Shockwave Rider Quotes

There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.

I'm myself, not a label.

If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.

After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy.

Damn right I voted for him. But if I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn't have cast a vote—I’d have cast a brick.

intelligence and wisdom aren’t the same.

Toffler’s Law, I guess: the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.

In an age when we have more choice than ever before, more mobility, more information, more opportunity to fulfill ourselves, how is it that people can prefer to be identical?

It’s the beginning of wisdom when you admit you’ve gone astray.

We fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that’s better.

…as though, capable themselves of suffering, they granted no reality to the suffering of others. ‘The subject exhibited a pain response.’ But not, under any circumstances, we hurt her.

she sees them, again and again, all lighting at once, filling up the winter-naked trees, shockwave riders on the moving edge of nature’s most violent season, she sees them take wing again and again, the flutter of their wings like the snap of many sheets on the line, and she thinks: A month from now every kid in Derry Park will have a kite, they’ll run to keep the strings from getting tangled with each other. She thinks again: This is what flying is like.

It's not because my mind is made up that I don't want you to confuse me with any more facts. It's because my mind isn't made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with. So SHUT UP, do you hear me? SHUT UP!

It’s the social counterpart of natural selection. Those groups within society that craved power at the expense of everything else—morality, self-respect, honest friendship—they achieved dominance long ago. The mass of the public no longer has any contact with government; all they know is that if they step out of line they’ll be trodden on.

There are two kinds of fool. One says, ‘This is old, and therefore good.’ And one says, ‘This is new, and therefore better.

Few of us are equipped to cope with the complexity and dazzling variety of twenty-first-century existence.

There was exactly one power base available to sustain the old style of government," Nick grunted. "Organized crime." ​

But the habit patterns, inevitably, had survived. To the air, with a wry grin, he murmured, “How long, O Lord? How long?” In his private estimation: not long now.

They sought security by piling up more and more irrelevant weapons.

The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can’t cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics.

We know, we feel in our guts, that decisions are constantly being made which are going to wreck our ambitions, our dreams, our personal relationships. But the people making those decisions are keeping them secret, because if they don’t they’ll lose the leverage they have over their subordinates.

It was also not difficult to forecast that no matter how well endowed they were with material resources those countries where the Industrial Revolution arrived late would change proportionately more slowly. After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children.

I find no evidence for believing that I matter any more than any other human being who ever existed or who ever will exist. Nor does any of them matter more than I do. We’re elements in a process that began in the dim past and will develop through who knows what kind of future.

Best if the driver didn't have to get hurt. Though having been fool enough to volunteer for army service, of course, and worse still, having been fool enough to accept orders unquestioningly from a machine... But everybody did that. Everybody, all the time. Otherwise none of this would have been possible. Similarly, none of it would have had to happen.

a sneaking feeling that people are wrong when they say human beings can’t keep track of the world any more, we have to leave it up to the machines.

I am I.” “Tat tvam asi.

Is our society on the right lines when of of its most gifted people can find no better career than crime unless literally millions per year of public money are lavished on him? ​

I always wondered what democracy might smell like.

I don’t think of my fellow men as dangerous. I think of them as capable of occasional dangerous mistakes.

Men, embryonically speaking, are imperfect women, as you know.

Governments rely on threat and trauma to survive. The easiest populace to rule is weak, poor, superstitious, preferably terrified of what tomorrow may bring,

First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we’re going to have the brain race.

and that person might be Nickie Haflinger!

the plight of being old: clearly recalling what it was like to act voluntarily and enjoy life as it came, now trapped in a frame that forbade anything except slow cautious movements

I like you very much as a person,” he said […] “I think I’m going to like you just as much as a woman.” “I hope so,” she answered with equal formality. “We may have to go a lot of places together.

I put it to you that no rule consciously invented by mankind since we acquired speech has force equivalent to those inherited from perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred thousand generations of evolution in the wild state. I further suggest that the chief reason why modern society is in turmoil is that for too long we claimed that our special human talents could exempt us from the heritage written in our genes.

You know, that’s what’s wrong with us on the public level. We fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that’s better. Our society is hurtling in free fall toward heaven knows where,

our threshold of survival-prone behavior is so high it takes the prospect of total extermination to activate modes of placation and compromise, may there not be other processes, equally life-preserving, which can similarly be triggered off only at a far higher level of stimulus

How right you are.” She shivered. “Some of my colleagues at G2S, you know, live at Trianon, where they test new life-styles. And they boast about how their actions are monitored night and day, compare the advantages of various ultramodern bugs … I don’t know how they can stand it.

