Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

She got a lot of laughs; she was flushed, bright-eyed, John could almost see the tongues of fire flickering from her mass of auburn hair, which in the storm light looked like a cap of jewels.

The sky in the east grew brighter, and brighter again, until it seemed brighter than day could ever get; even behind faceplates their eyes watered, and some cried out over the common band at the sight. There were figures scampering around, the intercom babbling, the sky growing impossibly brighter, and brighter, and brighter yet, until it seemed it would burst: it pulsated with glowing pink light, the dots that were Venus and Earth overwhelmed by it.

But also it’s still and always our children’s lives and our children’s children and on down forever that we have to think of, we must act in a way that gives them just as many chances as we have been given and hopefully more, channeling the sun’s energy in ever more ingenious ways to reverse the flow of entropy in this little pocket of the universal flow.

the old parasitic greed of the kings and their henchmen – this system we call the transnational world order is just feudalism all over again, a set of rules that is anti-ecologic – it does not give back but rather enriches a floating international elite while impoverishing everything else, and so of course the so-called rich elite are in actuality poor as well, disengaged from real human work and therefore from real human accomplishment, parasitical in the most precise sense, and yet powerful too as parasites that have taken control can be, sucking the gifts of human work away from their rightful recipients which are the seven generations, and feeding on them while increasing the repressive powers that keep them in place!” (Cheers)

“so why don’t you folks start and we’ll dance till dawn and tomorrow scatter on the winds and down the sides of this great mountain, to carry the gift everywhere.”

Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.

Suddenly he was afraid: they were their pasts, they had to be or they were nothing at all, and whatever they felt or thought or said in the present was nothing more than an echo of the past; and so when they said what they said, how could they know what their deeper minds were really feeling, thinking, saying? They didn’t know, not really. Relationships were for that reason utterly mysterious; they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to be right. Did that Maya down at the deepest level know or not know, remember or forget, swear vengeance or forgive? There was no way of telling, he could never be sure. It was impossible.