Green Mars: An unforgettable dystopian sci-fi novel (Mars Trilogy Book 2)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

“Oh, you’re Nirgal,” one short red-haired woman said. “I’ve heard you’re bright.” Nirgal, who was constantly crashing against the limits of his understanding, blushed and shook his head while the woman calmly surveyed him.

The cliff towered over them like the vertical side of the universe itself:

In the dark the wind was sheer noise,

“The resistance begins fighting itself, because that’s the only thing it can beat. Happens every time. You can’t get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”

“I’m my own boss now.” “You could say you are our prisoner,” Maya pointed out sharply. “When you’re the prisoner of anarchists it’s the same thing, right?”

“Liberal democracy says that cultural tolerance is essential, but you don’t have to get very far away from liberal democracy for liberal democrats to get very intolerant.” “How do the Swiss solve that?” Art asked. Jurgen shrugged. “I don’t think we do.”

He waited. Nowadays if he didn’t talk, no one bothered him. Advantages everywhere.

“There are some design problems.” “I know, I know. But they’ll solve them. I mean you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist.”

Working one day on changing room cabinets, she looked down at her sketches and felt a wash of déjà vu, and wondered if she had done exactly this bit of work before, some time in the lost past. She wondered also why it was that skills were so robust in the memory, while knowledge was so fragile.

But today they would not be deterred by the present.