Rhapsodies

I played with this last year only to give up after doing two of them.

Anyway here is the third installment of my collection of favorite quotes. With any luck this time I’ll do a better job of making it a habit.

Today I’ll go with one of my current favorite science fiction authors, Iain M Banks. My taste in science fiction tends to lean towards space operas (or at least my definition of the term which involves stories taking place in interstellar civilizations) In this Banks delivers in spades. While his Culture series in not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea I can’t get enough of his prose and wit. When I heard he had less than a year to live due to inoperable cancer I was greatly saddened for yet another loss to literature.

Anyway as a first of hopefully many tributes to the man here is a description of the relative honesty of the artificial minds that run the Culture from Look to Windward,

“Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.”