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26e9494
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Here, listen to this; a poem by a Greek who lived in Alexandria, one Cavafy: "You said, 'I shall go to another land to another sea Another city will be found better than this. My every effort is a written indictment And my heart--like the dead--is buried. How long will my mind be in this decay,' "and so on like that, it's the same old song we know so well--if only I were somewhere else, I would be happy. Until the poet replies to his poor f..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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724e65a
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So it's still New York. People can't give up on it. It's what economists used to call the tyranny of sunk costs: once you've put so much time and money into a project, it gets hard to just eat your losses and walk. You are forced by the structure of the situation to throw good money after bad, grow obsessed, double down, escalate your commitment, and become a mad gibbering apartment dweller, unable to imagine leaving. You persevere unto dea..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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780f63e
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Becoming a shaman is a fate that can strike anyone. Even you.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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090bc8d
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So that human beings were miraculous indeed - conscious creators, walking this new world like fresh young gods, wielding immense alchemical powers. So that anyone Michel met on Mars he regarded curiously, wondering as he looked at their often innocuous exteriors what kind of new Paracelsus or Isaac of Holland stood before him, and whether they would turn lead to gold, or cause rocks to blossom.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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7cf7573
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Maya felt the turbulent maelstrom of emotions inside her, stirred by all she had seen on her circumnavigation, by all that had happened and all that was going to happen... ah, the floods within her, the flash floods in her mind! If only she could accomplish the same yoking of her spirit that they had with this aquifer - drain it, control it, make it sane. But the hydrostatic pressures were so intense, the outbreaks when they came so fierce...
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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b5f65cb
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If you want to write a novel about our world now, you'd better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain confused.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4aa051d
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Yeah, hey you know carbon sinks are so crucial, scrubbing CO2 out of the air may eventually turn out to be our only option, so maybe we should reverse those two clauses. Make carbon sinks come first and the climate-neutral power plants second in that paragraph." "You think?" "Yes. Definitely. Carbon sinks could be the only way that our kids, and about a thousand years' worth of kids actually, can save themselves from living in Swamp World. ..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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cfa023a
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it's like in eco-economics where what you take from the system has to be balanced by what you give in to it, balanced or exceeded to create that anti-entropic surge which characterizes all creative life and especially this step across to a new world, this place that is neither nature nor culture, transformation of a planet into a world and then a home.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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724227b
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It's lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative.
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lawmakers
congress
law-and-order
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6dee7ac
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the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth's biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e139ba0
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This was perhaps the evolutionary usefulness of the elderly, Bao had concluded: to give the young some kind of psychic shield from reality, putting them under a description which allowed them to ignore the fact that age and death would come to them too, and could come early and out of sequence.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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fc62633
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The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.
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youth
wisdom
vitality
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6538ddb
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No one cares about books, that's why you can write anything you want in them.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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51f34fe
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We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. It is usually attention given to some other consciousness, but not always; the attention can be to something unconscious, even inanimate. But the attention seems often to be called out by a fellow consciousness. Something about it compels attention, and rewards attention. That attention is what we call love.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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5c0987d
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The outdoors is what you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into a taxicab. said Fran Lebowitz
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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9b5d8c3
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Maybe this was the way it had always happened, with no fate ever involved; you simply fell in with the people around you, and no matter what else happened in history or the great world, for the individual it was always a matter of local acquaintances--the village, the platoon, the work unit, the monastery or madressa, the zawiyya or farm or apartment block, or ship, or neighborhood--these formed the true circumference of one's world, some t..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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276e80a
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All the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e12add2
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people six hundred years later are still complaining about violence inflicted on their ancestors." "I think you will find that in most of those cases, there are fresh or current problems that are being given some kind of historical reinforcement or ratification. If any of these resentful populations were prospering, the distant past would only be history. People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present." "Maybe so. But ..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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906bfce
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The one who tells the stories rules the world.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ec46570
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But to say self-interest is all that exists, or that it should be given free rein! My Lord. Believe that and nothing matters but money.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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8c5b36f
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Self-reliance my ass. We're fucking monkeys. It's always about teamwork.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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699a0b1
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knowing too that [the sky] was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything.
