Alastair Reynolds Quotes & Sayings

My people are impressing on Tulwar's people the wisdom of surrender and a rapid shift of allegiance. I'm counting on most them being opportunist thugs who'll recognize a good thing when it's offered to them. — Alastair Reynolds

I am not cruel," he said. "Not in the sense you mean. But cruelty is a useful tool if one can only recognise the precise moment when it must be used. — Alastair Reynolds

When two or more of their lighthuggers met, they would compare and update their respective nomenclature tables. If the first ship had assigned names to a group of worlds and their associated geographical features, and the second ship had no current entries for those bodies, it was usual for the second ship to amend its database with the new names. They might be flagged as provisional, unless a third ship confirmed that they were still unallocated. — Alastair Reynolds

observing the way the rig needed only occasional human intervention to stay locked on the road. Doubtless it could have managed with none at all, were it not for local union laws. Very — Alastair Reynolds

I think I've reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level. — Alastair Reynolds

Autocratic governments are masters of self-contradiction. They say one thing, do another. — Alastair Reynolds

Arethusa liked to call us Poseidon's Children. Orphans of the storm. We'd endured the worst the world could throw at us, the worst consequences of our own stupidity, and came through ... ready to face the dawn. But there are always more storms, Chiku. — Alastair Reynolds

None of us is a monster, Chiku. We're all just trying to make the best of our singular natures. — Alastair Reynolds

Nothing had ever existed between us except the possibility of something, and now even that was over. — Alastair Reynolds

At best noise, at worse a potentially damaging input. — Alastair Reynolds

Some promises are best broken. Trust me on this: I'm a politician. — Alastair Reynolds

Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours. A man once spent his entire life searching for a particular shade of blue that he remembered encountering in childhood. He began to despair of ever finding it, thinking he must have imagined that precise shade, that it could not possibly exist in nature. Then one day he chanced upon it. It was the colour of a beetle in a museum of natural history. He wept for joy.'

- "Zima Blue" by Alastair Reynolds — Alastair Reynolds

First rule of complex systems," I said. "You can't tell friends from enemies. — Alastair Reynolds

Nonetheless, we offer our forgiveness. What is the point in being a superior civilisation if you can't do that once in a while? I — Alastair Reynolds

It's not how far you've come that matters. It's where you've come from. — Alastair Reynolds

The two men
Fray and Malkin
were standing near each other. They were not unarmed. They were quite seriously not unarmed. Both men were carrying
or at least aiming
what could only be categorised as small artillery pieces: two bulky gas-powered spinguns, so heavy that they had to be strapped to their bodies via thick leather girdles. Malkin was aiming at the angels, more or less. — Alastair Reynolds

To Sky, Clown had become something to be understood; something to be dissected and parameterised. Clown, he now recognised, was something like the bubble-drawing the dolphin had made in the water: a projection carved from light rather than sound. — Alastair Reynolds

Can we drop the 'artificial intelligence'? It's a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system. — Alastair Reynolds

You're confident he'll have found him, then?"
"Well, no. I didn't sat that."
"If there's one thing I hate," Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, "it's mindless optimism. — Alastair Reynolds

At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred around until it reduced the problematic brain tissue to non-functioning porridge. — Alastair Reynolds

Volyova did not like planets at the best of times, and gas giants struck her as an unreasonable affront to human scale and frailty. In that respect, they were almost as bad as stars. — Alastair Reynolds

Has a control system so perilously close to intelligence that a government agent must be on hand at all times, ready to destroy the machine if it slips over the threshold into consciousness. — Alastair Reynolds

It was a wartime story, goodies versus baddies, lots of explosions and shooting. The Germans always shouted 'Aiiieeee!' as they died. Atkins wondered what he would choose, confronted with similar circumstances. 'Aiiieeee!' seemed to him to lack the necessary gravitas and originality, as well as sounding a bit, well, German. But then who knew what might come to mind, in those final moments? — Alastair Reynolds

For a moment I think we were turned into information, and that in that instant we were linked to every other piece of information ever known; every thought ever thought, or at least ever captured by the light. — Alastair Reynolds

Birth and death frame a life, give it shape. Without that border it just becomes a kind of sprawling mess, a thing with no edge, no definition, no centre. — Alastair Reynolds

The first six million years had been all fun and games. — Alastair Reynolds

It was an exceedingly odd thing to see an elephant in a spacesuit. — Alastair Reynolds

Quantum reality is a nest of snakes, Clavain, and we are already poking it with a very sharp stick. — Alastair Reynolds

