2312

by Kim Stanley Robinson

The superthin neon-argon atmosphere, created by sunlight smashing rock, holds only the faintest predawn glow.

What I appreciate most about KSR is the humanist descriptions of physical effects.

You are a creature of the sun. The beauty and terror of it seen from so close can empty any mind, thrust anyone into a trance. It’s like seeing the face of God, some people say, and it is true that the sun powers all living creatures in the solar system, and in that sense is our god. The sight of it can strike thought clean out of your head. People seek it out precisely for that.

Sheer dumb sentience. Here I am. This is reality. No one escapes it. Can’t go on, must go on; they never got past that moment.

Very big, this toad person: big shoulders, big chest, big belly. Short legs. People were strange. Now he shook his head and said in a deep gravelly voice—a beautiful voice, she had to admit—froggy, yes, but relaxed, deep, thick with timbre, something like a bassoon or a bass saxophone—“So sorry to bother you at a time like this. I wish we could have met under different circumstances. I am an admirer of your landscape installations.

Im imagining Lawrence Fischeburne

Most of the paintings were the originals, moved here for safekeeping; the rest were copies so perfect that it would take a chemical analysis to tell them from the originals. As with many of Mercury’s single-artist museums, the hope was to gather all the original paintings here and locate only copies on Earth, to take on the intense assault of that most volatile environment—oxidation, corrosion, rust, fire, theft, vandalism, smog, acid, daylight…. Here, in contrast, everything was controlled, benign—safer. Or so it was said by Mercurial curators. The Terrans were not always so sure.

The room’s control AI would know the room was occupied by only a single person and, with voice and retina, could certainly be set to identify the person.

All the genomes for all the species of your particular biome will be available for print on demand, except for the bacteria involved, which are simply too numerous and too genetically labile to categorize.

The peak point of brain growth was also the peak point of playfulness.

Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses, bulwarks against time and despair.

She had been a fool and survived yet again—how often it had happened. Surely it was a fate. Surely it would keep on happening. “This is the most basic of false syllogisms,” Pauline assured her when she spoke the thoughts aloud.

Alex liked that, because she was trying to shift all her dealings over to direct human communication.”

Ah yes, humans. The most trustworthy of vessels

Spheres of bright holographic colors made something like the familiar solar system orrery, though this one had many more colored spheres in it, Swan saw, and a great number of colored lines connecting these spheres. Also, the spheres were not sized in proportion to the real sizes of the planets and moons.

Thank you for clarifying, Kim

Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since, dogs when we had been wolves.

That's depressing.

Asian faces, African, European—everyone but Native Americans, as she always thought in Manhattan. Talk about invasive biology!

People said he was cool, but really he was slow.

I feel seen.

the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth’s biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils

marginal capitalism is a tough-guy sport like rugby or tackle football, suitable mostly for people slightly overdosed on testosterone.

confining capitalism to the margin was the great Martian achievement, like defeating the mob or any other protection racket

He realized he had thought sun worshippers would be followers of the various early solar religions of ancient Egypt, Persia, the Inca—but no. They just liked the sun.

“What causes that kind of anger?” “I don’t know… say food, water, land… power… prestige… ideology… differential advantage. Madness. These are the usual motives, aren’t they?”

there being no air, there was no air temperature.

“You can either have high specific intelligence or high general intelligence, but not both.”

Writhing white circle in a starless charcoal sky. White banners flowing over themselves everywhere in the circle, the movement suggestive of some vast living intelligence. A god, sure, why not? It looked like a god.

Apollonian, Dionysian

Ambivert shuffle between the two

Interplan was unfortunately not a universally acknowledged police agency but rather something in the nature of a semiautonomous quasi-governmental treaty monitor, so their work was often compromised, and Genette could sometimes feel like a private agent or an NGO gadfly; but they had good data.

Excellent

“Strictly speaking, the burning is done. It is now incandescing.”

Swan liked that; the inspector would sit right on the table while eating, on a plush brought for the purpose, and afterward lounge there on one elbow with a drink, so that they spoke eye to eye. It was a little like talking to a cat.

