90 Quotes by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Do I say ‘This is where it starts?’ There’s nowhere where it starts. Life is constant creation, change and destruction. The trick is knowing one from the other.

That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.

Humanity is overrated.

In her speech, which she was barely paying attention to, she meandered down a list of other names, from here or at home. The person she really wanted to thank was herself. She had fought for this, her engineered longevity allowing her to carry the debate across several natural human lifetimes. She had clashed in the financiers’ rooms and in the laboratories, at academic symposiums and on mass entertainment feeds just to make this happen.

Ah well, the key failing with tigers is that their performance drops off sharply when you get them to mend coolant pipes a kilometre below the surface of the ocean.

Most conspiracies, after all, seem weird on the surface but are really an attempt to drag things down to a human scale: a flat Earth instead of the immensity of the cosmos, shadowy illuminati instead of a chaotic mess of chance, incompetence and greed.

The Mirror Empire is the most original fantasy I’ve read in a long time, set in a world full of new ideas, expanding the horizons of the genre. A complex and intricate book full of elegant ideas and finely-drawn characters.

Hartnell had no idea what Murray would be doing with his life if he wasn’t ordering animals to kill people in the name of a shadowy junta of ousted special interests. Probably something in investment banking or venture capitalism, any trade where an utter inability to empathise with the people he hurt was considered a positive boon.

Despite the barriers to communication, they have developed an idiolect of their own, mostly devoted to complaining.