The Hyperion Cantos Highlights
Aug 15
August 15th, 2023
“The HTN stuff doesn’t simulate,” whined Cadet Radinski, the best AI expert Kassad could find and bribe to explain, “it dreams, dreams with the best historical accuracy in the Web—way beyond the sum of its parts cause it plugs in holistic insight as well as facts—and when it dreams, it lets us dream with it.”
loc. 2180-2182
The Code demanded a forsaking of nuclear weapons and strategic bombing campaigns in all but the most extreme cases but, more than that, it demanded a return to Old Earth medieval concepts of set battles between small, professional forces at a mutually agreed-upon time in a place where destruction of public and private property would be kept to a minimum.
loc. 2306-2308
where the dinosaur herds were much scarcer.
loc. 3026-3027
I be doomed to play with words the rest of my days, as if in expiation for our race’s thoughtless slaughter of its crib world. So what the hell; I became a poet.
loc. 3042-3043
I be doomed to play with words the rest of my days, as if in expiation for our race’s thoughtless slaughter of its crib world. So what the hell; I became a poet.
loc. 3042-3043
no book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.
loc. 3352-3352
She loved it enough to know that she must help in destroying it.
loc. 10815-10816
Your own UI is essentially triune/
loc. 13445-13446
the crowding of the thousands of cruciforms,
loc. 13838-13838
have met the thing twice, and I know in my heart that it is neither divine nor diabolical, but merely some organic machine from a terrible future.”
loc. 14483-14484
create the finest retrieval persona for
loc. 16139-16140
Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so. It was not obedience. It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son. Abraham was testing God.
loc. 17402-17405
Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so. It was not obedience. It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son. Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.
loc. 17402-17406
Rachmaninoff’s heart-stoppingly beautiful Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor.
loc. 17770-17770
Millions of those close to power on worlds across Pax space know the rumors of the Core’s survival …” “The rumors of our death are greatly exaggerated,” said Councillor Albedo. “So?”
loc. 30756-30758
“You will become—in the nicest sense—rats scurrying in the walls of the rooms of time,”
loc. 30872-30872
She knew the unimaginable amounts of energy that had to be transferred from the Core via the Void Which Binds to her or her siblings when they phase-shifted. The Elements had to respect even their own instruments to divert so much energy in their direction.
loc. 30873-30875
In the 1940s, the greatgrandfather of the TechnoCore—a mathematician named John von Neumann—had done all the proofs of artificial self-replication.
loc. 33323-33324
Every time a human stepped through a farcaster portal, it was as if the Core cut open that person’s skull, removed the gray matter, laid the brain out on a workbench, and hooked it up to billions of other brains in their giant, parallel-processing, organic computer. The humans completed their step from Planck space in a subjective instant of their time and never noticed the inconvenience.
loc. 33443-33445
It was the Reapers who created and first controlled the physical construct known as the Shrike.
loc. 33456-33456
“I invoke the command of Albedo and the Core, by the authority of the Three Elements I command thee!”
loc. 34265-34265
The Void Which Binds is touched by all of us who have wept with happiness, bidden a lover good-bye, been exalted with orgasm, stood over the grave of a loved one, or watched our baby open his or her eyes for the first time.”
loc. 34557-34559
friends … for learning to step across the medium of the Void Which Binds is a bit like learning to walk on water, if you will pardon the scriptural hubris, while the TechnoCore’s farcaster burrows were more like draining the oceans so as to build highways across the seabed.
loc. 34633-34635
“Aenea,” I said softly, “are you the new messiah?” I could hear her sigh. “No, Raul. I never said I was a messiah. I never wanted to be a messiah. I’m just a tired young woman right now … I’ve got a pounding headache … and cramps … it’s the first day of my period …”
loc. 35664-35666
visitors here tonight may not know that the end goal of both us Ousters and our Templar brethren is not just the Biosphere Startree which we can see above us even as we speak … but a day in which air and water and life shall fill almost all of the space between the Startree and the yellow sun we see burning above us.
loc. 37010-37012
Lourdusamy’s lust for power and Mustafa’s contusion
loc. 39398-39398