Stephen Baxter > Quotes

“We seem to be young, in a very old Galaxy. We're like kids tiptoeing through a ruined mansion.”
― Stephen Baxter, Ark

“When you get close enough to someone you're never really alone again.”
― Stephen Baxter, Vacuum Diagrams

“In the Vortex that lies beyond time and space tumbled a police box that was not a police box.”
― Stephen Baxter, Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice

“The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future.

Cut loose the past; it is dead weight.
Let the Extirpation continue. Let it never end.”
― Stephen Baxter, Exultant

“In the afterglow of the Big Bang, humans spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across billions upon billions of years.
Everywhere they found life.
Nowhere did they find mind—save what they brought with them or created—no other against which human advancement could be tested.
With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages.
They learned of other universes from which theirs had evolved. Those earlier, simpler realities too were empty of mind, a branching tree of emptiness reaching deep into the hyperpast.
It is impossible to understand what minds of that age—the peak of humankind, a species hundreds of billions of times older than humankind—were like. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They had nothing in common with us, their ancestors of the afterglow.
Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.
The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile, and ultimately lethal.
There was despair and loneliness.
There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as the finest of humanity chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle.
The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.
But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old.
And, at last, they realized that this was wrong. It wasn't supposed to have been like this.
Burning the last of the universe's resources, the final down-streamers—dogged, all but insane—reached to the deepest past. And—oh.
Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon. It's starting—”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“We could try the Turin test," said Lobsang.
"Oh, machines have been able to pass the Turing test for years."
"No, the Turin test. We both pray for an hour, and see if God can tell the difference.”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long War

“And there's no such thing as too much back-up.”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long War

“Per ardua ad astra. Through adversity to the stars.”
― Stephen Baxter, Proxima

“We ought to call ourselves Homo clamorans. Noisemaking man.”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long War

“Sometimes people say that we're living in the future, and time's up for science fiction, but I think that never will be, because science fiction really isn't about the future. It's about change and present-day concerns”
― Stephen Baxter

“An ability to believe in things that weren’t true was a powerful tool.”
― Stephen Baxter, Evolution

“Two damaged people, thrown together in a hostile world, doing their best. What else was there to life, in the end?”
― Stephen Baxter, Proxima

“Every door I pass is one way. So I may as well look around, and see what there is beyond the next door, and the next.”
― Stephen Baxter, Proxima

“We're going to bollocks up our second chance at Eden, even before the paint has dried.”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long War

“...our citizens must be protected, even from being dumb, which is not a crime.”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long War

“I have a vision of a Galaxy overrun by mankind from Core to rim. Of four hundred billion stars each enslaved to the rhythm of Earth's day, Earth's year. I have a vision of a trillion planets pulsing to the beat of a human heart.”
― Stephen Baxter, Exultant

“A brief life burns brightly.”
― Stephen Baxter, Exultant

“It's never going to stop,’ Malenfant whispered. ‘It will consume the Solar System, the stars—’
This isn't some local phenomenon, Malenfant. This is a fundamental change in the structure of the universe. It will never stop. It will sweep on, growing at light speed, a runaway feedback fueled by the collapse of the vacuum itself. The Galaxy will be gone in a hundred thousand years, Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, in a couple of million years. It will take time, but eventually—
‘The future has gone,’ Malenfant said. ‘My God. That’s what this means, isn’t it? The downstream can’t happen now. All of it is gone. The colonization of the Galaxy; the settlement of the universe; the long, patient fight against entropy...’ That immense future had been cut off to die, like a tree chopped through at the root. ‘Why, Michael? Why have the children done this? Burned the house down, destroyed the future—’
Because it was the wrong future. Michael looked around the sky. He pointed to the lumpy, spreading edge of the unreality bubble.
There. Can you see that? It's already starting...
‘What is?’
The budding... The growth of the true vacuum region is not even. There will be pockets of the false vacuum—remnants of our universe—isolated by the spreading true vacuum. The fragments of false vacuum will collapse. Like—
‘Like black holes.’ And in that instant, Malenfant understood. ‘That’s what this is for. This is just a better way of making black holes, and budding off new universes. Better than stars, even.’
Much better. The black holes created as the vacuum decay proceeds will overwhelm by many orders of magnitude the mere billion billion that our universe might have created through its stars and galaxy cores.
‘And the long, slow evolution of the universes, the branching tree of cosmoses?...’
We have changed everything, Malenfant. Mind has assumed responsibility for the evolution of the cosmos. There will be many daughter universes—universes too many to count, universes exotic beyond our imagining—and many, many of them will harbor life and mind.
‘But we were the first.’
Now he understood. This was the purpose. Not the long survival of humankind into a dismal future of decay and shadows, the final retreat into the lossless substrate, where nothing ever changed or grew. The purpose of humankind—the first intelligence of all—had been to reshape the universe in order to bud others and create a storm of mind. We got it wrong, he thought. By striving for a meaningless eternity, humans denied true infinity. But we reached back, back in time, back to the far upstream, and spoke to our last children—the maligned Blues—and we put it right. This is what it meant to be alone in the universe, to be the first. We had all of infinite time and space in our hands. We had ultimate responsibility. And we discharged it. We were parents of the universe, not its children.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“Imagine God inside your computer, your phone, everyone else's computer. Imagine someone who almost is the Black Corporation, with all its power and riches and reach. And who, despite all this, seems pretty sane and beneficent by the standards of most gods. Oh, and who sometimes swears in Tibetan...”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long War

“He took refuge in the concept that sometimes slowest is the fastest in the end.”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long War

“A pioneer family lived beyond the reach of shopping malls...”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long War

“The folk of Hell-Knows-Where by default still thought of themselves as Americans.”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long War

“Wow. Pioneers with ice-cream."
Joshua felt motivated to defend his home. "Well, it doesn't have to be like the Donner Party, Sally-”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long War

“By now there were whole new Industrial Revolutions going on in the Low Earths; the British seemed to have the building of steam engines and railways in their genes.”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long War

“The squid are leaving, Maura…”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“...the story of colonial-era America, rerun across an infinite frontier...All of which was fine, until the day you needed root-canal dentistry. Or your e-book reader broke down. Or you worried whether your kids were ever going to learn anything more than how to plough a field or trap a rabbit. Or you got sick of the mosquitoes. Or, damn it, you just wanted to go shopping.”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long War

“What do you expect? Look here: we’re dipping into History, like temporal tourists. People are generally obsessed by the surface of things – and rightly so! How often in your own Year do you find the daily newspapers filled with deep analyses of the Causes of History? How much of your own conversation is occupied with explanations as to the general pattern of life in 1873? …”
― Stephen Baxter, The Time Ships

“Is it really conceivable, given all of that immensity, all that structure, that we are truly alone? That life emerged here, and nowhere else?”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“Look, whatever hayseed laws you pass in Who-Knows-What -"
"Hell-Knows-Where."
"Don't amount to a hill of beans back here, as your type might say.”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long War

“If I was a cynic I would be wondering if sooner or later some charismatic douche-bag might stomp all over this Little House on the Prairie dream of yours.”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long War