Khouri had never really given much thought to the slowness of light. There was nothing in the universe that moved faster ... but, as she now saw, it was glacial compared to the speed that would be needed to keep their love alive. — Alastair Reynolds

We should have brought a torch," he was saying. "We have been to Saturn and back and we didn't bring a torch. — Alastair Reynolds

Nothing endures, except nothing itself. — Alastair Reynolds

I don't know. That was typical Sajaki; like all the genuinely clever people Sylveste had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed. — Alastair Reynolds

It's one thing to be given a big boxful of theory and quite another to make an engine out of it. — Alastair Reynolds

Qafzeh's algorithms - if implemented properly on a particular architecture of quantum computer - led to a net heat loss from the local universe. A cryo-arithmetic engine was in essence just a computer, running computational cycles. Unlike ordinary computers, however, it got colder the faster it ran. — Alastair Reynolds

There's a vorg loose," Meroka explained. "In case that escaped your attention. Ricasso's doing his bit for Swarm, trying to kill the thing before it sucks someone's brains out. Now he might be able to find time in his schedule to file that paperwork you need, but I'm guessing it's going to be a stretch, what with a monster on the loose and the ship being in a state of fucking emergency and all." She smiled sweetly. "So, what's it going to be? You going to let them out, or do I have to get, you know, truculent. — Alastair Reynolds

Banking and Prosperity in the Thirteenth Occupation or even A Child's Treasury of Economics or The Young Person's Illustrated Omnibus of Fiscal Prudence. — Alastair Reynolds

Elephants have a theory of mind - they can think into the head of another elephant and infer their knowledge of the world, including errors and omissions of knowledge. That puts them above all but a handful of species - a few primates, some very smart birds and cetaceans. — Alastair Reynolds

So she talked, and Noah, to his credit, did not quibble. He interrupted once or twice, but only for the sake of amplification or clarification, never because he doubted the essential veracity of her story. She told him all of it, from the pod, to the aircraft, to Eunice and the Tantors. She told him what she had learned of Eunice's nature, and why she had no reason to doubt that she had been talking to a machine. She told him of Eunice's amnesia, and the thing called Arachne. — Alastair Reynolds

The game's rules were Byzantine, and we had to work them out through trial and error. One rule, which had only gradually become apparent, was that one could only move into another character's head if the move did not involve too big a jump in social status. A peasant could not swap into the head of a king, even if the king knelt down to kiss the peasant. But the peasant could get there by jumping into the head of a blacksmith, and then an armourer, and then an officer in the king's guard, and so on - working their way up by discrete steps. Sometimes it would not be possible to change character between one session and the next, but that was all part of the game's richly involving texture. It was difficult and slow, but because at each step one had access to the memories and personality of the inhabited character, it was seldom boring. — Alastair Reynolds

There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space. — Alastair Reynolds

Cyphel knew exactly how he felt about her as well - it was there in her expression whenever they spoke that beguiling combination of amusement and haughtiness that she carried off so well. It was a look that expressed disdain at Campion's guarded advances but also a kind of measured probationary respect as well. It was a look that said You dare to think that I will find you as interesting as you obviously find me Well perhaps in that very act of daring you become interesting to me if only fleetingly. — Alastair Reynolds

Clavain looked around the room, taking in the gruesome menagerie of wraithlike seniors, wizened elders and obscene glass-bottled end-state Conjoiners. They were all hanging on his answer, even the visible brains seeming to hesitate in their wheezing pulsations. — Alastair Reynolds

It was that same old spiralling argument, and again he didn't have the energy to fight his corner. 'When you put it like that, I guess it doesn't sound too ridiculous. — Alastair Reynolds

I was never strong at maths, but I eventually got onto a university physics/astronomy course, and that led on to my Ph.D. and eventual employment. — Alastair Reynolds

An idea so dangerous it can't be discussed. I thought we buried all that nonsense back in the Dark Ages. — Alastair Reynolds

To see something marvellous with your own eyes - that's wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you'll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won't ever really exist as a whole until you're together, talking or thinking about that moment ... that's worth more than one plus one. It's worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can't even imagine it. — Alastair Reynolds

I thought we were better then this."
"We're human. Be thankful we've moved on from clubbing each other's brains out every five minutes. — Alastair Reynolds

I'm still bothered by the threat of nuclear war. — Alastair Reynolds

Everyone has their fulcrum, Chiku. You can bend anyone to any cause with the right timing. — Alastair Reynolds

