
The Hydrogen Sonata (A Culture Novel Book 9)

love generally comes from a need within ourselves, and that the behaviour, the… expression of love is what is most important to us, not the identity, not the personality of the one who is loved.”
Iain M. Banks • The Hydrogen Sonata (A Culture Novel Book 9)
who was smiling broadly to all and sundry as though his grin was something unpleasant attached to his face and he was trying to find a place to wipe it off.
Iain M. Banks • The Hydrogen Sonata (A Culture Novel Book 9)
The Chaos Problem meant that in certain situations you could run as many simulations as you liked, and each would produce a meaningful result, but taken as a whole there would be no discernible pattern to them, and so no lesson to be drawn or obvious course laid out to pursue; it would all depend so exquisitely on exactly how you had chosen to twea
... See moreIain M. Banks • The Hydrogen Sonata (A Culture Novel Book 9)
But not always. Sometimes, if you were going to have any hope of getting useful answers, there really was no alternative to modelling the individuals themselves, at the sort of scale and level of complexity that meant they each had to exhibit some kind of discrete personality, and that was where the Problem kicked in.