The city was concentrated at first on the hemisphere facing Saturn, which looms overhead four times larger than Luna from Earth. This was felt worth having in one’s sky, especially since Iapetus’s orbit is at a seventeen-degree tilt from the plane of Saturn’s rings, giving it a perpetually changing view of the gorgeous mobile. Almost all the other moons see the rings only edge-on. From the Iapetus bulge one also has a view down to the rest of the moon’s surface, twelve or sixteen kilometers lower than the bulge, so there is always a broad icescape below to balance the sublime ringed pearl above.

Seashell biomimicry allowed the builders to extract and deploy calcium under mantles, and these soft living tissues were genetically engineered to shapes that allowed the architects to layer bioceramic stuctures one on the next, building structure on structure, like corals, until the area under the tent by now is almost full. Like most bioceramics structures, the beveled and layered shapes have been induced to produce scalloping, fanning, notching, and other conchological features, so that the buildings look like great seashells stacked one on the next.

Graffiti on Iapetus! Later it was declared a mistake and a scandal, a moral stupidity, even a crime, in any case disgusting; and there were calls for the entirety of Cassini Regio to be reblacked. Someday it may happen, but don’t hold your breath, for the truth is we are here to inscribe ourselves on the universe, and it is not inappropriate to remind ourselves of this when blank slates are given us. All landscape art reminds us: we live in a tabula rasa, and must write on it. It is our world, and its beauty is entirely inside our heads. Even today people will sometimes go out over the horizon and scuff their initials in the dust.

People shared schnapps and sang Schubert.

They would definitely not.

He could see that while this was obviously the case, stating it aloud only tagged him among his colleagues as biased, which was true, so after that he went silent and only listened to what the others said about it, which really was nothing surprising: many of them had not liked the arrangement with Mercury in the first place, and now they reverted to these views and argued that they should be making their deals with some kind of Vulcanoid league, or even with individual Vulcanoids.

If only our politicians were so concerned with being perceived as biased.

Turing machines can’t always tell when the result has been obtained. No oracle machine is capable of solving its own halting problem

he didn’t want to be involved in any plots he didn’t understand. On the other hand, he did want to be involved in plots that he did understand. That would represent progress.

The Working Group was a tight secretive little club, prone to fits of enthusiasm and sudden faction. Most of the people in the song bar felt it was a dangerous force, not at all interested in ordinary Venusians except insofar as they were useful to the terraforming.

Obviously most in the bar felt they were only helpless observers of a giant drama going on above their heads, a drama that was eventually going to suck them down into its maelstrom, no matter what they said or wanted.

So what else is new

some actions look like predation but are in fact symbiogenesis

for each ecstatic instant we must an anguish pay

Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked, generation after generation; give them three thousand calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike.

big minority of Earth’s population did robot work, and that had never gone away, no matter what political theories said.

immiseration is a terror tactic. If a population is decimated, then the remaining ninety percent are docile. They’ve seen what can happen and they take what they can get.”

Remember this when you wonder how they can be so cruel to their constituents.

How they despised the generations of the Dithering, who had heedlessly pushed the climate into a change with an unstoppable momentum to it, continuing not only into the present but for centuries more to come, as methane clathrate releases and permafrost melting began to outgas the third great wave of greenhouse gases, possibly the largest of them all.

Hey, that's us!

That brings up a point: people in physical masses seem to matter. If enough of the population takes to the streets in mass demonstrations, governments have no good defense.

“People adhere to ideas that explain and offer psychological compensation for their position in the class system of their time. People either increase their sense of dispossession by clarifying it, or they try to dismiss it as unimportant because of an ideology that justifies their dispossession as part of a larger project. People thus very often act against their own interests as the result of ideologies they hold which justify their subalternity to themselves. Denial and hope both play a hand in this.

She became abrasive with people, thus even more ineffective.

You don’t worry about feelings until your material needs are met.

Swan looked around, trying to see everywhere at once: sky all strewn with clear seeds, which from any distance were visible only as their contents, so that she drifted eastward and down with thousands of flying wolves, bears, reindeer, mountain lions. There she saw a fox pair; a clutch of rabbits; a bobcat or lynx; a bundle of lemmings; a heron, flying hard inside its bubble.

Ok this silly