Iain M. Banks

And coincidence convinces the credulous. Two things happen at the same time, or one after another, and we assume there must be a link; well, we sacrificed a virgin last year, and there was a good harvest. Of course the ceremony to raise the sun works—it comes up every morning, doesn’t it? I say my prayers each night and the world hasn’t ended yet...

Dung beetle thinking. Life is too complicated for there not to be continual coincidences, and we just have to come to terms with the fact that they merely happen and aren’t ordained, that some things occur for no real reason whatsoever, and that this is not a punishment and that is not a reward. Good grief; the most copper-bottomed, platinum-card proof of divine intervention, of some holy masterplan, would be if there were no coincidences at all! That really would look suspicious.

That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off...and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.

Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.

I came out stunned. I was angry at them, then. Angry at them for surprising me, touching me like that. Of course I was angry at their stupidity, their manic barbarity, their unthinking, animal obedience, their appalling cruelty; everything that the memorial evoked... but what really hit me was that these people could create something that spoke so eloquently of their own ghastly actions; that they could fashion a work so humanly redolent of their own inhumanity.

Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.

I’ve been thinking about the war a lot recently, and I think I’ve decided it’s wrong. We are defeating ourselves in waging it, will destroy ourselves by winning it.

“Tell me, suit, don’t you wonder if it’s all worth it?’

“If what’s all worth what?” it says, and I can hear that condescending tone in its voice again.

“You know; living. Is it worth all the... bother?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, I don’t ever wonder about it.”

“Why not?” I’m keeping my questions short as we walk, conserving energy and breath.

“I don’t need to wonder about that. It’s not important.”

“Not important?”

“It’s an irrelevant question. We live; that’s enough.”

While the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once.

Pity they didn’t devote a little more ingenuity to staying alive rather than conducting mass slaughter as efficiently as possible.

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.

“Don’t you have a religion?” Dorolow asked Horza.

“Yes,” he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. “My survival.”