On the Steel Breeze Quotes

“Can we drop the ‘artificial intelligence’? It’s a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“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, On the Steel Breeze

“So much for the tolerant acceptance of the other. We’re forging out into deep space – who knows what we’ll meet out there? If we can’t even accept a robot and some talking elephants, what good are we going to be when we meet something really strange?”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“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, On the Steel Breeze

“Everything depends on everything else, doesn’t it? That’s interconnectivity for you – it’s a bitch.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“Masai and elephants. The rest is dust.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“Mathematics is a terrible calling. It’s as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There’s a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in the universe can stop you falling all the way in. That’s what happened to your mother – she swam too close to theory, fell below the last stable orbit.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“I am Chiku Akinya. I am the daughter of Sunday Akinya; I am the grand-daughter of Eunice Akinya – Senge Dongma, the lion-faced one, mother of us all...”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“Everyone has their fulcrum, Chiku. You can bend anyone to any cause with the right timing.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“Without risk in our lives, we’re scarcely better than machines ourselves.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“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, On the Steel Breeze

“Can we drop the “artificial intelligence”? It’s a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“Having created these cognitively enhanced creatures, the safest option at the time appeared to be to launch them into interstellar space.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“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, On the Steel Breeze

“None of us is a monster, Chiku. We’re all just trying to make the best of our singular natures.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“We have worlds to save, Doctor Aziba.”
“That sounds ... compelling,” the physician allowed.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“We have made some collective mistakes as a species, it’s true – invested too much power in things we can’t see, let alone control. But look at the world we have, Chiku. For all its failings, things could be a great deal worse. No one’s died in any wars lately, or been murdered, or left to rot in a prison, or been denied the basic allocation of fresh food and drinking water. No one’s been tortured for their beliefs or made to feel like a pariah because of their sexual preferences.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“That’s what love is – sacrifice. Sacrificing everything ...”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“It’s one thing to be given a big boxful of theory and quite another to make an engine out of it.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“Autocratic governments are masters of self-contradiction. They say one thing, do another.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“An idea so dangerous it can’t be discussed. I thought we buried all that nonsense back in the Dark Ages.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“Such was the nature of obsessions: no quarter given for the human cost.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“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, On the Steel Breeze

“Very few worthwhile things are not difficult, in some fashion,”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“There was no present, no past, no future. No sadness, no sorrow, because those were ordinary little human emotions that required a frame of reference, and she had none to cling to. She had caved in, become a measureless void, no poles, no lines of latitude or longitude. She was an emptiness bigger than galaxies, unmapped and unmappable.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“Mathematics is a terrible calling. It’s as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There’s a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in the universe can stop you falling all the way in.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“there’s a strength in not being strong.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“I’m always serious about my fun. I”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“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, On the Steel Breeze