The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

the future is a game; time is one of the rules.

the Culture’s real cities were its great ships, the General Systems Vehicles.

“It is unusual for us to discover an imperial power-system in space. As a rule, such archaic forms of authority wither long before the relevant species drags itself off the home planet, let alone cracks the lightspeed problem, which of course one has to do, to rule effectively over any worthwhile volume.

everybody in it seemed to be stuck in another age. He could see nothing in the palace or worn by the people that could not have been produced at least a thousand years earlier;

“a guilty system recognizes no innocents.