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At the dawn of civilization, she would say to me very seriously, there was Crete and Sumeria, and Crete had a peaceful trading culture, run by women and filled with art and beauty—a utopia in fact, where the men were acrobats who jumped bulls all day, and women all night, and got the women pregnant and worshipped them, and everyone was happy. It sounds good except for the bulls. While Sumeria on the other hand was ruled by men, who invented war and conquered everything in sight and started all the slave empires that have come since.
And no one knew, Hiroko said, what might have happened if these two civilizations had had a chance to contest the rule of the world, because a volcano blew Crete to kingdom come, and the world passed into Sumeria’s hands and has never left it to this day. If only that volcano had been in Sumeria, she used to tell me, everything would be different.
Glancing past his kin, he saw how small his little world really was; the dome was less than 5 kilometers across, and 250 meters high out over the lake. A small world.
He breathed in the chill kelp-and-salt scent of the beach; the intense familiarity of the scent triggered a million memories at once, and he knew he was home.
He explained that every pair of parents would thus have the right to bear a child and a half; after having one, they could either sell the right to the other half, or arrange to buy a half from some other couple and go on to have a second child. Prices for half children would fluctuate in classic supply/demand fashion. Social consequences would be positive; people who wanted extra children would have to sacrifice for them, and those who didn’t would have a source of income to help support the one they had. When populations dropped far enough, the World Emperor might consider changing the
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We have no obligation to abide by the rules as they stand now. We can make a new species. Not feudal. We’ve got the collective ownership and decision-making, the policy of constructive action. We’re working toward a corporate state similar to the civic state they’ve made in Bologna. That’s a kind of democratic communist island, outperforming the capitalism around it, and constructing a better way to live. Do you think that kind of democracy is possible?
Kuhn had written about Priestley—that a scientist who continued to resist after his whole profession had been converted to a new paradigm might be perfectly logical and reasonable, but had ipso facto ceased to be a scientist.
But there were different types of intelligence, and not all of them were subject to analytic testing. Sax had noticed this fact in his student years: that there were people who would score high on any intelligence test, and were very good at their work, but who at the same time could walk into a room of people and within an hour have many of the occupants of that room laughing at them, or even despising them. Which was not very smart.
Sax saw some lodgepole pine, Pinus contorta, joining the more numerous white spruce. These were the most cold-tolerant trees on Earth, and apparently the Biotique team had added salt tolerance from trees like the tamarisks.
Subarashii at that time was a conglomeration of most of the Japanese corporations that had not folded into Mitsubishi, and it was a rising power, very aggressive and ambitious.
So the stock market rise was probably some kind of bubble phenomenon, and if it burst it might very well be enough to bring everything down again. Or perhaps not; economics was a bizarre field, and there were senses in which the whole stock market was simply too unreal to have impacts beyond itself. But who knew till it happened? Sax, wandering the streets of Burroughs looking at the stock market displays in the office windows, certainly didn’t claim to. People were not rational systems.
Righteousness, good Lord—it is a most unpleasant quality in a person.
problem is that people with a hypertrophied regard for wealth and power achieve positions that give them these gifts in excess, and then they find that they’re as much slaves to them as masters. And then they become dissatisfied and bitter.”
brutally—Earth had a carrying capacity. People had overshot it. Many of them would therefore die. Everyone knew this. The fight for resources was correspondingly fierce. The fighters, perfectly rational. But desperate.
It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.
