"But what if someone kills somebody else?"
Gurgeh shrugged. "They're slap-droned."
"Ah! This sounds more like it. What does that drone do?"
"Follows … - Iain Banks
"But what if someone kills somebody else?" Gurgeh shrugged. "They're slap-droned." "Ah! This sounds more like it. What does that drone do?" "Follows you around and makes sure you never do it again." "Is that all?" "What more do you want? Social death, Hamin; you don't get invited to too many parties." "Ah; but in your Culture, can't you gatecrash?" "I suppose so," Gurgeh conceded. "But nobody'd talk to you."
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About
Iain Banks
Iain Menzies Banks (February 16, 1954 – June 9, 2013), officially Iain Banks, was a Scottish writer. As Iain M. Banks he wrote science fiction; as Iain Banks he wrote literary fiction.
Biography information from
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Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Pasi Välkkynen (CC BY-SA)
I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you're just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it's not about you. It's what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. 'Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs' – oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not.
The sheer wastefulness of it all distressed him. He was older and wiser now and more used to the way that things really worked being more important than the way they appeared to (unless you were talking about public perception, of course, when it was the other way around).
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