Zima Blue and Other Stories

Life is precious. Infinitely so. Perhaps it takes a machine intelligence to appreciate that." ~"Understanding Space & Time

But without fallibility there is no art. And without art there is no truth.

...the next time you need a piece of apparently obscure information, try asking a science fiction writer. You might be surprised.

Do you have to sound so damned indifferent to it all? Here we are talking about how we're likely to be dead in a few hours and you're acting like it's only a minor inconvenience. ~"Spirey & the Queen

Some people get it. Most people never will. But that’s art.

Just because it came from the heart didn’t make it good.

There has been much debate on the matter, but the present state of understanding is that no useful information can ever emerge from a black hole." ~"Understanding Space & Time

I'll die? I'm going to die anyway, so what difference does it make?"She paused, allowing the melancholic chorus of the machines to swell and fill the room. "Probably by the end of the week. And all I've got to look forward to is the inside of this room or the view out this window. At least let me see something different." ~"Understanding Space & Time

All right," I said, still wishing we could talk about Zima rather than me. "But what practical difference does it make whether the artificial memory is inside my head or outside?" "All the difference in the world," Zima said. "The memories stored in the AM are fixed for eternity. You can query it as often as you like, but it will never enhance or omit a single detail. But the implants work differently. They're designed to integrate seamlessly with biological memory, to the point where the recipient can't tell the difference. For that very reason they're necessarily plastic, malleable, subject to error and distortion." "Fallible," I said. "But without fallibility there is no art. And without art there is no truth.

All I knew was the way that colour spoke to me, as if I'd been waiting my whole life to find it, to set it free." He thought for a moment. "There's always been something about blue. A thousand years ago Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours.

Keep trying,’ Merlin said. ‘Keep making mistakes, and learning from them. That’s all any culture ever does.

All I do know is that in six hours I could be suffering from acute existence failure.

You've found a way to stay sane, Renfew--even if that means admitting a tiny piece of piano-playing madness into your world. But there's a cost to that sanity, and it isn't moi. the cost is you can't ever allow yourself an instant of hope, because hope is something that will always be crushed, crushed utterly, and in the crushing of hope you will be weakened forever, just as surely as if you'd mainlined some slow-acting poison." ~"Understanding Space & Time

But what Mick remembered, more than anything, was not being cold and wet, but the feeling of relief when they arrived at some cosy warm pub at the end of the day, both of them ravenous and thirsty and high on what they’d achieved. Good memories, all of them.

When you recall something - this conversation, perhaps, a hundred years from now - there will be things about it that you misremember. Yet those misremembered details will themselves become part of your memory, gaining solidity and texture with each instance of recall. A thousand years from now, your memory of this conversation might bear little resemblance to reality. Yet you’d swear your recollection was accurate.

But one of the truly delightful things about science fiction is that it is far less about new ideas than it is about finding new ways to think about old ones.

So the next time you need a piece of apparently obscure information, try asking a science fiction writer. You might be surprised.

If it took a monster to do that, doesn’t that mean we sometimes need monsters?’ ‘Maybe we do. But that doesn’t mean we should forgive them for what they are, even for an instant.