Ann Leckie
The ability to live for five hundred years would be an incredible gift. But I greatly fear it would be a gift only for the wealthy - one that might greatly widen the gap between those with access and those without.
What would it be like to live 500 years? Healthy years, of course; no one wants to live 500 years in a coma on a respirator. But reasonably healthy all that time? That would be awesome!
When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I'd work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I'd work on next, and then I'd panic.
Science fiction is huge and varied, and there's almost any sort of book or story you might imagine.
When I'm writing, I don't really have much other guide than, 'As a reader, how would I respond to this?'
I do think that narrative is very important - I think that we use narrative to organize the world around us, and so it does matter a lot what kinds of narratives we have in our inventories and which ones are reinforced so often and so strongly that we habitually reach for them without thinking.
I've seen music and songs used in stories, and while sometimes it works really well, often it doesn't.
If you're going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one.Collection: Hopeless
Things happen the way they happen because the world is the way it is.Collection: World
What, after all, was the point of civilisation if not the well-being of citizens?Collection: Citizens
To be Radchaai is to be civilised.Collection: Civilised
The Romans have provided a lot of writers with a model for various interstellar empires, of course, and no wonder. The Roman Empire is a really good example of a large empire that, in one form or another, functioned for quite a long time over a very large area. And over all that time, there was all sorts of exciting drama - civil wars and assassinations and revolts and bits breaking off and being forced back in ... But I didn't want my future - however fanciful it was - to be entirely European. The Radchaai aren't meant to be Romans in Space.Collection: War
Good necessitates evil and the two sides of that disk are not always clearly marked.Collection: Two Sides
Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings.Collection: Unity
Translator Dlique was saying, very earnestly, “Eggs are so inadequate, don't you think? I mean, they ought to be able to become anything, but instead you always get a chicken. Or a duck. Or whatever they're programmed to be. You never get anything interesting, like regret, or the middle of the night last week.Collection: Regret
It's the people without the money and the power, who desperately want to live, for those people small things aren't small at all.Collection: People
When one is the agent of order and civilisation in the universe, one doesn't stoop to negotiate. Especially with nonhumans.Collection: Order
Let every act be just, and proper, and beneficial.Collection: Beneficial
Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It's just easier to handle those with emotions.Collection: Decision
Surely it isn't illegal here to complain about young people these days? How cruel. I had thought it a basic part of human nature, one of the few universally practiced human customs.Collection: People
Or is anyone's identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?Collection: Together
If there was anything any Radchaai considered essential for civilised life, it was tea.Collection: Tea
Falling didn't bother me. I could fall forever and not be hurt. It's stopping that's the problem.Collection: Hurt
Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form. Wishes and intentions, the same. Meaningless, unless they impel you to one choice or another, some deed or course of action, however insignificant. Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.Collection: Mean