I was toying with the idea of having to give up writing SF in the relatively near future, not because I… — Iain M. Banks
I was toying with the idea of having to give up writing SF in the relatively near future, not because I wanted to but because I felt I’d have to. I think you get fewer ideas as you get older, and even though you get better at using and developing the few you do have, that’s not enough. Written SF relies heavily on ideas—you can write a perfectly good mainstream novel with no original ideas at all; you just have to tell an interesting story with interesting characters who have something to say. I don’t mean that as a criticism either: that encompasses perfectly valid, rich, and rewarding literary forms, but you can’t get away with that in science fiction. You have to have completely new ideas in there somewhere or it doesn’t really cut it as proper SF, and I was concerned about that.
p. 601Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Roundly insulting one’s superiors behind their backs was one of the perks of being inferior, Choubris held.
p. 44
He was starting to change his mind about the old Warrior Code stuff knights and princes invoked, usually when they were drunk and in need of spilling their words, or trying to justify their poor behavior in some other field.
Behave honourably and wish for a good death. He always dismissed it as self-serving bullshit, frankly; most of the people he’d been told were his betters were quite venally dishonourable, and the more they got the more the greedy bastards wanted, while those that weren’t like that were better behaved at least partly because they could afford to be.
Was it more honourable to starve than to steal? Many people would say yes, the rarely those who’d actually experienced an empty belly, or a child whimpering with its own hunger. Was it more honourable to starve than to steal when others had the means to feed you but chose not to, unless you paid with money you did not have? He thought not. By choosing to starve you became your own oppressor, keeping yourself in line, harming yourself for having the temerity to be poor, when by rights that ought to be a constable’s job. Show any initiative or imagination and you were called lazy, shifty, crafty, incorrigible. So he’d dismissed talk of honour; it was just a way of making the rich and powerful feel better about themselves and the powerless and poverty-stricken feel worse.
p. 549
Ultimately the galaxy, indeed the sum of the universe in its entirety, was mostly nothing; average it all out and it made a pretty good vacuum. But within the foci of matter there were the systems, the stars and planets and habitats—what a cornucopia of life was there!
p. 167
