Green Mars (Mars Trilogy, #2)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

the powerful almost always seem to have a dysfunctional aspect to them. Everything from cynicism to full-blown destructiveness.

For that matter how could any historian, sitting in a chair and sifting through the records, ever know what they had known, ever capture the way it had felt at the time, the fractured kaleidoscopic nature of the daily crisis? Each moment of the storm they had struggled.…

building a revolution was like building an arch; until both columns were there, and the keystone in place, practically any disruption could bring the whole thing crashing down.