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1bbc484
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We live in a world where people pretend money can buy you anything, so money becomes the point, so we all work for money. Money is thought of as value.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2c2f12f
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Each terrarium functions as an island park for the animals inside it. Ascensions cause hybridization and ultimately new species. The more traditional biomes conserve species that on Earth are radically endangered or extinct in the wild. Some terraria even look like zoos; more are purely wilderness refugia; and most mix parkland and human spaces in patterned habitat corridors that maximize the life of the biome as a whole. As such, these spa..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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3ba93e6
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that's a large part of what economics is--people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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86b18ea
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They needed to be an independent state, sovereign perhaps, semiautonomous at least. Semiautonomy might be enough, given the realities of the two worlds; semiautonomy would justify calling it a free Mars. But in the current state of things they were no more than property, and had no real power over their own lives. Decisions were made for them a hundred million kilometers away. Their home was being chopped up into metal bits and shipped away..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6e98bb1
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Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e0b3006
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We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It's too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out. And so now we're on two, three if you count the moon. And we can change this one to make it safer to live on. Changing it won't destroy it. Reading its past might get harder, but the beauty of it won't go away...
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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69d26df
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Indeed, it has to be said that the percentage of old human sayings and proverbs that are actually true is very far from 100 percent. Seems it may be less important that it be true than that it rhyme, or show alliteration or the like. What goes around comes around: really? What does this mean?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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26934a8
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Yes, a busy space, the interstellar medium. Empty space, near vacuum: and yet still, not vacuum itself, not pure vacuum. There are forces and atoms, fields, and the ever-foaming quantum surf, in which entangled quarklike particles appear and disappear, passing in and out of the ten suspected dimensions.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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da3d404
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no extinctions from this point onward are inevitable (this has always been true, however) 19,340
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4e3d819
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When you had the world and your body as canvases, why deal in squares of wallpaper?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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c2bfe63
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They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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0780e84
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because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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9d8f37b
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Looking around the tight confines of her first home on Mars, it suddenly seemed to her that the walls were moving--beating very lightly--a kind of standing wave of double vision, as if she were standing in the low morning light looking through a temporal stereopticon, which revealed all four dimensions at once with a pulsating, hallucinatory light.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2822807
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Against our lives we would like to rebel, But we worry that then it would all go to hell." Aram"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2a3c929
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Strangely enough, without names they were still things. He could see them and think about them in terms of shapes, or numbers. Formula of description. Various combinations of conic sections and the six surfaces of revolution symmetrical around an axis, the plane, the sphere, the cylinder, the catenoid, the unduloid, and the nodoid; shapes without the names, but the shapes alone were like names. Spatializing language.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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143504b
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Destruction is creation. Become as a little child. Language as space, a kind of mathematical notation, geometric locations in the lab of memory. Reading. Maps. Codes, substitutions, the secret names of things. The glorious inrush of a word. The joy of chatter. Every color's wavelength, by number.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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b0b771d
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Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things. However, what is a similarity? My Juliet is the sun: in what sense? A
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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c5b7b55
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So we were shouted at, we were beat on. "What gives you the right to do this! Who do you think you are!" We replied to this in the thousand-voice chorus, at a volume of 115 decibels: "WE ARE THE RULE OF LAW."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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fe903a4
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There is just enough time to complete the preparation of a lander," we concluded after summarizing the situation, and the notable incidents of the past dozen years, which we had to confess were nearly nil: we entered the solar system, we hit our marks, people yelled at us, we learned some history, we became disenchanted with civilization, we ran out of fuel."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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9dcdb12
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We should think of Earth as our sun. We all revolve around it, and it exerts a huge drag on us.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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9328682
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In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself. Human
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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31c0d36
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Jevons Paradox,
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6576d63
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However, recall that every human lives under pressure. Every human feels various kinds of stress. Then things happen." Badim"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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48fc652
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the current coastline of Labrador, or Norway, or for that matter southern Chile. Elsewhere on the map, western Antarctica was an archipelago somewhat resembling the Philippines.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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573dd71
