Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder (born September 4, 1962) is a Canadian science fiction author.

Quotes

Ventus (2000)

Page numbers from the first mass market paperback edition, published by Tor in November 2001, 1st printing ISBN 0-812-57635-7

• His lantern guttered and finally went out. “Shit,” he said, shaking it. “Excuse me.”
  “You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?” she asked, chiding.
  “No, ma’am. I’m afraid of what’s in it.”
  • Chapter 2 (p. 33)

• “We’re all pretending; that’s what events like this are all about.”
  “Why are we doing it at all?”
  “To fit it. Better that we be there to be spoken to than absent to be spoken about.”
  • Chapter 7 (p. 102)

• “So why did you do it?”
  August stared at the ceiling pensively. “It gets easier to risk your life as you get older. I think women understand that when they have children. Suddenly they know they would give their life for their child, and it doesn’t bother them. With men it’s different, but we…trade our allegiance in the same way. At some point, if you’ve grown up at all, you have to decide that something outside yourself is more important than you are. Otherwise you’ll be a miserable bastard, and you’ll die screaming.” He closed one eye and peered at Jordan. “That make sense?”
  “I don’t know,” Jordan said uncomfortably.
  “You get perspective. You can stand outside your own death, a little. Not while you’re dying, though.”
  • Chapter 11 (pp. 156-157)

• Just because something is convincing, that does not make it true. It is merely convincing.
  • Chapter 15 (p. 227)

• She started threatening the stability of the ruling classes, at least in their own eyes. No ruler who does that ever stands for long.
  • Chapter 17 (p. 245)

• “Humans become violent when they feel their interest are threatened.”
  Galas scowled. “They were never threatened! Parliament is a rumor mill staffed by trough-fed clods who abuse the tongue of their birth every time they open their mouths. They all gabble at once and confuse one another mightily, and when this confusion is committed to paper they refer to it as ‘policy.’”
  • Chapter 17 (p. 246)

• “Which do you prefer?”
  Armiger leaned over her and kissed her cheek. “Which what do I prefer?”
  “Do you prefer making love or reading?” Her voice held a teasing note, but he had learned there were frequently hidden needs behind her teasing questions.
  “To read is to make love to the world,” he said. “But to make love to a woman is to feel like the world is reading you.”
  She smiled, not comprehending, and fell asleep.
  • Chapter 19 (p. 270)

• She looked up at the towering wisdom and felt a sudden love for it—as if these books were family.
  • Chapter 25 (p. 370)

• “It’s time to abandon the plans of the entity that enslaved me all these centuries,” he said. “And time to start making my own.”
  • Chapter 26 (p. 378)

• “All sound is music,” he had said, “and there is no place without sound.”
  • Chapter 29 (p. 413)

• In the end, her written ideology, the philosophy and new morals she had preached, were all means to an end. That end could never be reached; Armiger had taught her that. If so, then what mattered their disappointment, their disillusionment? They would hate her for leaving them alive, but they would be alive, and a life lived in bitterness was still better than a death colored by useless fanaticism.
  • Chapter 31 (p. 443)

• When she looked around, she saw the same expression of mindless fear in the eyes of the men with her. They were all in the same boat—carried forward by habits of training, minds blank with fear hence too stupid to sensibly turn and run. It was this stupor of fear that would later be counted as courage.
  • Chapter 31 (p. 447)

• The richest billionaire has to realize that the gods next door take no more notice of him than he would a bug.
  • Chapter 34 (p. 484)

• He was acutely aware of how little attention the people who lived here actually paid to their immediate environment. They seemed cut off from their own senses, cocooned away from their bodies in the infinite spaces of inscape. Cybernetic realities were more real to most people now than their own lives, it seemed. And any connection between those internal spaces and the physical world seemed entirely accidental.
  • Chapter 37 (p. 543)

• “It’s not that simple.”
  “Ah! That phrase is Male for ‘I’m afraid to.’”
  • Chapter 40 (p. 586)

• “What if they don’t surrender?”
  “My Lady,” he said, “you never ask that question after you’ve gone to war.”
  • Chapter 41 (p. 599)

• Her own sincerity returned to her now like the remembrance of a crime.
  • Chapter 43 (p. 623)

• “Something’s wrong.”
  Axel shrugged. “That statement probably applies to every second I’ve spent on this blasted world.”
  • Chapter 44 (p. 632)

• “Then you have no more wish to rule? The country needs you now more than ever.”
  She shook her head. “I’ve been crushed under the weight of power all my life. I think I’m going to enjoy missing it.” She laughed at the lightness with which she dismissed royal power. Every moment was a surprise, these days. She hoped that that feeling would never end.
  • Chapter 45 (p. 655)

Lady of Mazes (2005)

Page numbers from the hardcover first edition published by Tor

Ellipses (except on page 126) indicate minor elisions of description

• The being was trying to get him to think about what he was saying, not just recite.
  • Chapter 5 (p. 45)

• In such a way she had done what her people prized above all else: she had given her respect to those different from herself.
  • Chapter 7 (p. 66)

• Idiots. They were losing everything because of their short-sightedness. Maybe they deserved to lose it.
  • Chapter 8 (p. 89)

• “I am the Government,” she said. “I am a force of omniscience and unparalleled power within the human part of the Archipelago. I am a public-domain distributed artificial intelligence. I have made all human institutions redundant, for I am the personal and intimate friend of each and every one of the trillion humans under my domain. I am the selfless advocate of each of them, from the lowliest to the greatest.
  The only problem is...Well, nobody listens to me much anymore.”
  • Chapter 12 (p. 126)

• “The fact is, there’s no such thing as an ultimate state of consciousness. It’s a myth; sentience has meaning only insofar as it’s connected into the physical world...
  If you’d like to see it, here’s a view of the Omega Point.” It gestured to open a large inscape window in the sky. Instantly Doran’s head was filled with an undifferentiated roar; white noise matched in the window by endless video snow.
  Choronzon laughed. “The more information there is in a signal, the more it resembles noise. You’re looking at infinite information density, gentlemen, a signal so packed with information that it has become noise. These idiots pushed so far in one direction that they ended up at the opposite pole...
  Perhaps the fanatics of Omega Point had gotten their wish, but if so they had been mistaken in thinking that the Absolute was something that hadn’t been there all along. Absolute meaning, it seemed, was no different from no meaning at all.
  • Chapter 14 (p. 158)

• They see something they may never have seen before: a normal human reacting normally to a traumatic situation. Livia, these people have been insulated within inscape their whole lives. They have lived in a world where their merest whim could be granted with a thought. Reality has always conformed to their desires—never the other way around. Now they find themselves in a world that obstinately refuses to change itself to fit their imagination. They literally have no idea how to respond.
  • Chapter 14 (p. 159)

• “You know I was once a human being, too, Doran. I remember how hard it was to marshal all the resources I needed to cure myself of the affliction. I also remember, quite clearly, how I always told people I had no interest in self-deification. It was a useful and sometimes necessary shield against interference.”
  “Blow off,” said Doran. “Unless you have some specific threat you want to use on me.”
  Choronzon laughed. “Not a threat. Just curiosity as to why someone so violently opposed to improving on the human model should decide to go against all his principles.”
  “Sometimes,” said Doran icily, “mature people do things they don’t want to do. It’s called following higher principles. But someone without mortal concerns, say, like yourself, wouldn’t understand that.”
  • Chapter 14 (p. 161)

• “I haven’t organized my life as a narrative, you know. I’m not sure you’ll understand.”
  “As listeners, we are not required to understand,” said Qiingi. “Only to care.”
  • Chapter 16 (p. 176)

• “The great commandment of the narratives is that your life must be meaningful,” said Charon. “If knowing the truth strips the meaning away, then the truth must be suppressed.”
  • Chapter 16 (p. 179)

• What’s real is what’s valuable. Everything else is just an illusion.
  • Chapter 17 (p. 183)

• Even the gods fight boredom in vain.
  • Chapter 22 (p. 252)

• Each technology equated to some human value or set of values, she saw. She’d known that. But on Earth, in the Archipelago and everywhere else, technologies came first, and values changed to accommodate them. Under the locks, values were the keys to access or shut away technologies...
  The locks proclaimed that there were no neutral technologies. The devices and methods people used didn’t just represent certain values—they were those values, in some way.
  • Chapter 23 (pp. 255-256)

• But what good’s abundance if nobody can experience it?
  • Chapter 23 (p. 256)

• That’s what being human means: to be master of your own fate.
  • Chapter 23 (p. 262)

• Our whole life we’ve lived in a world of softened edges and easy decisions. All except once. One time, when someone had to look at the world through adult eyes and even the grown-ups who survived the crash with us failed the test. Someone had to look at the world as it was, and make the hard decisions that were necessary—not to romanticize, not to retreat into illusions. You did it then. I’m asking you to do it again. See what’s really going on here. See what’s real.
  • Chapter 24 (p. 265)

• Only the dead are free of the influence of others.
  • Chapter 24 (p. 266)

• “Technologies are control systems,” she said. “They dictate your reality.”
  • Chapter 25 (p. 277)