More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
wandering male gaze,
he’s the product of a single-sex schooling followed by graduate and postgraduate studies in a field with institutional gender bias.
The caretaker is about sixty, the heavy burden of his years slowly crumpling him into an envelope of wheezing lassitude wrapped around a bloated core of abdominal discomfort.
the cost of refurnishing and restocking the installation to house forty staff on 24x7 rotation
They’re living the dream, for Marks & Spencer values of the dream, working really hard at being sober-sided middle-class professionals.
noösphere
thixotropic
a sufficiently large congregation of Bible-thumpers can bring about the Apocalypse by summoning up something they’ve mistaken for Jesus.
Organizations are not human beings and they don’t obey the same priorities. They’re hives.
you were too specialized, working at too low a level to see the politics going on around you. Hives run on emergent consensus and policy.
Alex doesn’t so much wonder about sex as have a fully developed five-year post-doc research program in mind, assuming he ever finds a willing collaborator.
Silent killers who worked in packs, because that kind of brain-work requires a high-energy metabolism and unless they were a tropical-only band of peaceful fruit-eating hippy fuckers, they were hunters.
they get religion pretty soon, too—an emergent side effect of ascribing intentionality to aspects of their environment.
“You’re going to get a society based on cognitive binding. Geases all the way down. It’ll make Feudal Japan look like an anarchist utopia.
the ritual dance of the shadows manipulates distance.
the mistress of dragons is not noted for her discreet approach to disposing of obstacles.
perhaps if she could get a glimpse of one of the overseer class she would be able to better understand what she is seeing.
Pete has had to comfort so many people for whom things are going terribly, unbelievably badly that he keeps his own personal life in an emotional containment grid.
“Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence or overwork?”
they have social axioms like love and friendship that denote circumstances in which the normal traffic of obligation is suspended for purely emotional reasons.
if his brain was a computer it’d be throwing segmentation faults and dumping core
a Turing Oracle, an abstract function that can resolve undecidable problems (including the Halting Problem) in O(n) time.
treat any behavior showcased by the male lead in a Hollywood romantic comedy as dangerously abusive.
butterflies are shooting up crystal meth in his chest.
Coming right after their daughter coming out, breaking the news to them that their son is a vampire and he’s dating a self-identified elven princess should be a walk in the park. Just don’t mention the pay cut, some residual sense of self-preservation prompts him.
All they care about is a sensible career development path and a solid pension plan.
if you farm bees on rhododendron flowers you get poisoned honey
(Vampires, it turns out, are not abominable undead walking corpses: they’re just a character class.
The DM makes a steeple of his fingers. “I feel a great disturbance in the force . . .” “Yes, yes, as if a hundred geomancers cried out in frustration and had to rework their topographic maps because the ley line shifted.”
Martian invasion: sure, the Army understands what it needs to do, if not necessarily how to go about it. Religious apocalypses involving the Four Horsemen: pass the holy water and bend over, here it comes again. But invasion by the armies of Middle Earth—who ordered that?
Vodafone doesn’t provide cell service in hyperspace,
Whitehall has been a self-kicking centipede orgy since four o’clock this morning, with phones ringing and secure email systems smoking since whatever it is that’s kicking off kicked off in cloth-capshire or wherever it is up north, interrupting Jeremy’s post-prandial beauty sleep.
emergent hysteresis loop
any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology,
he thinks we’re going to die now, Pete tells himself, trying the idea on for size: it’s a bad fit, but they don’t have time for dramatics, so he dismisses it.
