欧宝娱乐

“For now. But if I ever decide you're useless, you are a dead man."
To be killed by you is to be desired more than a life excluded from your service."
Bravo." Her Imperial Viciousness laughed with genuine feeling. "Bra-vo!”
― Frank Beddor, Seeing Redd

“It is puerile to reduce imperial history to a matter of 'good' and 'bad'; trying to weigh up the positive and negative in this way is like defending the morality of kicking a random old man in the shins one afternoon because you helped an old lady across the road in the morning.”
― Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain

“Imperial is like Robert Caro鈥檚 The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis鈥檚 City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee鈥檚 cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote s茅ance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau鈥檚 great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)”
― Sam Anderson - NY Magazine

“Goldie was a believer in the imperial project, which is to say, in the civilising power of social progress.”
― Damon Galgut

“The Imperial Senate, ever conscious of the weight of public opinion resting on the tip of the pencil come voting day, wanted to be fair and just 鈥� or at least appear that way. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there was little love lost between Imperial troops and the locals who viewed each other with little short of open hostility, and often through the sighting devices attached to weaponry of various diverse descriptions.”
― Christina Engela, Dead Beckoning

“It did occur to him that perhaps he鈥檇 gone to the wrong Academy 鈥� the guys in the Space Fleet always had more interesting stories to tell at the spaceport bars. You know, tales about the dude who got vaporized in a plasma accident in the engineering section, or the fella who got turned into a blob of weird space jelly by some alien virus 鈥� or the time someone flew a starship into an astor-field at warp four by mistake (they were still trying to find the black box on that one). The Imperial Space Fleet鈥檚 recruiting office sure didn鈥檛 go around advertising 鈥楯oin up, see the universe, meet interesting aliens and die screaming鈥�, but it was known there were risks involved. It was part of the job after all, and yet somehow, they still got recruits signing up in droves. Yes, indeedy 鈥� the stories were far more interesting than his 鈥� took a load of ore to Gorda, took a load of mining equipment back to Tordrazil. Took a load of Florpavian Flame-birds to a zoo on Deanna, took a load of machinery to Salus. Picked up and dropped off a few passengers on the way. Still, Florpavian Flame-birds were a risky cargo鈥� and damned tricky to transport 鈥� which is probably the only reason he鈥檇 had any entertainment at all on the last trip.”
― Christina Engela, Black Sunrise

“While browsing through the Seattle Art Museum in 1945, a scholar discovered a 5-inch jade seal, missing from China since the Boxer Rebellion, as a priceless Imperial seal. 鈥淢y spectacles fell off my nose and I started to yell,鈥� said Hugh Alexander Matier, 62-year-old scholar and traveler.”
― Noel Marie Fletcher, Two Years in the Forbidden City

“All eyes were turned to the newly minted princess, Her Imperial Highness Princess Izumi, aka the Lost Butterfly. The wedding marked her first formal entrance into Japan society. Would she fly---or fall?
HIH Princess Izumi certainly dressed the part in a jade silk gown and Mikimoto pearls, pulled from the imperial vaults and gifted by the empress.”
― Emiko Jean, Tokyo Ever After