A mother’s love—””Fuck love,” Amber snarls, “she wants power.

First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life—oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not just the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness.

Waaant equity,” hisses the alien intruder.”You can’t be Pamela Macx,” says Pierre, his back to the wall, keeping the sword point before the lobster-woman-thing. “She’s in a nunnery in Armenia or something. You pulled that...

[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

Private ownerships of a …slave chip is illegal in many polities. It tends to be a government monopoly, much like other forms of violence. But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters.

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

Annette sighs. Manfred’s been upgrading this robot cat for years, and his ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its neural configuration, too: This is its third body, and it’s getting more realistically uncooperative with every...

if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?

Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.

Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.

Don’t you have any concept of individuality?” she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states.”Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer,” says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a...

Unfortunately it’s also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen – it’s invisible and you don’t notice its presence until it’s gone, and then you’re sorry.

Although I am unconvinced that I desire life, I am not yet ready to embrace death.

…A vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment–with its redefinition of personhood–is rejected by the house of deputies: A universe where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a...

I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren’t easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of...

This has serveral consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms–translation: all your bank account are belong to us–

Some say the Internet is for porn but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam.

Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.

I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.I am descended from you, and exist in your future.Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

Helpfiles are traditionally outnumbered by no-help files, which superficially resemble a helpfile in form but not in content because they don’t actually tell you anything you don’t already know, or they answer every question except...

Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches…

Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.

Only debt is forever.

Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They’re using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas.

Identity is theft, don’t trust anyone whose state vector hasn’t forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only constant, et bloody cetera.

Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new...

We are medium-sized mammals who only prosper because we’ve developed a half-arsed ability to terraform the less suitable bits of the planet we evolved on, and we’re conscious of our inevitable decay and death, and...

Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli.

I let the happy times slip through my fingers and gripped on to the sad times as if they were my heart’s desire