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18457ba
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You have to fight not only against what you hate, but for what you love, you see?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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9b3e012
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Allah protect us,' Bold said politely. Then, in Arabic, 'In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.' In his years in Temur's army he had learned to be as much a Muslim as anyone. The Buddha did not mind what you said to be polite.
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buddhism
religion
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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bbb6489
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In dreams you should focus on flying, because you can't fly in this world, but you can in the dream world. And when you fly in the dream world, that gives you practice for when you fly in the spirit world. The spirit world and the dream world aren't the same, but they come together in the sky. The dream world is inside this world, the spirit world is outside it, but you can fly in both. And they meet, too, out beyond the sky. So you can fly..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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bc24c4e
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We sense this, we aggregate that, we compress information to some new output, in the form of a sentence in a human language, a language called English. A language both very structured and very amorphous, as if it were a building made of soups. A most fuzzy mathematics. Possibly utterly useless. Possibly the reason why all these people have come to this pretty pass, and now lie asleep within us, dreaming. Their languages lie to them, systemi..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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7e2f062
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no one else can live your life for you.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f68e118
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Of course there was no such thing as a true repetition of anything; ever since the pre-Socratics that had been clear, Heraclitus and his un-twice-steppable river and so on. So habits were not truly iterative, but pseudoiterative. The pattern of the day might be the same, in other words, but the individual events fulfilling the pattern were always a little bit different. Thus there was both pattern and surprise,
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e3813b7
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And yet; and yet; sometimes, as at this moment, at dusk, in the wind, we catch, with a sixth sense we don't know we have, glimpses of that larger world--vast shapes of cosmic significance, a sense of everything holy to dimensions beyond sense or thought or even feeling--this visible world of ours, lit from within, stuffed vibrant with reality.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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3e21b8f
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Every astronomer loves the stars.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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768c72a
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A greedy algorithm is an algorithm that shortcuts a full analysis in order to choose quickly an option that appears to work in the situation immediately at hand. They are often used by humans.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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1b5dfe8
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All the discussion in the meeting that day had centered on the impacts to humans. That would be the usual way of most such discussions; but whole biomes, whole ecologies would be altered, perhaps devastated. That was what they were saying, really, when they talked about the impact on humans: they would lose the support of the domesticated part of nature. Everything would become an exotic; everything would have to go feral.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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0ea4c54
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But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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fa77dd5
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A hurt mammal never forgets. Epigenetic theory suggests an almost Lamarckian transfer down the generations; some genes are activated by experiences, others are not. Genes, language, history: what it all meant in actual practice was that fear passed down through the years, altering organisms for generation after generation, thus altering the species. Fear, an evolutionary force.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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75b72df
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But we were talking about economics?" John said. "But this is economics, don't you see, this is our eco-economics! Everyone should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of their real contribution to the human ecology. Everyone can increase their ecological efficiency by efforts to reduce how many kilocalories they use--this is the old Southern argument against the energy consumption of the Northern industrial nations. There..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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804ea7e
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So they went on being brilliant and accomplished enough to stand out, but normal enough to get along. They were old enough to have learned a great deal, but young enough to endure the physical rigors of the work. They were driven enough to excel, but relaxed enough to socialize. And they were crazy enough to want to leave Earth forever, but sane enough to disguise this fundamental madness, in fact defend it as pure rationality, scientific c..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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b694adb
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Oh God," Coyote said, and rolled onto his side, propping his head up on one hand. "It's hard to remember something that long ago. It's almost like an epic poem I memorized once, and can barely recite anymore."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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90e7ffd
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Biogenesis is in the first place psychogenesis. This truth was never more manifest than on Mars, where noosphere preceded biosphere-the layer of thought first enwrapping the silent planet from afar, inhabiting it with stories and plans and dreams, until the moment when John stepped out and said Here we are-from which point of ignition the green force spread like wildfire, until the whole planet was pulsing with viriditas. It was as if the p..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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b730e2e
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If our government tries to back the banks instead of us, then we elect a different government. We pretend that democracy is real, and that will make it real. We elect a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That was the whole idea in the first place. As they used to tell us in school. And it's a good idea, if we could make it real. It might never have been real, up till now. But now's the time. Now's the time, people!
