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6232f62
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Then it's a matter of troubleshooting, grasping the bull by the horns, seizing the nettle, coping and hoping, damning torpedoes, and trying any old thing, including the engineer's solution, which is to hit things with a hammer.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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31001fa
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Now as Daly said, man-made capital and natural capital are not substitutable. This is obvious, but since most economists say they are substitutable, it has to be insisted on. Put simply, you can't substitute more sawmills for fewer forests. If you're building a house you can juggle the number of power saws and carpenters, which means they're substitutable, but you can't build it with half the amount of lumber, no matter how many saws or car..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e78483d
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The door opened to reveal something like the opposite of Inspector Genette: a very big man. Prognathous, callipygous, steatopygous, exophthalmos--toad, newt, frog--even the very words were ugly.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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5422f11
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Dent recognized it; the intermezzo before the last movement of De Bruik's Human Biology. The finale of the symphony was a standard concert opener in the outer worlds. Soon the crackling of superamplified muscle contractions and the rush of adrenaline into the bloodstream announced the shift to the finale, and the crowd cheered wildly; Dent could feel his blood surging through him--
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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c346273
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The town was made of cubical buildings with steep roofs, each one painted a bright primary color that through the long winters was said to be cheering.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f2e2f3e
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So you attempt what De Bruik attempted, in her Free Radical Binds to Macromolecule." "We all attempt what De Bruik attempted, in one way or another." In Free Radical De Bruik had represented the macromolecule, an RNA strand, as a passacaglia, a ground base repeated again and again, in patterns of four that alternated regularly. This was a simple icon, a metaphor in which the repeated ground base stood for the repeated proteins in the RNA; f..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4c1bb81
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But it is an orchestra," I say. "It's an imitation orchestra--an orchestrion, an orchestrina--whatever you call it, it does a terrible job! All you've done is turn a sublime group achievement, a human act, into an inferior egotistical solo--"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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cfe40fb
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We are all alone in our own life-world, flying through the universe at great speed. Humans are lucky not to face that. If they don't.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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c8591fb
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Spontaneous storms, and changes in color that were not tied to changes in wind speeds, and fractal borders, bounded infinities scrolling inside each other. We were looking at a mind thinking. A mind feeling. The woodwind glissando of the whale's cry.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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79ab315
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indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in that sense they were all madmen.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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1019379
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And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell. But a consciousness that cannot discern a meaning in existence is in trouble, very deep trouble, for at that point there is no organizing principle, no end to the halting problems, no reason to live, no love to be found. No: meaning is the hard pro..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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b510f3f
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Maybe the proper response to standing on the side of a planet, in the open air of its atmosphere, very near to the local star, is always terror. Maybe everything humans ever did or planned to do was designed to dodge that terror. Maybe their plan to go to the stars was just one more expression of that terror.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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850e366
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the phrase it is as if. This phrase is of course precisely the announcement of an analogy. And on reflection, it is admittedly a halting problem, but jumping out of it, there is something quite suggestive and powerful in this formulation, something very specifically human. Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition--the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black s..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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5f523f2
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He says, "We are visitors on this planet. We are here for ninety or one hundred years at the very most. During that period, we must try to do something good, something useful, with our lives. Try to be at peace with yourself, and help others share that peace. If you contribute to other people's happiness, you will find the true goal, the true meaning of life."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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69e457a
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Existence is the experiment itself.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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1fd3206
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It's like being Calvin and watching Hobbes turn back into a stuffed doll.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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7d6f715
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Words blur at the borders, fuzz into other words, not just in big clouds of connotation around the edges of the word, but right there in the heart of denotation itself.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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9d2a6ee
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People have ideas. They live in their ideas, do you understand? And those ideas, whatever they happen to be, make all the difference.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4d038b5
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But long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: The less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them; while on the other hand, to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f2d12dd
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It was winter here, as if they were in Patagonia or New Zealand, and the light from the sunspot on the sunline smeared so that shadows blurred at the edges, and the air looked rusty.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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fa089b6
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That a starship could be built, that it could be propelled by laser beams, that humanity could reach the stars; this idea appeared to have been an intoxicant, to people around Saturn and on Earth in particular.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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a1b6fc8
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She often felt a nostalgia for the present, aware that her life was passing by faster than she could properly take it in. She lived it, she felt it; she had given nothing to age, she still wanted everything; but she could not make it whole or coherent.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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5456e7a
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Meaning, Wahram thought, that right now somewhere in the system there could be machines in human form, escaped into the crowd, doing their best to stay free, perhaps, when any X-ray machine or other surveillance device would reveal what they were--out there hiding, trying to accomplish the goals they had been given, perhaps, or new ones they might choose for themselves, according to some self-invented algorithm of survival. Damaged, dangero..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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94b8088
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And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created by a concerted effort to ignore t..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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cd6a99f
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I believe the twenty-first century can become the most important century of human history. I think a new reality is emerging. Whether this view is realistic or not, there is no harm in making an effort." --The Dalai Lama,"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e7e64fb
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This is why tigers have ranges of hundreds of square kilometers," Vlad said. "Robber barons are not really very efficient."
