Seven Surrenders (Terra Ignota, #2)

by Ada Palmer

I am a Humanist because I believe in heroes, that history is driven by those individuals with fire enough to change the world.

yet we do not vaccinate against a thing defeated. The more people insist that feminism has won, the more they blind themselves to its remaining foes.”

First entomologist on Mars, now there’s a title for a hero.

Curiosity is a dangerous thing for a dead man; it tempts one to want to live.

Kat Typer I know is fascinated by the pseudoscientific spiritualism of the Nineteenth Century: meters to quantify ghostly presences, meticulously catalogued séances, ESP research, but it is not in the supernatural where Kat finds wonder. It is the late Nineteenth-Century mind that fascinates, these scientists who were simultaneously so rigorous and so poetic, so critical and so credulous, so expert and so wrong. It was a unique mind-state, Kat thinks, fleeting, a psychological mayfly possible only in the moment when science was rising quickly in respect and use, but lagging behind in power. Medicine was not yet competent, workweeks not yet humane, so these minds, trying to be modern, still faced premodern trauma levels, and channeled that into the most sophisticated double-think we have ever achieved. That is Kat’s current theory anyway.

Our happy world has made complacency contagious.