Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I… - Iain Banks

You'd make a great teenage boy," she told the avatar.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You still think girls get moist when they hear arcane nomenclature. It's sweet, I suppose.

All the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar of dialectic of dissent which—simply stated—dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seem often to baffle the military and political mind.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.