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beauty-in-nature
sky
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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039c0ad
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Charlotte was coming to believe that arrogance was a quality not just correlated with but a manifestation of stupidity, a result of stupidity.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2f67335
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Tiny parasites inside you, big parasites outside you, people living from your work even though they stay on the other side of the world, making you do it by the force of laws and guns. Laws like mistletoe!
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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bb5bf4a
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So she fixes things by thinking about them!
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2be98f5
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Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked, generation after generation; give them three thousand calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and cog..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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aea88f2
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Something to consider: going as fast as we are, if we flew right into the outer layers of the sun, we might emerge again from the sun before there was time for us to heat and burn up. That would create a very considerable deceleration. Indeed, as a calculation quickly shows, too much deceleration. We would perhaps survive; our humans, not. So the more complicated solution of gravitational drag must be studied. Would however have been intere..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e7f8716
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And analogies were mostly meaningless--a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy).
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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415d2b5
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The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History.
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politics
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2674db7
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Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Idiocy (from the Greek word idios, for self)? Would Turing acknowledge it as a proof of human behavior? Well, perhaps. They drove Turing to suicide too.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2427cf1
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Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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5e45261
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To her data analysis was the ugly love child of science and Kafka,
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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615a12b
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I guess you'll have to try to do something with F's moon now. Presumably it's dead. Or even try E." He looked up at it, big in the blue sky. "Well, no. It's too big. Too heavy." Two minutes later: "Maybe you can just keep living on the ship, and stock up on whatever you run out of, from here and from E. Terraform F's moon if you can. Or maybe you can resupply and get to another system entirely. I seem to recall there's a G star just a few m..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e6e9b1d
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Bugs like these we've got here, you aren't going to find those unless you slow down and hunt really hard. Live nearby for a while and look. At which point it's too late, if you get a bad result. You're out of luck then." Long silence as he walked south along the beach. Then: "It's too bad. It really is a very pretty world." Later: "What's funny is anyone thinking it would work in the first place. I mean it's obvious any new place is going t..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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045d566
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Ship, are you conscious now?" "My speaking establishes a subject position that might be conscious."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f39bd95
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Bad things don't just grow on one path, they're everywhere. So don't blame yourself when those things happen. Don't let yesterday take up much of today.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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1fd0cee
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Chalmers stopped listening and let his gaze wander over the new city. They were going to call it Nicosia. It was the first town of any size to be built free-standing on the Martian surface; all the buildings were set inside what was in effect an immense clear tent, supported by a nearly invisible frame, and placed on the rise of Tharsis, west of Noctis Labyrinthus. This location gave it a tremendous view, with a distant western horizon punc..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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47b695f
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So now as always you could get AAA ratings, not for subprime mortgages, obviously bad, but for submarine mortgages, clearly much better! And the fact that all submarine properties were in some sense extremely subprime was not mentioned except as one aspect of the very lucrative risks involved.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2662d31
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The Earth is bathed in a flood of sunlight. A fierce inundation of photons--on average, 342 joules per second per square meter. 4185 joules (one calorie) will raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. If all this energy were captured by the Earth's atmosphere, its temperature would rise by ten degrees Celsius in one day. Luckily much of it radiates back to space. How much depends on albedo and the chemical compos..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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589cac4
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omnipresent sublime,
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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b516847
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Maybe that's what a marriage is," Mqaret said. "Whistling together. Some kind of performance. I mean, not just a conversation, but a performance."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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33a82de
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You're not a conventional man." "No!" He hooted. "I never claimed to be! Except before certain selection committees of course. A conventional man! Ah, ha ha ha ha ha!--the conventional men get Maya. That is their reward." And he laughed like a wild man."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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811d662
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There's no new world, my friend, no New seas, no other planets, nowhere to flee-- You're tied in a knot you can never undo When you realize Earth is a starship too." "Ahh,"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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443b13b
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It's fragile what we know. It's gone every time we forget. Then someone has to learn it all over again.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |