Adam Roberts Quotes

As far as dreams were concerned—well dreams are generated by the random processes of neural oscillation during the brain’s rest phases. What dreams do is cycle and recycle images and feelings, rationalisations and fears. There’s nothing special about that. It’s not the dreams that matter (chaff, mental turbulence, the rotating metal bars moving endlessly through the transparent tub of metaphorical slushy). It is what the problem-solving circuits in the mind make of the dreams. Dreams iterate and test mental schemas, discarding the maladaptive to return the adaptive to the slush to be reworked. Dreams are emotional preparations for solving problems—that is why we have evolved them, because problem-solving abilities are highly adaptive and thus strongly evolutionarily selected. Dreams intoxicate the individual out of reliance on common sense and preconception, and tempt her into the orbit of private logic. Dreams have utility.

Are we in a dream?" Lebret asked. "Might we actually be dead and in some afterlife?"
"How could we test either supposition?" the scientist asked, with characteristic practical-mindedness. "What conceivable experiment could we design to falsify such a claim?

It had to be one or the other. Did it have to be one or the other? Even the question as to whether it had to be one or the other had to be one or the other!

Do you know what this is?
"The floor, Miss?"
"Dust! I read about it—tiny particles of matter.

“The devils,” Billiard-Fannon wept, struggling upward. “They’re all about the ship! They want to break in! A cursed vessel, a haunted vessel...we must pray to God! Let us pray!”
“I pray you to shut up,” grunted Capot.

His last hours alive. But he didn’t know!
None of us will know, of course. The weird grammar of death. You die, he or she dies, they die, but there is no genuine form for “I”. Not really. All know that, none know when.

Jack considered: there were worse things that could happen than him dying. Of course, there were much better things, too.

Money is not our concern. Our concern is the sea. The sea is not persuaded by bankers’ drafts and stocks of bullion; the sea respects nothing but the grit and willpower of dedicated seamen.

She didn’t have to believe the technology existed. She only had to believe that people believed the technology existed. People, being stupid, believed all sorts of things.

“The situation on, on earth is complicated.”
“You mean politics?” Dakkar spat the word, with immeasurable contempt.

“Eva is perfectly content with her academic research,” said Diana. “She just isn’t interested in power. As I say those sentences,” she added, clasping her knees to her chest, “I can tell they’re both wrong. Aren’t they? Of course she’s interested in power.”
“She’s a human being,” agreed Iago.

I have heard the rumours," said the captain, directing his attention to the food on his plate.
"Ah, but rumours," said Lebret easily, "may not be trusted. Appearances, you see, can trump reality.

There is always war," said Dakkar, coldly. "There will always be war, whilst empires oppress and distort human potential.

Nobody can overthrow the fascist dictator by being nicer than him. The reason for this is: by definition everybody is always already nicer than the fascist dictator.

People-problems did not interest her. Data seemed to her a larger, purer, more transcendent quantity than Homo sapiensness. Human-to-human interactions were, effectively, all just politics, and politics bored her.