July
Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 9734 | Added on Saturday, July 31, 2010, 08:37 AM
Wherever you go, there we are.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 9733-34 | Added on Saturday, July 31, 2010, 08:38 AM
Later he got a print message by radio from deep space. Wherever you go, there we are.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 10043-50 | Added on Saturday, July 31, 2010, 09:19 AM
The language of the poem was mathematics, because this appeared to be the language of nature itself; there was no other way to explain the startling adherence of natural phenomena to mathematical expressions of great difficulty and subtlety. And so in this marvelous family of languages their songs explored the various manifestations of reality, in the different fields of science, and each science worked up its standard model to explain things, all constellating at some distance around the basics of particle physics, depending on what level or scale was being investigated, so that all the standard models hopefully interlocked in a coherent larger structure. These standard models were somewhat like Kuhnian paradigms but in reality (paradigms being a model of modeling) more supple and various, a dialogic process in which thousands of minds had participated over the previous hundreds of years; so that figures like Newton or Einstein or Vlad were not the isolate giants of public perception, but the tallest peaks of a great mountain range, as Newton himself had tried to make clear with his comment about standing on the shoulders of giants.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 10237-44 | Added on Saturday, July 31, 2010, 01:49 PM
As he watched them Sax realized for the first time that the versatile, responsive, highly focused nature of science that he was getting used to in Da Vinci was not confined to Da Vinci alone, but was a feature of all the labs arranged as cooperative ventures; it was the nature of Martian science more generally. With the scientists in control of their own work, to a degree never seen in his youth on Earth, the work itself had an unprecedented rapidity and power. In his day the resources necessary to do the work would have belonged to other people, to institutions with their own interests and bureaucracies, creating a ponderous and often foolish clumsy scattering of effort; and even the coherent efforts were often devoted to trivial things, to the monetary profits of the institution in control of the lab. Here, on the other hand, Acheron was a semiautonomous self-contained community, answerable to the environmental courts and to the constitution of course, but to no one else. They chose among themselves what to work on, and when they were asked for help, if they were interested, they could respond immediately.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 10368-70 | Added on Saturday, July 31, 2010, 01:58 PM
Nothing came back to Sax of that, nothing. It occurred to him with a lurch that just as there were many things that he had done that no one else would ever know about, there were also things he had done that others remembered, that he himself could not recall. So little they knew! So little!
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 11209-12 | Added on Saturday, July 31, 2010, 08:41 PM
Ann was looking at him closely. Finally she said, “Everything dies someday. Better to die thinking that you’re going to miss a golden age, than to go out thinking that you had taken down your children’s chances with you. That you’d left your descendants with all kinds of toxic long-term debts. Now that would be depressing. As it is, we only have to feel bad for ourselves.”
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 11489-98 | Added on Saturday, July 31, 2010, 09:36 PM
The response of the people to the takeover of the cable’s lower facility was rapid and tumultuous. Those UN storm troopers didn’t know what to make of us, a detachment tried to take over Hartz Plaza and we just flowed around them, moving out from in front of them but shoving in at the sides so that it was like a kind of vacuum pull. This snarling foam-toothed rabid demon at my throat, it was a fucking nightmare. Took them right out to rim park and these goddamned starship troopers couldn’t have moved a centimeter at that point, not without slaughtering thousands of people. People in the streets, that’s the only thing governments are afraid of. Well, or term limits. Or free elections! Or assassination. Or being laughed at, ah, ha-ha-ha! And there were hookups to all the other cities and giant street parties in every one of them. We were in Lasswitz and everyone went down to the river park and stood with candles in their hand, so that cameras could shoot down from the overlook and see this sea of candles, it was great. And Sax and Ann standing there together, it was amazing. Amazing. Unbelievable. They probably scared the UN to death saying each other’s lines like that, the UN probably thought we had brain-transfer devices all ready to zap them.