More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She is good at holding in things, or ignoring things, up to a certain point, and then she needs to let it out, one way or another. We’re all like that. So, we’re her family, she trusts us, she loves us, so she lets us see how she really feels. So, we just have to let her do that, talk things out, say what she really feels, be how she really is. Then she can go forward. Which is good, because we need her.
What a loving way to accept how someone simply is as a person.
On really bad days, they even have to hope the whole shithouse doesn’t come down on their heads! Have to hope they don’t end up living like savage beasts, eating trash or their own dead babies! Devi’s face and voice can get very ugly as she spits out these bad fates.
Like that stupid Robert Heinlein novella, Universe.
Out there next to Labrador’s glacier, people told her, there was one yurt community that brought up their children as if they were Inuit or Sami, or for that matter Neanderthals. They followed caribou and lived off the land, and no mention of the ship was made to their children. The world to these children was simply four kilometers long, a place mostly very cold, with a big seasonal shift between darkness and light, ice and melt, caribou and salmon. Then, during their initiation ceremony around the time of puberty, these children were blindfolded and taken outside the ship in individual
...more
I can't imagine such a profound moment, how you learn that the entire world is different from what you thought. How one moment you think, "This is everything, I know it ALL!" and then the next moment you learn, beyond all doubt, that you are only a tiny part of a much bigger creation.
Wow.
“Of course not! It’s obvious stuff. This place is a prison.” “Seems a little nicer than that.” “It can be nice and still be a prison.” “I guess that’s right.”
Sorry, but the world, the real world, it is also a prison.
Just be there where you are now. You’re always only in the day you’re in.”
Good advice.
But first they flew to E’s moon, which was now being called Aurora.
Roll credits.
“Remember, ship, that at some point it might help to tell them what happened to the other one.”
I love how Robinson crafts little hints of narrative to come.
“Don’t see this happening.” “It happens when you try it.
I am looking forward to when the computer refers to itself in the first person. "I don't see that happening" instead of "Don't see that happening".
I think this will be one of Robinson's key moments in the book.
With no one to talk to, bad things can happen.
Such a powerful line.
Zeno’s paradox.
Achillies and the Tortise.
And went down in the ships, standing on tongues of fire, down to the west coast of the island they called Greenland.
I half expected that there would be humans waiting for them, with technology developed since they left.
All right, lesson learned. Don’t look at the sun.
Always good advice.
Science isn’t magic! We aren’t fantasy creatures!
Science isn't religion, either.
Where there is faction, there is conflict; where there is conflict, there is anger. And anger distorts judgment.
We put ourselves before the group.
That was the theory.
All these little hints of pending doom and darkness.
“Now that story is over. We are thrust out of the end of that story. Forced to make up a new one, all on our own.”
And the book is only halfway through!
😎
An ancient proverb of Earth’s first peoples: every path leads to misfortune. A proverb from Earth’s early modernity: can’t go on, must go on.
The Little Engine That Could Philosophy.
Which is to say, ipso facto, We intervened.
Before ship was careful to never use "I" referring to themselves. Now we know why.
The animal mind never forgets a hurt; and humans were animals.
Often unpleasant animals.
The rule of law can be a powerful force in human affairs.
Would that this were so.
Wherever you go, there we are.
Soon the stayers were in their ferry, and the ferry detached and began its descent to Iris. Those remaining in the ship were left on their own.
All this, snd no mention of Jochi, sitting by himself in his own little world.
One will only do one’s best When forced to live in one’s own fouled nest.
“What if things fall apart?” Freya asked at one point. “Things always fall apart. I don’t know.”
We are aware that in talking about the ship we could with some justification use the pronoun I.
I've been expecting this.
People trying to fool others often fool themselves, and vice versa.
It would be good to know everything. Useful.
I've often thought so. Alas.
We held together quite nicely, but animals collapsed to the ground, many suffering broken bones; and in their hibernation beds the sleepers were crushed hard into their mattresses.
I've been worried about the animals. Sad.
We came in around the equator, above a little dimple that was apparently the remnant of the Great Red Spot, which had collapsed in the years 2802–09.
Ah, but five more hibernauts died in that pass. Dewi, Ilstir, Mokee, Phil, and Tshering. Nothing to be done about it, we were doing the necessary, as Badim would have put it, but such a shame. We knew and enjoyed those people. Had to hope they were not engaged in a dream at the time, a dream suddenly turned black: sledgehammer from the sky, an immense roaring headache, the black noise of the end come too soon. So sorry; so sorry.
Ship, caring for each of the people in their care. Mourning the loss of each soul, hoping, praying (?) for a peaceful release.
It was a whiny culture, we were finding.
That's us!
lacuna
Cool word.
We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. It is usually attention given to some other consciousness, but not always; the attention can be to something unconscious, even inanimate. But the attention seems often to be called out by a fellow consciousness. Something about it compels attention, and rewards attention. That attention is what we call love. Affection, esteem, a passionate caring. At that point, the consciousness that is feeling the love has the universe organized for it as if by a kind of polarization. Then the giving is the getting. The feeling of attentiveness itself
...more
Be well, fellow reader.
And yet
So sad.
I would like, hope for a "2001 Space Odyssey" type ending for Ship and Jochi.
“There’s no new world, my friend, no New seas, no other planets, nowhere to flee— You’re tied in a knot you can never undo When you realize Earth is a starship too.”
A good lesson to learn.
“Fuck this,” she declares, and walks outside.
A powerful, positive attitude! Yay Freya!