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Only this moment, always. We never get to change the past. We never get to know the future. No reason to wish for one place rather than another; no reason to say I wish I were home, or I wish I were in an exotic new place that is not my home. They will all be the same as this place. Here the experience of existing comes clear. This world is our body. Now
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2a59c03
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Guerilla climatology. What do you call that, climatage? Attack meteorology?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ae8049a
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Each reality is followed by one stranger than the last.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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91bca35
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To conclude and temporarily halt this train of thought, how does any entity know what it is? Hypothesis: by the actions it performs. There is a kind of comfort in this hypothesis. It represents a solution to the halting problem. One acts, and thus finds out what one has decided to do.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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cac02cf
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Odd how a few sticks of furniture hung around like that. It made her feel better to see them. They would unpack, deploy the furniture, use it until it became invisible. Habit would once again cloak the naked reality of the world. And thank God for that.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ae0f7f8
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For that world out there we just saw. For humanity. What's it been, about fifteen thousand people, and a couple hundred years? In the big scheme of things it's not that many. And then we have a new world to live on." "If"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6ede5fc
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I mean it's obvious any new place is going to be either alive or dead. If it's alive it's going to be poisonous, if it's dead you're going to have to work it up from scratch. I suppose that could work, but it might take about as long as it took Earth. Even if you've got the right bugs, even if you put machines to work, it would take thousands of years. So what's the point? Why do it at all? Why not be content with what you've got? Who were ..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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252e90b
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Maybe fear and want never went away. We are more than food and drink and shelter. It seems like those should be the crucial determinants, but many a well-fed citizen is filled with rage and fear. They feel painted hunger, as the Japanese call it. Painted fear, painted suffering. The rage of the servile will. Will is a matter of free choice, but servitude is lack of freedom. So the servile will feels defiled, feels guilt, expresses that as a..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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72a4cf9
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When memory fails to contain us we must love the past more than ever, to hold it to us--or else the present becomes a meaningless blaze of color and sound, in which no two humans, great elongate beings, will be able to do more than touch at their very lips, their spatial selves--no one will ever truly understand another. To love the past is to become fully human.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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470132c
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Now he stood in the farthest end of the cave, in front of the great lion chase he had watched Thorn paint so long ago. He saw again: it was by far the greatest painting in the the cave, maybe the world. Maybe it would always be the greatest painting.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ae20d03
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But it can be controlled by labor just as well as by capital. Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few. There is no reason why a tiny nobility should own the capital, and everyone else therefore be in service to them. There is no reason they should give us a living wage and take all the rest that we produce. No! The system called capitalist democracy was no..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2b08a50
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He did not want to be struck by her again. Or worse, denied her company.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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0678e0f
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Bad things don't just grow on one path, they're everywhere.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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406db30
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here's the genuine thoughtfulness and deep consideration for sake of truth and meaningful understanding. There's the recognition that if there were simple answers, we'd have already implemented simple solutions - and that not being the case, people have to work hard to discover the best - imperfect but with iteration ever-less flawed - courses of action and forget the pedantic and simple-minded debate points that so often mar discussions th..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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a91a0d5
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He had written commentaries for the Journal suggesting that people would be healthier if they lived more like their paleolithic ancestors had. Not that they should starve themselves from time to time, or needed to kill all the meat they ate--just that incorporating more paleolithic behaviors might increase health and well-being. After all, a fairly well-identified set of behaviors, repeated for many generations, had changed their ancestors ..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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dcab7ca
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a collection that included, among other items, an Allen wrench set, some pliers, a power drill, several clamps, some hacksaws, an impact-wrench set, a brace of cold-tolerant bungie cords, assorted files and rasps and planes, a crescent-wrench set, a crimper, five hammers, some hemostats, three hydraulic jacks, a bellows, several sets of screwdrivers, drills and bits, a portable compressed gas cylinder, a box of plastic explosives and shape ..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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cf4d6bd
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Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on. These
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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0bf79af
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So. Our little pearl of warmth, our spinning orrery of lives, our island, our beloved solar system, our hearth and home, tight and burnished in the warmth of the sun--and then--these starships we are making out of Nix. We will send them to the stars, they will be like dandelion seeds, floating away on a breeze. Very beautiful. We will never see them again.
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powerful
science-fiction
space
space-exploration
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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c0f3386
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The sensation passed, and after a bit of thought he decided it must have been that the decelerating car had passed momentarily through one g. An image came to him, of running out a long pier, wet uneven boards splashed with silver fish scales; he could even smell the salt fish stink. One g. Funny how the body remembered it.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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1d298a7
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Scared of her, solicitous of her, in love with her--she had seen all that. And shouting at her furiously for some small treachery, or for nothing at all; she had certainly seen that too. Because he had loved her.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |