning at the core of meaninglessness and the meaninglessness at the centre of meaning. Here every action, every thought, each nuance of every least important mental event within any creature mattered utterly and fundamentally; here, too, the fates of stars, galaxies, universes and realities were as nothing; less than ephemera, beneath triviality. He swam through it all as it coursed through him. He saw backwards and forwards throughout time forever, seeing everything that had happened and everything that would happen and knew it was all perfectly true and completely false at once, without contradiction. Here the chaos sang songs of sweet pure reason and reserve, here the loftiest aims and finest achievements of humans and machines were articulations of psychopathic insanity. Here the data winds howled, dissociated as plasma, abrading as blown sand. Here the lost souls of a billion lives had poured and shattered and tattered and dissolved and mixed with a trillion extracted, excerpted strings and sequences and cycles of mutated programs, evolved virus and garbled instructions, themselves irretrievably compounded with uncountable irrelevant facts, raw figures and scrambled signals. He saw, heard, tasted and felt it all, and was submerged within it and borne over it; he carried within him, always there and just collected, the seed of something else, something at once supersessant and insignificant, and foolish, wise and innocent all together. He stepped ashore from a molten ocean of chaos, walked calmly from the belching volcano mouth, floated comfortably on the supernova's radiation wave-front to the dust-rich depths, always holding his charge.”

ExistentialismMetaphysicalCyberpunkTranshumanismPosthumanSpeculativefictionLiteraryscifiMindbendingExperimentalliteratureNewwavescifi
Book:Feersum Endjinn
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“There was no specific reason for Dwellers to band together at this point in their lives, they just in general enjoyed joining clubs, sodalities, orders, leagues, parties, societies, associations, fellowships, fraternities, groups, guilds, unions, fractionals, dispensationals and recreationalities, while always, of course, leaving open the possibility of taking part in ad hoc non-ceremonial serendipitous one-time gatherings as well. The social calendar was crowded.”

HumorClubsDwellers
Author:Iain M. Banks
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“The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they’d wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages.” The avatar hesitated. It put its head a little to one side and narrowed its eyes. “How far do I have to take this analogy, Cr. Ziller?”.”

AchievementRock Climbing
Book:Look To Windward
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“Socialists, charity workers, carers, people who volunteer to help others; they're all - and he's quite convinced about this - they're all in reality mean-spirited bastards, either self-deceiving bastards or - for their own filthy left-wing reasons - deliberately trying to destroy the self-esteem of normal, healthily ambitious people like him. Because if only everybody looked after their own interests everything would be fine, see? Level playing field, with everybody nakedly ambitious and selfish; everybody knows where they are. If some people aren't totally selfish, or, even worse, 'pretend' not to be selfish, then it messes up the whole system. It makes it more unfair, not fairer, the way they'd claim. He calls people like that do-gooders, and they make him angry. I think he would actually prefer do-badders, which is a pretty fucked up attitude when you think about it. He feels quite strongly about them. Never misses an opportunity to complain that they're liars and frauds. Frankly, Ade, altogether, it makes him sound like - and I firmly believe he actually is - a complete cunt.”

Do GoodersCunts
Book:Transition
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