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The Star Fraction QUOTES

The Star Fraction QUOTES

1 " The Christians had an almost miraculous talent for turning wine into water. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

2 " Conscious of each other’s subjectivity in a direct and immediate way, they experienced no conflict between resolute solidarity and riotous individuality: they were indeed an association in which the free development of each was the condition for the free development of all. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

3 " Intellectually he understood perfectly what the problem was: guilt and doubt, the waste products of innocence and faith, inhibited him and filled him with self-loathing even at his own weakness in trying to be free of them. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

4 " For we have seen the future – we have by now centuries of experience of the future – and we know it doesn't work. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

5 " Behind him the holograms above the Palace faded in the early sun. In his mind, they burned. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

6 " These days you couldn’t keep things separate even in your mind. If we could only disconnect— "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

7 " It bordered Norlonto in a high-intensity contrast between freedom and slavery, war and peace, ignorance and strength. Which was which depended on whose side you were on. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

8 " He made himself as small as possible behind the parapet, holding the gun awkwardly above it, and aimed by the screensight image patched to his glades. His trigger finger pressed Enter. The weapon took over, it aimed him. In a second the head-up image showed four bodies, sprawled, stapled down like X- and Y- chromosomes. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

9 " ...the smell of cigarette smoke, the blue light of morning through the polygon panes of the geodesic roof, the green light from the screen, the black letters trickling up it in indented lines like poetry in a language he didn't know.
But he knew it now, recognized the code as the key.
And his fingers began to spell it out. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

10 " The screen blazed with the light of recognition. The eyes met yes the Is met the answer sparkled so it was you all the time and it was a seen joke a laugh a tickling tumble a gendered engendering of a second self a you-and-me-baby from AI-and-I to I-and-I.
There was a flowering, and a seeding: a reflection helpless to stop itself reflecting again and again in multiple mirrors.

The stars threw down their spears.
Someone smiled. His work to see.

The connection broke. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

11 " Terror has to be random...that's how to really break people, when they don't know what rules to follow to keep them out of trouble. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

12 " [S]he had difficulty crediting it could really happen in her own lifetime. She knew this was exactly how people would feel just before the real apocalypse, that nearly everyone who’d faced some intrusive threat to their everyday existence – war, revolution, genocide, purges, disaster – had faced it with the firm conviction that things like this just didn’t happen or didn’t happen here or didn’t happen to people like them. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

13 " ... ideas are exactly as interested in the brains they're in as genes are in the bodies they're in: just enough to get themselves copied...Like computer viruses. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

14 " Do AIS dream in electric sleep?

He hoped it had nanosecond nightmares. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

15 " ...maybe we can do better than this. And to ask yourself: where's the vulnerable point in this multiple-choice totalitarianism? It seems...seamless. What can an individual do against it?... I suggest that you doubt, disobey, desert. Particularly if you are called upon to fight against those who insist, against all the evidence, that we are one people. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

16 " White-hot needles stabbed through his eyes into his head, into his brain: a new environment for the information viruses, where they replicated, forming snarls of complex logic that entangled him, clanking mechanisms that pursued him from one thought to another, down corridors of memory and forgotten rooms of days. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

17 " He'd written some of the movement's earliest manifestos (No More Earthquakes, The Earth is a Harsh Mistress) and numerous pamphlets, articles and books documenting what he called the counterconspiracy theory of history, which maintained that many otherwise incomprehensible historical events could be explained by identifying the conspiracy theories held by the protagonists. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

18 " She distrusted the US/UN agencies, she disapproved of enhanced humans on principle, and the whole Watchmaker rumour was so apocalyptic that she had difficulty crediting it could really happen in her own lifetime. She knew this was exactly how people would feel just before the real apocalypse, that nearly everyone who’d faced some intrusive threat to their everyday existence – war, revolution, genocide, purges, disaster – had faced it with the firm conviction that things like this just didn’t happen or didn’t happen here or didn’t happen to people like them. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

19 " What's that?' The one who'd hassled Kohn turned at a noise. He found his cheek meeting a gun muzzle. Muffled sounds came from all around.

'Your worst nightmare,' said a voice from the darkness, about a metre away. 'A yid kid with an AK and attitude.'
 "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction