Stephen Baxter

"I think we’ve all become desensitized to the state of our world. We live in a closed economy, an economy of limits. Grain yields globally have been falling since 1984, fishing yields since 1990. And yet the human population continues to grow. This is the stark reality of the years to come."

"It seems to me our best hope for getting through the next century or so is to reach some kind of steady state: recycle as much as possible; try to minimize the impact of industry on the planet; try to stabilize the population numbers. For the last five to ten years I have, in my small way, been working toward exactly that goal, that new order. I don’t see that any responsible politician has a choice. I must say I entered politics with rather higher hopes of the future than I enjoy now."

"But even the steady state, our best-hope future, may not be achievable without space. Without power and materials from space we are doomed to shuffle a known—in fact diminishing—stockpile of resources around the planet. Some players get rich; others get poor. But it’s not even a zero-sum game; in the long term we are all losers."

"Emma trying to figure that for herself. But, like most probability problems, the answer was counterintuitive."

"“I don’t believe this for a second,” Emma said flatly. “It is impossible to prove, but hard to refute,” said Cornelius."

"If you have kids you’re a slave to your genes. Just a conduit from past to future, from the primeval ocean to galactic empire."

"This remains a place of grinding poverty. Misguided aid efforts had flooded the area with cheap Western clothes, and local crooks had use them to undercut and wipe out the textile factories that had once kept everyone employed."

"From the air Illinois was a vast emptiness studded by lost-looking little towns."

"In engineering, experience gained is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined."

"“The only advantage of e-therapists,” Maura murmured, “is that their horseshit is cheaper than humans’.”"

"All the tabloid-fed hysteria, the religious ravings, the pompous and hostile commentaries, made no sense, of course. If to abandon ten or a thousand sentient squid was a crime, so was abandoning one. But when, she thought sourly, had sense and rationality been a predominant element in public debate on science and technology?"

"It seems to me that age, growing old, is a war between wisdom and bitterness. I’m not sure how I’ll come out of that war myself, assuming I get so far. Maybe some things are more important than life itself. But what?"

"Since 1970 or thereabouts going to space has not been part of our national agenda. NASA has kept complete control over space. But since 1970 NASA has produced paper, not spaceships."

"Anyhow, she knew when she looked into her heart she’d never really wanted kids anyhow. She’d seen how kids dropped from the sky and exploded people’s lives like squalling neutron bombs. She was honest enough to admit she was too selfish for that; her life, her only life, was her own."

"The future, it seemed, was turning out to be one damn thing after another."

"It seems to me that the human race simply isn’t advanced enough yet to be able to trust any subset of itself with the power to run the lives of the rest."

"I did not enter politics to be involved in this kind of operation. But who did? And I have learned that leadership is, more often than not, the art of choosing the least worst among evils."

"To some extent the human race today seems to react as a single organism to great events. After all, we live in a wired world. Memes—information, ideas, fears, and hopes—spread around the media and online information channels literally at light speed. It may be that this mass reaction is the greatest single danger facing us."

"It was a war that was inevitable because it was a war that everybody wanted."

"Everyone was used to official manipulation of the truth—to zhilu weima, to point at a deer and call it a horse, as the expression went."

"It is of course a truism that all logically possible universes must exist."

"“Have you studied history, Anna?” “Yes. The information is limited, the interpretation is partial. But it is interesting.”"

"Almost all of history was a carefully constructed mythology for use as propaganda or nation building."

"The immediate future, regardless of Carter, was as dangerous as it had ever been. And the temptation many people seemed to feel to sacrifice their freedom to stern utopians who promised to order that future for them was growing stronger."

"There was a great wave of extinctions that, ultimately, couldn’t be stopped. How bad was it? Well, Oona, we don’t really know. We didn’t even get as far as counting all the species before destroying them. Yes, that’s right; a lot of species must have died out before we even knew they were there. Shivery thought, isn’t it?"

"Well, the world may be heading for the iceberg, but the dead hand of old Darwin is still on the tiller. What am I talking about? Just this: if most people stop breeding, the handful of people who love kids and want to have them—people like me—are, within a generation or two, going to outnumber everyone else. Simple math. And that’s exactly what is happening."

