Congo

by Michael Crichton

(It was a joke at ERTS that one way to find a tiger was to keep walking until you stepped on its tail.)

“In Africa, the animals always get strange when there’s a war on, you know.”

To enter a truly natural world was exotic, beyond the experience of most mankind, who lived from birth to death in entirely man-made circumstances.

Today we are surrounded by man and his creations. Man is inescapable, everywhere on the globe, and nature is a fantasy, a dream of the past, long gone.

he abandons all who knew him prior to his insensate lust for fame at the hands of the demon called Science.”

“Even religion is practical,” Munro said. “It’s supposed to benefit you.”

Language-skilled primates freely taught other animals in captivity; for that matter, they would teach people, signing slowly and repeatedly until the stupid uneducated human person got the point.

“these animals had been trained by men, and I had to think of them as men. The question became what would I do if they were men?”

“Better a sitting duck than a dead duck.”

Primates carried strong inhibitions against harming infants,

(L. S. Verinski once said that if alien visitors watched Italians speaking they would conclude that Italian was basically a gestural sign language, with sounds added for emphasis only.)

You can’t stop technological advances. As soon as we know something is possible, we have to carry it out.”

Resonant conventionals, or RCs, were timed explosives, a potent marriage of microelectronic and explosive technology.