Categories
technology

Iain Banks | technology

I think a lot of people are frightened of technology and frightened of change, and the way to deal with something you’re frightened of is to make fun of it. That’s why science fiction fans are dismissed as geeks and nerds.

Categories
technology

Iain Banks | technology

Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn’t matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state.

Categories
science

Iain Banks | science

I think a lot of people are frightened of technology and frightened of change, and the way to deal with something you’re frightened of is to make fun of it. That’s why science fiction fans are dismissed as geeks and nerds.

Categories
science

Iain Banks | science

Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what’s been done, what’s been superseded, what’s so much part of the furniture it’s practically part of the fabric now, what’s become no more than a joke… and so on. It’s just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research.

Categories
science

Iain Banks | science

A lot of what the ‘Culture’ is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.

Categories
science

Iain Banks | science

Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.

Categories
science

Iain Banks | science

My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.

Categories
politics

Iain Banks | politics

In so much of politics you’re not allowed to disagree with what’s been agreed.

Categories
legal

Iain Banks | legal

Torture is such a slippery slope as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons.

Quote from Iain Banks

Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you?

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