"Maura pulled an elaborate face. “Don’t these people realize the cat is already out of the bag? You can’t control the public’s access to information anymore—and you certainly can’t control their response. Nor should you try, in my opinion.”"

"As an engineer, he knew that a bucket-load of philosophical principles wasn’t worth a grain of good hard fact."

"The law is a weapon of government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that."

"Madeleine’s heart sank. Nemoto would be hard to deal with rationally. People with missions always were."

"She wondered if the gerontocrats—conservative, selfish, reclusive, obsessive—were responsible for a more general malaise that seemed to her to have afflicted this fast-forwarded world. There had been change—new fashions, gadgetry, terminology—but, it seemed to her, no progress. In science and art she could see no signs of meaningful innovation. The world’s nations evolved, but the various supranational structures had not changed for decades: the political institutions that wielded the power had ossified."

"After a time it became unbearable, the lesson blinding in its cruelty: but if the universe didn’t get you, other sentient beings would."

"The shortness of human lives, she thought. Our curse. Every generation thinks it is immortal, that it has been born into a world that has never changed, and will never change."

"Life seems to be emergent from the very fabric of the universe that contains us, hardwired into physical law. And so, I suppose, mind is emergent too."

"She laughed. “Guilt: the Catholic Church’s first patent.”"

"He dug into the ground until he came up with a stone the size of his thumbnail. “—if the universe was the size of this rock, then each star would be the size of a quark.”"

"Life, Cassiopeia said, was emergent everywhere. Planets were the crucible. Life curdled, took hold, evolved, in every nook and cranny it could find in the great nursery that was the Galaxy."

"When everybody else was snuggling at the drive-in, you used to lecture me on how space is a high frontier, a sky to be mined, a resource for humanity. But is that all there is? Is the sky really nothing more than an empty stage for mankind to strut and squabble?"

"The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile and ultimately lethal."

"No organization was a rational place. Organizations were bear pits where people fought for their own projects, which might or might not have something to do with the organization’s supposed mission. The wise person accepted that, and found a way to get what she wanted in spite of it all."

"The main reason to exercise, he thought: It stops your brain working, lets your body remind you you’re still an animal. It was the only respite he got from being himself."

"A pinch of observation is worth a mountain of hypothesis."

"Only children chatter of an afterlife. We are nothing but transient dissipative structures. In your cherishing the bone dust of the dead you are seeking to deny the basic truth of existence: that when we die, we are gone."

"There were no cop cars cruising through that darkness, no watching choppers or surveillance satellites, nobody out there to help him—no law operating save the savagely impartial rule of nature. And yet every day he was struck by the strange orderliness of the place. Decaying animal corpses did not litter the ground, save for a handful of bleached bones here and there; it was rare to walk into so much as a heap of dung. There was death here, yes, there was blood and pain—but it was as if every creature, including the hominids, were a cog in some vaster machine, that served to sustain all their lives. And every creature, presumably unconsciously, accepted its place and the sacrifices that came with it. All say one species of hominid, it seemed: Homo sap himself, who was forever seeking to tear up the world around him."

"One must admire efficiency when one finds it, whatever one’s moral qualms."

"They talked further, an incoherent conversation of disconnected fragments, peppered by misunderstanding, suffused by mistrust."

"Superstition! A fatal flaw for a regime whose legitimacy comes entirely from religion."

"We must consider the possibility that the manifold of universes through which we wonder is in fact infinite."

"No wonder you can’t figure out the Fermi Paradox, Malenfant, if you don’t know your own wife’s dress size."

"But what would humans do, she mused, if they stumbled on a situation like this? Well they wouldn’t be satisfied with the generosity of Candyland. They’d breed until the caves were overflowing. The hunters would start ranging farther until all the animals in the area were eaten or driven away. Then agriculture would start, with everybody forced to bend their bodies to back-breaking toil, day after day. As the population exploded the forests would be cut back, the animals decimated. Then would come the famines and the wars."