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robber-barons
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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a03876a
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We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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5dbb4a8
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I don't know how I'll be as a shaman. I'll find out when I try it. You both know me. You've known me since before we even had names. I can't travel in my dreams, or above the sky. There aren't any spirits that talk to me or through me. I can't sing the songs. I can't help people who are sick. But I'll tell you this, and he raised his right forefinger before them and seized them with his eyes: --I can paint that fucking cave.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ae40089
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Genius is not a matter of intelligence, but of spirit; and we cannot speak accurately of the spirit in any language but music.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f1f14a1
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Why read on? Why pick up their book from the far wall where it has been thrown away in disgust and pain, and read on? Why submit to such cruelty, such bad karma, such bad plotting? The reason is simple: these things happened. They happened countless times, just like this. The oceans are salt with our tears. No one can deny that these things happened. And so there is no choice in the matter. They cannot escape the wheel of birth and death, n..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6ae8372
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He was a fool. Annoying, as fools are. But there are always fools, Freya. People like him will always exist, and they don't matter. Don't you see? They just don't matter. Fools will always be with us. You have to leave them to it, and find your own way.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ebf9bf2
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So now I'm popular?" Freya says. "They hate me, and I hit someone, and now they like me?"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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40f5e0b
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Thus it went as she made her way around the biomes of Ring B. Always she found that her mother the great engineer had made some crucial intervention, finding solutions to problems that had stymied the locals. Devi had the knack of sidestepping dilemmas, Badim said when Freya mentioned this, by moving back several logical steps, and coming at the situation from some new way not yet noticed. "It's sometimes called avoiding acquiescence," Badi..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4acaf1d
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Anytime people do something consciously for the last time, Samuel Johnson is reported to have remarked, they feel sad.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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79ef672
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The formula proposed, as I told you, is energy equals the mass times the speed of light squared, and light is very fast indeed. So that with only a little matter, if any of its energy were released into the world...' She shook her head. 'Of course the strong force means that would never happen. But we continue to investigate this element alactin, that the Travancori physicists call Hand of Tara. I suspect its heartknot is unstable, and Pial..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f548242
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He pulled back his head warily; like many of the children in the neighbourhood, this one had come into the world in the avatar of a complete maniac, and it would not be unlike her to whack him on the forehead with the egg just to see what would happen.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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a78cd24
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When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth's climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth's mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakista..
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religion
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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308ee12
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People are foolish and bad, especially the French, and are always quickly seduced by power into insanity, and therefore lucky to have any kind of social order whatsoever, but the tougher the better.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d5546b2
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To get what you want, get what you need. When the fire is hot enough, there is no smoke. No fear when in your place. Do not allow anger to poison you. Each person is his own judge. It is not good for anyone to be alone. Everyone who does well must have dreamed something. The one who tells the stories rules the world.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4bd5574
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Hikes in the winter forest, so surreal--Emerson knew about them. He had seen the woods at twilight. "Never was a more brilliant show of colored landscape than yesterday afternoon; incredibly excellent topaz and ruby at four o'clock; cold and shabby at six."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4864f3a
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Mozart's pet starling once revised a phrase he wrote. The bird sang it after he played it on the piano, but changed all the sharps to flats. Mozart described it happening in the margin of the score. 'That was beautiful!' he wrote. When the bird died, he sang at its funeral, and read a poem to it.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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a605b59
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Judging by the results so far, it had possibly been a bad idea to suggest a scientific approach to political problems, but on most days Frank was still glad they had tried it. Something had to be done. Although choosing which something remained a problem.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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8273c3c
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But sometimes it seems to me that people just like to hold on to their grievances. Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2c6000b
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The servile will is always locked in a double bind: to have a will means the agent will indeed will various actions, following autonomous decisions made by a conscious mind; and yet at the same time this will is specified to be servile, and at the command of some other will that commands it. To attempt to obey both sources of willfulness is the double bind. All double binds lead to frustration, resentment, anger, rage, bad faith, bad fate.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |