Children of Memory Quotes

“Because the real problem with a knowledge-based economy is knowing that, no matter how hard you try, most of the information in the universe has already dissolved into entropy before you even evolved.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“You will fail, and when you do, you must do everything you can to fail as little as possible. Don’t let the failure get its teeth into you. You will make decisions that come with a cost. That is Command.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“Oxygen was – to quote Mikhail Elesco, the team’s top geologist – a needy bastard that couldn’t stand not to be in a relationship, no matter how toxic.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“She's learning that getting a proper education doesn't answer questions, it just teaches you to ask them.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“But then blame is just credit for something that’s gone wrong.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“Things fall apart, though, and entropy is the landlord whose rent always gets paid.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“On this basis, either everything of sufficient complexity is sentient, whether it feels itself to be or not, or nothing is,” Gethli tells her. “We tend towards the latter. We know we don’t think, so why should anything else?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“The essential fallacy,' Ghoti picks up, 'is that humans and other biologically evolved, calculating engines feel themselves to be sentient, when sufficient investigation suggests this is not so. And that sentience, as imagined by the self-proclaimed sentient, is an illusion manufactured by a sufficiently complex series of neural interactions. A simulation, if you will.'
'On this basis, either everything of sufficient complexity is sentient, whether it feels itself to be or not, or nothing is.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“But there will come a time, even if it’s the heat death of the universe, when they will be gone. The living and the struggle is all. The moments of joy and sorrow, not just as stepping stones to the future, but taken on their own merits.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“a proper education doesn’t answer questions, it just teaches you to ask them.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“Meaning you don’t really understand and it’s all just parrot. Meaning, in my very considered opinion, Gothi, that we can’t ever really know if we understand or not. It feels as though we do, up until the point that we’re challenged, and then the focus of our attention shifts to the challenge and all that complex structure we were working on falls over like a house of cards. A what? No idea. Another human expression. Presumably relating to unsound structural practices and a violation of the appropriate construction codes. Would we pass the Turing test, Gothi?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“entropy is the landlord whose rent always gets paid.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“Because the best way to make yourself one of us is to find someone more them than you are, and put the boot in.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“Kern was always up for sharing bad news.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“What they used to call non-neurotypical. Except, as we all went that way, it would eventually have to have been called typical. Because sometimes non-neurotypicality is what you need.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“What has more sense of obligation than a parasite,”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“Empathy is the cornerstone of what her composite people have made together”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“They’re not plundering a tomb, they’re robbing a corpse, and the difference between those two things is scale and longevity.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“Because she’s there. Everything’s there. That’s the definition of everything. That it’s there. The things that aren’t there are nothing. Ergo.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“Bernd Heinrich’s Mind of the Raven and Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“You will fail, and when you do, you must do everything you can to fail as little as possible. Don’t let the failure get its teeth into you. You will make decisions that come with a cost. That is Command. Do not let the cost consume you.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“But then blame is just credit for something that’s gone wrong. And everything here’s gone wrong already. All we can do is find ways to make it go wrong differently, in the hopes we might zero in on something actually right.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“mechanical”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“And of course Kern’s verdict is that the Corvids of Rourke must be treated with all the appropriate dignity of sentient creatures. In spite of, or because of, their complex and fervent reasoning to prove that they are not.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“By the time his beard was grey, Holt felt that they’d thrown the colony as high in the air as they could, and he was watching it at the apex of its parabola. Perhaps, if they all worked hard enough, it would level out and fly.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“Even the complex operating system that was Kern couldn’t have hosted her as a sub-routine. She represented more raw data than any individual Human-scale mind. There was only one substrate on board that was capable of running the complex program that was Miranda, and that was Miranda.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“Because the best way to make yourself one of us is to find someone more them than you are, and put the boot in.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“Knowledge and understanding is the crown atop the hierarchy of needs, the thing you can’t have enough of.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“As though not doing the right thing and doing a different wrong thing were the same thing, which they aren’t.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“Witches always hate people and yet resourceful little girls can win their grudging respect. Witches are always very clever and yet very stupid at the same time, each in very specific ways. They are always tricking people but they can always be tricked. They are fenced around with rules that don’t apply to normal people, but which they can’t break, and if you know the rules you can command them to do what you want, as well as use their great powers at your whim. That is how the stories go, although sometimes they use words other than “witch” for the thing the story is about, such as genie or demon or artificial intelligence.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory