Alastair Reynolds: Human

“The central defect of the human mind,” Custine said, “is its unfortunate habit of seeing patterns where none exist. Of course, that is also its chief asset.”

Alastair Reynolds book Century Rain

“But sometimes a very dangerous one.”
Source: Century Rain (2004), Chapter 12 (p. 178)

“The battle sunk towards the horizon. Presently it would be gone, leaving a sky unsullied by human affairs.”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 8 (p. 130)

“Either you are a man of unusual ability, Thorn, or a man with a rather inadequate grasp of human nature. I just hope it’s the former.”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 27 (p. 495)

Hope , Nature

“Relativity distorted classical expectations in a way that Clavain still did not find entirely intuitive. Slam two objects towards each other, each with individual velocities just below light-speed, and the classical result for their closing velocity would be the sum of their individual speeds: just under twice the speed of light. Yet the true result, confirmed with numbing precision, was that the objects saw each other approach with a combined speed that was still just below the speed of light. Similarly, the relativistic closing velocity for two objects moving towards each other with individual speeds of one-half of light-speed was not light-speed itself, but eight-tenths of it. It was the way the universe was put together, and yet it was not something the human mind had evolved to accept.”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 26 (p. 463)

Way , Light , Universe , Speed

“I learnt the true meaning of what was euphemistically described as close-quarters combat. No line-of-sight particle-beam weapons now; no delayed-detonation nano-munitions. What close-quarters combat meant was something which would have been infinitely more recognisable to a soldier of a thousand years earlier: the screaming fury of human beings packed so close together that the only effective way to kill each other was with sharpened metal weapons: bayonets and daggers, or with hands around each other’s throats; fingers pressed into each other’s eye-sockets. The only way to survive was to disengage all higher brain-functions and regress to an animal state of mind.
So I did. And in doing so, I learned a deeper truth about war. She punished those who flirted with her by making them like herself. Once you opened the door to the animal, there was no shutting it.”

Alastair Reynolds book Chasm City

Source: Chasm City (2001), Chapter 7 (p. 108).

War , Truth , Way , Learning

“I’m hoping no one will be quite that stupid,” Sparver said. “Then again, this is baseline humans we’re dealing with.”

Alastair Reynolds book The Prefect

Source: The Prefect (2007), Chapter 6 (p. 59)

Stupidity , Hope

“Pretty smart piece of thinkware by all accounts: full Turing compliance; about as clever as you can make a machine before you have to start giving it human rights.”

Alastair Reynolds

Nightingale (p. 277)
Short fiction, Galactic North (2006)

““A splendidly inept thing,” Sylveste said, nodding despite himself.
“What?”
“The human capacity for grief. It just isn’t capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn’t just level off—it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feel a damn about these people.””

Alastair Reynolds book Revelation Space

Source: Revelation Space (2000), Chapter 15 (p. 323).

People , Feeling , Dead

“The Fascists got what they deserved,” Floyd said.
“My husband lived long enough to see those monsters come to come to power. He saw through their lies and promises, but he also knew that they spoke to something nasty and squalid in the human spirit. Something in all of us. We want to hate those who are not like us. All we need is an excuse, a whisper in the ear.”

Alastair Reynolds book Century Rain

Source: Century Rain (2004), Chapter 9 (p. 135)

Hate

“Volyova did not like planets at the best of times, and gas giants struck her as an unreasonable affront to human scale and frailty. In that respect, they were almost as bad as stars.”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 11 (p. 206)

Star , Time

“They had been in love, desperately in love, but the universe cared nothing for the vicissitudes of the human heart.”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 31 (p. 586)

Love , Universe , Heart

“To feel oneself so tiny, so fragile, so inherently losable, was at first spiritually crushing. But, by the same token, this realisation was also strangely liberating: if an individual human existence meant so little, if one’s actions were so cosmically irrelevant, then the notion of some absolute moral framework made about as much sense as the universal ether. Measured against the infinite, therefore, people were no more capable of meaningful sin—or meaningful good—than ants, or dust.
Worlds barely registered sin. Suns hardly deigned to notice it. On the scale of solar systems and galaxies, it meant nothing at all. It was like some obscure subatomic force that simply petered out on those scales.”

Alastair Reynolds book Absolution Gap

Source: Absolution Gap (2003), Chapter 6 (p. 84)

People , World , Feeling , Sense

“Don’t you start. It’s bad enough that one of us feels he could have done more. We’re human, Campion—that’s all it boils down to. Human and not nearly as clever as we thought we were when it counted. End of story. When they put up the gravestone for our species, that’ll be the epitaph.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 39 (p. 509)

Bad luck , Feeling

“There had been a human soul in that skull only a few hours earlier, and now no authority in the universe could bring her back. We were like monkeys sitting around a fire that had just extinguished, wondering why the warmth and light had gone away.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 19 (pp. 307-308)

Light , Soul , Universe

“Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential.”

Alastair Reynolds book On the Steel Breeze

Source: On the Steel Breeze (2013), Chapter 43 (p. 438)

“This is a kindness, a thing done to another human being for no reason other than compassion. A private, dignified act of basic human decency, which history, being the bastard that it is, will probably neglect to commemorate.”

Alastair Reynolds book On the Steel Breeze

Source: On the Steel Breeze (2013), Chapter 28 (p. 304)

History