I think I set myself on a course to become a scientist around about the time that Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' series was on television, and there really was no going back for me at that point, and then I went on to study space science and then get my Ph.D., then go aboard and work in the European Space Agency. — Alastair Reynolds

Even monsters are beautiful. — Alastair Reynolds

The games enthralled the public and diverted their attentions from the Halo wars. And - unlike the arts - they could not be used as vehicles for subversion. For gamers like myself it was a near-utopian state of affairs. We were pampered and courted by the houses and made immensely rich. — Alastair Reynolds

Making love was a game of echoes. We had shared memories so many times that when I made love to her, I knew exactly how it felt to be Purslane. I could taste and feel her other lovers and she could taste and feel mine, each experience reaching away like a reflection in a hall of mirrors, diminishing into a kind of carnal background radiation, a sea of sensuous experience. I had been a girl once, then a thousand men and women and all their lovers. The stasis field locked on. The Synchromesh took hold. I hurtled into my own future, while my ship ate space and time.

- "House of Suns" by Alastair Reynolds — Alastair Reynolds

It's called optimism - but I'm losing the hang of it fast. — Alastair Reynolds

The cards always look different when it's your turn to play them; loaded with subtly different possibilities. — Alastair Reynolds

If there's a story I absolutely cannot tell without faster-than-light travel, then I am quite prepared to accept it - even though I don't personally believe it is possible. — Alastair Reynolds

The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off - it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feel a damn about these people. — Alastair Reynolds

This is a kindness, a thing done to another human being for no reason other than compassion. A private, dignified act of basic human decency, which history, being the bastard that it is, will probably neglect to commemorate. You — Alastair Reynolds

The Melding Plague attacked our society at the core. It was not quite a biological virus, not quite a software virus, but a strange and shifting chimera of the two. No pure strain of the plague has ever been isolated, but in its pure form it must resemble a kind of nano-machinery, analogous to the molecular-scale assemblers of our own medichine technology. That it must be of alien origin seems beyond doubt. Equally clear is the fact that nothing we have thrown against the plague has done more than slow it. More often than not, our interventions have only made things worse. The plague adapts to our attacks; it perverts our weapons and turns them against us. Some kind of buried intelligence seems to guide it. We don't know whether the plague was directed toward humanity - or whether we have just been terribly unlucky. — Alastair Reynolds

Clavain was looking at a hyperpig: a genetic chimera of pig and human. — Alastair Reynolds

We don't own them, and we don't have any claims on moral superiority. But after all we've done to them in the past we do have an obligation to shepherd them through to better times.' He — Alastair Reynolds

There was a moment of absolute cosmic cold, as if a billion tiny doors had opened in every cell of his body, letting in the draught of creation. — Alastair Reynolds

Such was the nature of obsessions: no quarter given for the human cost. — Alastair Reynolds

And the knowledge that humanity was not alone in the universe would be as relevant to most as the knowledge that protons were built of quarks. — Alastair Reynolds

Everything came and went, everything was new and bright with promise once and old and worn out later, and everything left a small, diminishing stain on eternity, a mark that time would eventually erase. — Alastair Reynolds

Without risk in our lives, we're scarcely better than machines ourselves. — Alastair Reynolds

One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word. — Alastair Reynolds

Meddling is what we do. It's what defines us. Meddling gave us fire and tools and civilisation and the keys to the universe. Fingers will get burnt along the way, yes. That's the way of it. — Alastair Reynolds

Then they'd be wrong. It's only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they're what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings. But what are a few bad deeds compared to a life, especially the kinds of lives we can live now? — Alastair Reynolds

Weapons readiness?" "Nominal," Dalal — Alastair Reynolds

That,' Peregrine said, 'is civilisation. Not all who were rewarded deserved to be; not all who should have been were. — Alastair Reynolds

Enjoy it, kid. Enjoy feeling that you can make a difference.' Floyd flashed him a smile. 'It won't last for ever. — Alastair Reynolds

Sluka shook her head. We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die. — Alastair Reynolds

I think the deeper we go, the less likelihood we'll have of being recognised as something unwanted. It's like the human body - the greatest density of pain receptors lies in the skin. — Alastair Reynolds

Behold, Mr. Clavain: Chasm City. A place I have to come to know and, while not actually love, perhaps not to detest with quite the same missionary zeal as when I first arrived. — Alastair Reynolds

them were spectres uncertain of each other's reality. They , held each other for what seemed like many more hours than the one they had been allocated; not because time dragged, but because for now time was unimportant; it was in abeyance, and it seemed as if it could be held that way by the act of will alone. — Alastair Reynolds

