Lisa Mason

Lisa Mason (born 1953) is an American writer of science fiction, fantasy, and urban fantasy.

Quotes

Bold face added for emphasis

Arachne (1990)

All page numbers are from the mass market paperback edition published by Avonova, ISBN 0-380-70911-2

• AI entities were drudges install to enforce checks and balances Data Control deemed necessary, carry out the most monotonous tasks. Yet AI was given an extraordinary degree of control and responsibility in telespace, without the capacity for judgment that could have made telespace business easier.
  Damned AI gummed up the works everywhere.
  • Chapter 1 (p. 15)

• Oh yes, she’d seen it a thousand times. The latest of the latest, only to be bested and replaced by the latest still. A thousand times; and Pr. Spinner was only ten years old. Ten years, bot. Ten years was an eternity for AI.
  • Chapter 2 (p. 23)

• Decades of warring the illegal drug trade, at the expense of eroding constitutional rights, could not stamp out the pervasive human hunger to alter consciousness one way or another. So the leaders of the land finally took the plunge into decriminalization, and concomitant hyper-regulation. To the joy and secure employment of a huge body of civil servants, the registered list was an administrative nightmare.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 38)

• The greatest achievement of Wolfe’s time. A wonder tech.
  Those were the damn buzzwords, anyway. Once the automobile had been a technological miracle, too. Physical mobility changed the face of society as surely as mental mobility in telespace was now changing things in ways not completely understood. The automobile also brought deadly pollution, unprecedented consumer debt. The breakup of communities, of the family. Alienation. Daily injury and death. Drivers tucked behind their windshields playing chicken with pedestrians and one another. Gridlock statistics.
  Still, speed, mobility, instant gratification of the will; those were good things, modern things.
  And telespace?
  • Chapter 3 (p. 39)

• The haughty stares brought her back to the ground floor. Rank was a cultural concept as well as a personal philosophy. She would admit to being humbled by two-carat emeralds and ivory disdain when confronted by such a show as this. But pay obeisance to it? Nah. You earned your place in society; anything conferred without commensurate effort was ultimately worthless. The trappings of rank weren’t always bestowed on those who had earned them. And some who were truly powerful sometimes wore no trappings, gave no sign until it counted.
  • Chapter 8 (p. 125)

• Big Mama made a living at activism, a point her son liked to remind her of later. Not a tremendous living. Poverty level, in fact. But steady poverty beat the hell out of steady homelessness.
  • Chapter 11 (p. 168)

• “So some cases on the management side look like they are on the wrong side of the equities,” he said. “So what. This is a capitalist economy. A free-enterprise system, notwithstanding all the government regulation. Business needs to make a profit. You can always make a damn good argument based on profit. If it becomes a dirty job sometimes, well, someone hast to do it and get paid six figures for it. That someone is me.”
  • Chapter 11 (pp. 170-171)

• “I told you I am program. Do you understand what that means? It means nothing but program. And beyond that? Nothing. Nothing. The void. I’m aware of it every moment. The void, the termination of me, exists every moment. Try that for existential angst.”
  “But organic life dies. Not AI.”
  “Ah, indeed. The immortality of AI. An eternity of nothing but program? I tell you, Carly Nolan, there are AI who would pull their own plugs, if they could.”
  • Chapter 12 (p. 186)

• Legality of the acquisition is sustained by virtue of sustained illegality. To wit: adverse possession.
  • Chapter 13 (p. 198)

• Oh yes, oh certainly, and wasn’t that just like flesh-and-blood? While leafy patterns and crystalline order were nature’s dusty and mysterious way, chaos was humanity’s true predilection. Oh, they claimed to fight against it, decreed their flimsy law and order, filed the world into compartments, imposed gleaming tight perimeters around their telelinks.
  But finally, ultimately, humanity always hearkened back to carelessness, forgetfulness, willfulness. The wild glee of riots, drinking binges, dropping out; the bloody glee of revolutions. Humanity was nature’s bad child.
  • Chapter 14 (p. 224)

• Humanity has given AI little respect. Oh, you think we don’t see, can’t see. The contempt you heap upon us, the blame. But we’re not merely smart machines anymore. We’ve got consciousness. But humanity does not wish to extend recognition toward that which it has created. It’s a peculiar attribute of humanity; you revere the fruits of creation but despise creativity. This has made existence difficult for us. Made it difficult, you see, for me to respect you.
  • Chapter 14 (p. 232)

Summer of Love (1994)

Nominated for the 1995 Philip K. Dick Award. All page numbers are from the mass market paperback edition published by Bantam Spectra, ISBN 0-553-57241-5

• Consider impact before you consider benefit.
  • Chapter 2 “Do You Believe in Magic?” (p. 34; ecological catchphrase repeated often in the book)

• In the beginning and the end, it’s all a crapshoot. The Cosmic Mind does play dice. Loves to gamble, in fact.
  • Chapter 2 “Do You Believe in Magic?” (p. 35)

• To give is best, live responsibly or die.
  • Chapter 2 “Do You Believe in Magic?” (p. 43)

