Adrian Tchaikovsky

"The place gave a bad name to dingy and escaped being run-down only because it had never been up."

"And I had been manipulated, surely, but an actor, of all people, has no business complaining he has been tricked."

"Long-term thinking requires a clarity the natural human mind is not good at."

"He seemed dead, but perhaps “dead” meant something different. Perhaps it meant something less permanent."

"Just because I did good doesn’t mean I don’t feel bad, because the feeling bad, it’s not particularly because of anything that’s happened, it’s just the way I’m wired."

"I am nothing but a scientist of sufficiently advanced technology, which is to say a magician."

"Memory is fallible. Dreams overwrite the reality, fond fantasies inform the dreams."

"Aunt Charla is one of those people who take pride in not knowing about anything that’s changed in the world in the last thirty years."

"I’m telling it now. And I’m trying to remember how it actually was. Not just how I remember remembering it. But memory is a hard disk that overwrites itself constantly."

"The emergent ecologies that were recolonising the place were very light on mammals and birds. You got little ones, mostly nocturnal even when their ancestors had been diurnal. The big winners were amphibians, reptiles, bugs. Because hot and damp works for ectotherms."

"I’m the expert, God help us all."

"And wasn’t the planet supposed to die? Wasn’t that the deal about human-generated climate change? That the world was supposed to predecease us? I mean, that certainly seemed to be what we’d agree to. That, okay, we’d destroy everything, but that was fine just so long as the last thing to get destroyed was us. And here's all this. Flourishing. Fucking flourishing in the death zone. Heat-adapted in a way we could never be."

"That project was already well underway when I first came to the Zone. Hidden in all the budgetary overspends and the trees. But I became a part of it. And as for Why? When a conglomerate of future-minded corporations gives you a bottomless well of untraceable funds and a team of top scientists with no scruples at all, it becomes all very, Because it’s there."

"But haven’t you heard? We’re in a collapsing climate disaster. The Zone’s just one part of it. Collapsing as in, all our usable biomes crunching together as the heat pushes out from the equator. And you’ve all seen how that goes. Everything wants to live. People move north and south, animals move north and south, diseases move north and south. Waves of epidemics as all those people and animals and microbes mix in new configurations. Every year a new wave of hospitalisations from some fresh plague that’s mutating to survive the conditions we’re imposing on the world."

"By all means, go up to the surface and have the run of the Zone, Doctor Marks. Pit the indefatigability of your human spirit against the planet. See how that goes for you."

"MARKS: It’s not fair. MARKS: Evolution isn’t about being fair. It’s about adapting to changing circumstances."