The flare-watch in East Nekhebet had picked up an energy pulse, much brighter than anything seen previously. Briefly, there was the worrying possibility that Delta Pavonis was about to repeat the flare which had wiped out the Amarantin: the vast coronal mass ejection known as the Event. But closer examination revealed that the flare did not originate from the star, but rather from something several light-hours beyond it, on the edge of the system. — Alastair Reynolds

Then centrifugal gravity took over, and with something close to majesty the skeletal spacecraft descended out of the repair bay as smoothly and elegantly as a falling chandelier. — Alastair Reynolds

Is that what happened to Mercier?" "No - not quite. In so far as I understood Sukhoi's work, it appeared that the zero-mass state would be very difficult to realise physically. As it neared the zero-mass state, the vacuum would be inclined to flip to the other side. Sukhoi called it a tunnelling phenomenon." Clavain raised an eyebrow. "The other side?" "The quantum-vacuum state in which matter has imaginary inertial mass. By imaginary I mean in the purely mathematical sense, in the sense that the square root of minus one is an imaginary number. Of course, you immediately see what that would imply." "You're talking about tachyonic matter," Clavain said. "Matter travelling faster than light. — Alastair Reynolds

To be remembered at all is an achievement of sorts. — Alastair Reynolds

I'm not massively fond of right-wing nutters or war criminals. — Alastair Reynolds

Volyova felt as if her brain consisted of a room full of precocious schoolchildren: individually bright, and - if only they would pool themselves - capable of shattering insights. But some of those schoolchildren were not paying attention; they were staring dreamily out of the window, ignoring her protestations to focus on the present, because they found their own obsessions more intellectually attractive than the dull curriculum she was intent on dispensing. — Alastair Reynolds

I've seen marvelous things, Sunday. I've looked back from the edge of the system and seen this planet, this Earth, reduced to a tiny dot of pale blue. I know what that feels like. To think that dot is where we came from, where we evolved out of the chaos and the dirt. And I know what it feels like to imagine going further. To hold that incredible, dangerous thought in my mind, if only for an instant. To think: what if I don't go home? What if I just keep traveling? Watching that pale-blue dot fall ever further away, until the darkness swallowed it and there was no turning back. Until Earth was just a blue memory. — Alastair Reynolds

But beyond a certain scale vast was simply vast. — Alastair Reynolds

Life is precious. Infinitely so. Perhaps it takes a machine intelligence to appreciate that."
~"Understanding Space & Time — Alastair Reynolds

You didn't weld it shut or anything like that?"
"Yes, stupid me, I forgot. — Alastair Reynolds

In less than twelve hours, Purslane's ship would be travelling so close to the speed of light that the fastest ship ever built would still need a hundred thousand years to catch up with her. — Alastair Reynolds

There has been much debate on the matter, but the present state of understanding is that no useful information can ever emerge from a black hole."
~"Understanding Space & Time — Alastair Reynolds

Across the land, the semaphore towers stood deathly still. — Alastair Reynolds

It was a mansion of ghosts and monsters, with ghouls in the shadows and demons scuttling behind the wainscotting. — Alastair Reynolds

Well," she said, "I see it hasn't got a fuck of a lot better since I was away. — Alastair Reynolds

Do you have to sound so damned indifferent to it all? Here we are talking about how we're likely to be dead in a few hours and you're acting like it's only a minor inconvenience.
~"Spirey & the Queen — Alastair Reynolds

We all have it in us to be something other than what we are, I thought, but we don't often get a glimpse of what we could have been — Alastair Reynolds

It wasn't always about bravery or some shining inner goodness. It could just as easily be about the position of your name in the alphabet, the chemistry of your blood, or — Alastair Reynolds

Nightside, cities glistened in chains, and a spray of tinkertoy habitats girdled the planet. Gossamer starbridges reached from the equator towards orbit. — Alastair Reynolds

Might you show me how to project a schematic of the entire inner solar system? I appear to be unable to zoom out from the immediate neighbourhood of Paladin." "Access that sub-menu, then select the logarithmic scale factor," Nissa said. "Thank you - I should have seen that." The — Alastair Reynolds

Life was a very odd thing indeed, he reflected, when you really thought about it. — Alastair Reynolds

I'll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason. — Alastair Reynolds

Masai and elephants. The rest is dust. — Alastair Reynolds

I prioritise story over science, but not at the expense of being really stupid about it. — Alastair Reynolds