The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

To be honest, I still don’t know; the game is beyond me, just over-complicated for the way my poor target-tracking mind is configured

They call it compassion to draw my talons and remove my eyes and cast me adrift in a paradise made for others; I call it torture.

A warship can passive-bug using its electro-magnetic effector; they can watch you under a hundred klicks of rock-cover from the next stellar system and tell you what your last meal was.

Don’t forget; these people are surrounded by this game from birth. They have anti-agatic drugs, and the best players are about twice your own age. Even they, of course, are still learning.

Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.

he whistled them the first song that came into his head, and they’ve been playing that at receptions and ceremonies for the last eight years.”

“I didn’t want help, ship.” He played with the Orbital bracelet, wondering absently if it portrayed any particular world, and if so, which. “I wanted hope.”

He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.

something no larger than a lifeboat could outstrip their battlecruisers was not something to be contemplated

the Culture’s been a spacefaring species for eleven thousand years; just because you’ve mostly settled down in idealized, tailor-made conditions doesn’t mean you’ve lost the capacity for rapid adaptation.