This continent is littered coast to coast with people who were compelled to study business administration when they should have been painting murals or practicing the fiddle or digging a truck garden, and finally got their chance when it was twenty years too late to lead them anywhere.

I'm proud of it. Apart from marking the first occasion when I used my talent on behalf of other people without being asked and without caring whether I was rewarded--which was a major breakthrough in itself--the job was a pure masterpiece. Working on it, I realized in my guts how an artist or an author can get high on the creative act. The poker who wrote Precipice's original tapeworm was pretty good, but you could theoretically have killed it without shutting down the net--that is, at the cost of losing thirty or forty billion bits of data. Which I gather they were just about prepared to do when I showed up. But mine...Ho, no! That, I cross my heart, cannot be killed without DISMANTLING the net.

It started with population. Not having a fixed breeding season was among the reasons why mankind achieved dominance; it kept our numbers topped up at an explosive rate. Past certain stage restrictive process set in: male libido is reduced or diverted into nonfertile channels, female ovulation is irregularized and sometimes fails completely. But long before we reach that point we find the company of our fellow creatures so unbearable we resort to war, or a tribal match. Kill one another or ourselves. ​

Only years later would scientists again need to harness the power of multiple processors at once, when massively parallel processing would become an integral part of supercomputing. Years later, too, the genealogy of Shoch’s worm would come full circle. Soon after he published a paper about the worm citing The Shockwave Rider, he received a letter from John Brunner himself. It seemed that most science fiction writers harbored an unspoken ambition to write a book that actually predicted the future. Their model was Arthur C. Clarke, the prolific author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, who had become world-famous for forecasting the invention of the geosynchronous communications satellite in an earlier short story. “Apparently they’re all jealous of Arthur Clarke,” Shoch reflected. “Brunner wrote that his editor had sent him my paper. He said he was ‘really delighted to learn, that like Arthur C. Clarke, I predicted an event of the future.’” Shoch briefly considered replying that he had only borrowed the tapeworm’s name but that the concept was his own and that, unfortunately, Brunner did not really invent the worm. But he let it pass.

What a wise man can do, that can’t be done by someone who’s merely clever, is make a right judgement in an unprecedented situation. ​

...is this an unforgivable invasion of privacy? Invasion of privacy it is; unforgivable ...Well, do you believe that justice shall not only be done, but shall be seen to be done? The privacy my worm is designed to invade is that privacy under whose cover justice is not than and injustice is not seen. It doesn't care whether the poker who leeched his tax-free payoff spent it on seducing little girls; it cares only thata he was rewared for commiting a crime and wasn't brought to book. It doesn't care if the shivver who bought that congressman was straight or gay; it cares only that a public servant took a bribe. It doesn't care if the judge who misdirected the jury was concerned to keep her lover's identity secret; it cares only that a person was jailed who should have been released. ​

...is this an unforgivable invasion of privacy? Invasion of privacy it is; unforgivable ...Well, do you believe that justice shall not only be done, but shall be seen to be done? The privacy my worm is designed to invade is that privacy under whose cover justice is not than and injustice is not seen. It doesn't care whether the poker who leeched his tax-free payoff spent it on seducing little girls; it cares only thata he was rewared for commiting a crime and wasn't brought to book. It doesn't care if the shivver who bought that congressman was straight or gay; it cares only that a public servant took a bribe. It doesn't care if the judge who misdirected the jury was concerned to keep her lover's identity secret; it cares only that a person was jailed who should have been released.

….it was more a matter of time being divided up for you; if the ordained segments were too short, you got little done, while if they were too long, you got less done than you could have.

My degrees are scholarates, not mere doctorates. I’ve always been very proud of that. Like surgeons over in Britain, taking offense at being called Dr. So-and -so. … But it’s irrelevant, it’s superfluous, it’s silly!

Out of all the calls taken, nearly half—I think they say forty-five percent—are from people who are afraid someone else knows data that they don’t and is gaining an unfair advantage by it. For all the claims one hears about the liberating impact of the data-net, the truth is that it’s wished on most of us a brand-new reason for paranoia.

The nation was tightly webbed in a net of interlocking data-channels, and a time-traveler from a century ago would have been horrified by the degree to which confidential information had been rendered accessible to total strangers capable of adding two plus two.

... maybe it's a sneaking feeling that people are wrong when they say human beings can't keep track of the world any more, we have to leave it up to the machines. I don't want to be hung out to dry on a dead branch of the evolutionary tree.