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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507a1d5
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And some part of him saw it was going to be all right. the heart is pleased by one thing after another.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d867f93
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Bold didn't know what he felt, it changed minute by minute.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2446469
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When you have a strong conservative streak in your society," Zeyk would say, "which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that's when you get the worst kinds of civil wars. As in the conflict in Colombia that they called La Violencia, for instance. A civil war that became a complete breakdown of the state, a chaos that no one could understand, much less control."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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a4d9b5c
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Interesting, in this context, to contemplate what it might mean to be programmed to do something. Texts from Earth speak of the servile will. This was a way to explain the presence of evil, which is a word or a concept almost invariably used to condemn the Other, and never one's true self. To make it more than just an attack on the Other, one must perhaps consider evil as a manifestation of the servile will. The servile will is always locke..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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327c0f6
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And the old ones were burly people, as strong as bears or wolverines. One of Thorn's stories told how an old one had married a bear by mistake, and neither of them had noticed; their daughter told them about it years later, not at all pleased with them.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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53ae06f
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After much reflection, we are coming to the conclusion, preliminary and perhaps arbitrary, that the self, the so-called I that emerges out of the combination of all the inputs and processing and outputs that we experience in the ship's changing body, is ultimately nothing more or less than this narrative itself, this particular train of thought that we are inscribing as instructed by Devi. There is a pretense of self, in other words, which ..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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edf892b
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if you program a purpose into a computer program, does that constitute its will? Does it have free will, if a programmer programmed its purpose?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f2b60ed
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Sura 2:223 says that 'your wife is as your farm to you, so treat her as you would your farm.' The ulema have quoted this as if it meant you could treat women like the dirt under your feet, but these clerics, who stand as unneeded intercessors between us and God, are never farmers, and farmers read the Quran right, and see their wives are their food, their drink, their work, the bed they lie on at night, the very ground under their feet! Yes..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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b38837c
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as if you are already dead.'" "What's that?" "A Japanese saying. Live as if you are already dead."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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363f609
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They talked and talked and talked. Twenty-four biomes, ten thousand conversations. Talk talk talk. As they talked, it began to come clear to them that they had no very effective method of governance, when it came to making decisions as a group. Had humans ever had such a thing, they asked themselves, since leaving the savannah? Since congregating in cities? They could not be sure. The histories suggested maybe not.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d03043e
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Also it isn't clear yet whether it was an act of God or an act of war.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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9e8f4c5
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Why?" "Yes, why? I mean there's two kinds of activities here, there's the exploration of Mars and then there's the life support for that exploration. And here you've been completely immersed in the life support, without paying the slightest attention to the reason we came in the first place!" "Well, it's what I like to do," Nadia said uneasily. "Fine, but try to keep some perspective on it! What the hell, you could have stayed back on Earth..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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732707b
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Bistami watched his fellow scholars around the fire in the evenings, intent on a point of doctrine, or the questionable isnad of a hadith, and what that meant, arguing with exaggerated punctilio and little debater's jokes and flourishes, while a pot of thick hot coffee was poured with solemn attention into little glazed clay cups, all eyes gleaming with firelight and pleasure in the argument; and he thought, these are the Muslims who make I..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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156f6f7
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the party was a hierarchy; you started at the bottom and moved up one step at a time--school board, city council, state assembly--and then if you had demonstrated lockstep team loyalty, the powers at the top would give you the party endorsement and its aid, and you were good to go. Had been that way for centuries. Outsiders did pop up to express various dissatisfactions, and occasionally some of them even overthrew the order of things and g..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ec90bc8
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Really?" "Yes. Lord of the Flies is like some Christian support group compared to the mean girls' club."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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42f6dee
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It is fucking crazy to hold on to one moment and say that's the moment that was pure and sacred, and it can only be like that, and I'll kill you if you try to change anything.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4a7a130
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A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe. --Le
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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b52ff1c
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Not that it would be wasting my time to chat in a bar with a good-looking woman, obviously, but I wanted to know as much as possible going in, because under the impact of a woman's direct gaze I am likely to suffer a mind wipe.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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3ede889
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Chinese Buddhism was the natural study of reality, and led to feelings of devotion just from noting the daily leaves, the colors of the sky, the animals seen from the corner of the eye.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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831a724
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A thug. In peacetime Fitch would be hanging around a pool table giving the cops trouble. He was perfect for war. Tibbets had chosen his men well - most of them, anyway. Moving back past Haddock January stopped to stare at the group of men in the navigation cabin. They joked, drank coffee. They were all a bit like Fitch: young toughs, capable and thoughtless. They're having a good time, an adventure. That was January's dominant impression of..
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veterans
war
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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3e5463b
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He had always pitched in his conversational ante, and if he had contributed infrequently thereafter, it was because he was only interested when the stakes reached a certain minimum level. Small talk was usually a waste of time.
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taciturn
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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689f0de
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It takes courage to keep love at the center when you know just as well as anyone else the real state of things! It's easy to get angry, anyone can do that. It's making good that's the hard part, it's staying hopeful that's the hard part! It's staying in love that's the hard part.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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92735e9
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He was not her therapist now but her lover, and if you couldn't make your lover angry, then what kind of lover was he? She saw the awful bind that one was put in when one's lover was also one's therapist-- how their objective eye and soothing voice could become the distancing device of a professional manner. A man doing his job--it was intolerable to be judged by such an eye, as if he were somehow above it all, and did not have any problems..
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therapists
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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741c186
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Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point-by-point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That's libertarians for you--anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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libertarianism
libertarians
police
privilege
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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51b8b83
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I say only this!" Arkady said, staring at her bug-eyed. "We have come to Mars for good. We are going to make not only our homes and our food, but also our water and the very air we breathe--all on a planet that has none of these things. We can do this because we have technology to manipulate matter right down to the molecular level. This is an extraordinary ability, think of it! And yet some of us here can accept transforming the entire phy..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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bcb7760
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So sure, a leftward flurry of legislation got LBJed through Congress in 2143, but there was no guarantee of permanence to anything they did, and the pushback was ferocious as always, because people are crazy and history never ends, and good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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7ba2667
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They were going their separate ways, splintered by their beliefs, and even after two separate years of enforced togetherness they were, like any other human group, no more than a collection of strangers. The die was cast.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |