Neu gelesen:

Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas

Mein erster Band der "Culture"-Serie und ich bin schon sehr gespannt, wie sich alles entwickelt. Auf jeden Fall tut es gut, wieder Science Fiction zu lesen und dazu so guten, dem man überhaupt nicht anmerkt, daß er vor 26 Jahren geschrieben wurde. (Ja, auch SFs können sich überholen..) Die Sommerlektüre ist schonmal gerettet.

He could not believe the ordinary people in the Culture really wanted the war, no matter how they had voted. They had their communist Utopia. They were soft and pampered and indulged, and the Contact section's evangelical materialism provided their conscience-salving good works. What more could they want? The war had to be the Mind's idea; it was part of their clinical drive to clean up the galaxy, make it run on nice, efficient lines, without waste, injustice or suffering. The fools in the Culture couldn't see that one day the Minds would start thinking how wasteful and inefficient the humans in the Culture themselves were.

For what the Idirans regarded as essentially an animal (their word for humanoids was best translated as "biotomaton"), only the behaviour of devotion was required; his heart and mind were of no consequence. When Horza had asked, what of his immortal soul? Xoralundra had laughed. It was the first and only time Horza had experienced such a thing from the old warrior. Whoever heard of a mortal body having an immortal soul?

(Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas, 1987)