Adam Roberts Quotes

“The rest of the materials inside your submarine must have floated—must have flown around! What did you think?”
“Some people,” Lebret confessed, “suggested poltergeists.”
“Poltergeists!” Dakkar’s huge face registered astonishment. “Are you all idiots?”
“It was a chaotic time,” said Lebret, weakly.
“Poltergeists!” repeated Dakkar, disbelievingly. “I was certain it would be scientists who responded to my message! Instead they have sent down a clutch of gullible mystics and table-rappers!” He sounded genuinely disgusted.

It could be any one of a dozen things. Experience has taught me that we much more often see connection where there is only random copresence. Pattern-seeking consciousness, you know. Great plains ape, you know.

Diana got that seventh-sense intimation that she had touched on an unmentionable matter; although a strangely involuted one whereby the fact that it was unmentionable was itself unmentionable.

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.

Death is the currency of power.

She thought of the multitude.
Trillions of human beings, wrappend like a fog about their home star. The mind collapsed at the scale and the numbers. But if ethics meant anything at all, it meant not letting the largeness of the human population overwhelm our moral knowledge that life is lived individually, and that even when agglomerated into billions and trillions individual human beings deserve better han being used as tools. That the overwhelming majority of this vast mass of humanity was poor, living precariously and subsistence lives in leaky shanty bubbles, eating ghunk and drinking recycled water—this made this more, not less, true. These were the people least able to help themselves. Thery should be helped, not exploited.

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.

She had expected to encounter death as a kind of existential depth and had been disappointed. But maybe there was a deeper truth there. Maybe profundity actually is a mode of disappointment. The rhythm of the climax—joy and despair, sex and pain—is of course the currency of life. Death can only ever be a sort of anticlimactic belatedness.

It's not right. A human being is a human being. A human being is not a toy."
"We cannot help but use the people below us as a resource, my love," said her two MOHmies, as one. "That is what it means to be in power. Your choice is to relinquish power forever, or to accept that and use people for good."...
"If we are powerful," sang her MOHmies, "we can make things better, but we are made unclean by the fact that we have power. If we are powerless we remain clean, but we cannot make things better.

Have you never seen human beings acting in a mob-frenzy? Have you never seen a religious rite that tipped people over the edge? Did you not see footage of the rock-and-roll music concerts they have in America?

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.