I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness. Iain Banks More Quotes by Iain Banks More Quotes From Iain Banks I'm not a great believer in awards-of course the fact that I've never won one has nothing to do with it at all! Iain Banks believer awards facts As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book. Iain Banks long book people Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries. Iain Banks anarchist utopia war I'm too drunk to recall much of what I've said. Which, come to think of it, is probably just as well, judging by the way people who are normally quite sensible dissolve into gibbering, rude, opinionated and bombastic idiots once the alcohol molecules in their bloom-stream outnumber the neutrons, or whatever. Luckily, one only notices this if one stays sober oneself, so the solution is as pleasant (at the time, at least) as it is obvious. Iain Banks drunk people thinking 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 car lonely night It was the day my grandmother exploded. Iain Banks my-grandmother grandmother I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism. Iain Banks catechism eye secret Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances — and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse — then you don't have life after death; you just have death. Iain Banks mutation possibility-of-change development He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones. Iain Banks answers knows enemy 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 Iain Banks communist technology matter Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy. Iain Banks scholar immediacy I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese. Iain Banks blade-runner looks thinking ...[Changers] were a threat to identity, a challenge to the individualism even of those they were never likely to impersonate. It had nothing to do with souls or physical or spiritual possession; it was, as the Idirans well understood, the behavouristic copying of another which revolted. Individuality, the thing which most humans held more precious than anything else about themselves, was somehow cheapened by the ease with which a Changer could ignore it as a limitation and use it as a disguise. Iain Banks soul spiritual challenges I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books! Iain Banks character book A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens. Iain Banks reading culture fiction Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa. Iain Banks self air book I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on. Iain Banks stories writing thinking Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling. Iain Banks achievement skills exercise Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter. Iain Banks perfect writing past Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side. Iain Banks auras sides time
