Iain Banks - The Player of Games (1988)

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He looked up from it at the stars again, and the view was warped and distorted by something in his eyes, which at first he thought was rain.

Iain Banks
I'm very sorry, the drone said, without a trace of contrition.

Iain Banks
Is all this serious? Gurgeh said, turning, amused, from the screen to the drone.
Deadly serious, Flere-Imsaho told him.
Gurgeh laughed and shook his head. He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.

Iain Banks
Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

Iain Banks
So it's false.
What isn't?
Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.

Iain Banks
You like music, Mr. Gurgeh? Hamin asked, leaning over to the man.
Gurgeh nodded. Well, a little does no harm.

Iain Banks
My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it,

Iain Banks
Empires are synonymous with centralized—if occasionally schismatized—hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through—usually—a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society's information dissemination systems and its lesser—as a rule nominally independent—power systems. In short, it's all about dominance.

Iain Banks
One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them. We here are not children, Mr. Gurgeh. Hamin waved the pipestem round the tables of people. Rules and laws exist only because we take pleasure in doing what they forbid, but as long as most of the people obey such proscriptions most of the time, they have done their job; blind obedience would imply we are—ha! —Hamin chuckled and pointed at the drone with the pipe— no more than robots!

Iain Banks
The news team, and Hamin, seemed well pleased. You should have been an actor, Jernau Gurgeh, Hamin told him.
Gurgeh assumed this was intended as a compliment.

Iain Banks
All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules.

Iain Banks
It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting—corruption and favoritism, mostly—endemic to the system.

Iain Banks