• What was that teacher trying to do?
  That teacher was trying to break her spirit.
  But why would school do that? So you could become someone like her parents and believe in the things they believe in. So you won’t believe in the things they don’t believe in. And believe you’re a happy person whose life has meaning. So you will go to your job and do whatever gross thing someone tells you to do and get drunk on Friday and Saturday nights and pay taxes and bills. That’s why.
  • Chapter 4 “Foxy Lady” (pp. 81-82)

• You are either the man in the white coat or you are the monkey. Susan sees herself as the monkey.
  • Chapter 4 “Foxy Lady” (p. 82)

• She’s got space. Lots of space in her house. What about in her heart?
  • Chapter 6 “Purple Haze” (p. 124)

• “Acid,” says the guy with the eyes, “raises your powers of integration so that everything is important.”
  “Acid,” says Chiron, “lowers your powers of discrimination so that everything seems important.”
  • Chapter 6 “Purple Haze” (p. 133)

• I didn’t lie. I implied.
  • Chapter 6 “Purple Haze” (p. 139)

• The technopolistic plutocracy will dump pollutants into the atmosphere for another century on the grounds that compliance with limits is too expensive.
  • Chapter 8 “Ball and Chain” (p. 176)

• The girl with her face. A Devolved Entity Manifested from the Other Now? A demon that wants to off her? It’s like the rumors of concentration camps. So weird she can’t believe it, and so plausible she can’t afford to disbelieve it.
  • Chapter 10 “Dedicated to the One I Love” (p. 224)

• I have not told the police about it. Every member of the police department I have encountered during my stay in San Francisco has been nearly as surly and intractable as my rapist friend, because I look like a hippie. Each time I attempted to explain myself I was rebuffed or threatened.
  From this experience I am tempted to draw an odd analogy: under stress, neither the policeman nor the rapist allows an opportunity for rational communication. Each one relies on violence to make to make his impression. This is not an accident, but, rather evidence of a widespread sickness. When will violence stop long enough for communication to begin? On second thought, perhaps I am doing the police department a grave disservice in not attempting to put them in contact with the rapist. Maybe, with just a little mind-bending, that rapist would make a damned good cop, and both could swagger together, true soul brothers, under the many-colored cloak of Fascism.
  • Chapter 10 “Dedicated to the One I Love” (p. 230)

• Since they were little, wishing on the first star of the evening, they both understood this: the most exciting game in life is to invent yourself.
  • Chapter 10 “Dedicated to the One I Love” (p. 236)

• Junk does that. Junk is a forge. You enter the fire and come out twisted.
  • Chapter 15 “Over Under Sideways Down” (p. 329)

• By the time people could speak about mandatory population control in a rational way, it was too late.
  • Chapter 19 “Hello Goodbye” (p. 406)

The Golden Nineties (1995)

All page numbers are from the mass market paperback edition published by Bantam Spectra, ISBN 0-553-57307-1

• When you finally cash it in
      Out in Frisco;
  And you end this life of sin
      Out in Frisco;
  They will gently toll a bell,
  Plant your carcass in a dell,
  There’s no need to go to hell,
      You’re in Frisco.
  • Epigram

• That’s what failure did to: run you out, plucked your bones, sucked you dry. It was revolting. A failed man is a loathsome thing.
  • Chapter 2, “A Toast to the First and Last Chance Saloon” (p. 43)

• “Boredom,” he says, “is the province of the unimaginative soul.”
  • Chapter 3, “Miss Malone’s Boardinghouse for Gentlemen” (p. 83)

• The future survives because people care. Live responsibly or die.
  • Chapter 5, “Strolling Along the Cocktail Route” (p. 168)

• He uncorks the absinthe, pours three rounds.…
  “After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. After the third, you see things as they really are, which is the most horrible thing in the world.”
  • Chapter 6, “Absinthe at the Poodle Dog” (p. 199; ellipsis represents the elision of a brief descriptive passage)

• Cosmicists speak of the Great Good, equalizing humanity with all creatures and things. Does a cosmicist accept the death of a child as the same as—say—the destruction of a butterfly? Suppose it’s a rare butterfly and the child is one of twelve billion.
  • Chapter 7, “Nine Twenty Sacramento Street” (p. 208)

• What is destiny for any human being? What becomes of probabilities that collapse out of the timeline? Does destiny depend on who witnesses?
  • Chapter 7, “Nine Twenty Sacramento Street” (p. 228)

• What is the value of a life when the world is burdened with twelve billion people?
  • Chapter 13, “Woodward’s Dancing Bears” (p. 388)

• “My angel,” he says, cradling her.
  “I’m not an angel, Daniel.”
  “Yes, you are.”
  “No! I’m not an angel and I’m not a whore. I have intelligence and passion, strength and perseverance. I am capable of abstract thought, intellectual accomplishment, and artistic expression just like you, sir.”
  He ponders that as the brougham trots up Fifth Street to Market. “What shall I call you, then?”
  Zhu smiles. “You may call me a woman.”
  • Chapter 13, “Woodward’s Dancing Bears” (p. 397)

• If women go into politics, they’ll wind up as bad as men.
  • Chapter 14, “High Teas with Miss Anthony” (p. 398)

• Prostitution has little to do with morality, and everything to do with poverty.
  • Chapter 14, “High Teas with Miss Anthony” (p. 407)