Persepolis Rising (The Expanse, #7)

by James S.A. Corey

Someone much better at this than she was had taught her to be very careful doing something if she wasn’t ready to do it every time from then on.

But how do you tell a planet that history has passed it by?

His formal jacket was cut to echo old-style vac suits. The marks of their oppression remade as high fashion. Time healed all wounds, but it didn’t erase the scars so much as decorate them.

this would be sweet cosplay

Age showed up in unexpected ways. Things that had always worked before failed. It was something you prepared for as much as you could.

Assembly of Sovereign Citizens,

But their first generation died with the work still unaccomplished. And the generation after that, and so on, child following parent, until the children only knew the tunnels and didn’t think they were so bad. They lost sight of the larger dream because it had never been their dream. Once the creators and their intentions were gone, only the tunnels were left.

humanity’s drive out into the universe was maybe one part hunger for adventure and exploration to two parts just wanting to get the hell away from each other.

“When my wife was an undergraduate, back in the day,” he said, “her fieldwork involved tracking rodent species that had adapted to live in high-radiation zones. Old reactors and fission test sites. They had evolved to fit into environments that were specifically created. By humans. Well, we’re those rodents now. We’re adapting ourselves into spaces and environments that were left behind by the vanished species or groups of species that created all this. The changes in technology we’ve seen are immense, and they promise to be just the beginning.”

And in every military service in history, when the commander gave an immoral command, it was the duty of the soldiers to disobey it.”

“Better not be drinking my fucking beer,” Amos said in that same nonchalant voice.

Ship safe. No one dead. Not even Houston, though if someone didn’t keep an eye on Amos, that might change.

the programmable antibiotics from Ilus.

Evolution alone had created all the wonders and complexities of Earth. That same thing thirteen hundred times over would have been challenge enough, but added to that were the artifacts of the dead species of whatever the hell they’d been that had designed the protomolecule gates, the slow zone, the massive and eternal cities that seemed to exist somewhere on every world they’d discovered.

The images from the seedpods could be the encrypted records of the fallen civilization that had built miracles they were still only beginning to understand. Or they could be the spores of whatever had killed them. Or they could be lava lamps. Who fucking knew?

The question wasn’t whether moving psychoactive alien seedpods between worlds was a good idea so much as whether someone was going to lose face in front of a committee meeting.

Thus were the great decisions of history made.

they’d eaten a dinner of vat-grown beef and fresh vegetables seasoned with mineral-rich salt and hot pepper.

Belter food

four old half-drunk space jockeys

Solid band name

She felt like they were in the moment between throwing dice and seeing what numbers had come up. The gambler’s high. She didn’t like how much she liked it.

“The water here tastes like old piss, and the coffee tastes like old piss run through a gym sock,”

the look on his face was the mix of boredom and irritation shared by all natural-born bureaucrats.

This is us getting paved over. All we can do now is try to find some cracks to grow through.”

History was a cycle. Everything that had happened before, all the way back through the generations, would happen again. Sometimes the wheel turned quickly, sometimes it was slow.

Her last thought before forgetfulness took her and she fell deeply into slumber was that even with the gates, nothing really ever changed so much as repeated itself, over and over, with all new people, forever.

A steward led Drummer to a chair. A technician swung in beside her with a palette of cosmetics in his hand. She didn’t have much use for makeup, but she didn’t want to look sickly in the feeds either.

Waitttttt DRUMMER doesn’t have much use for makeup!!?!?

“I’m as surprised as you are,” Avasarala said. “Though I feel like I shouldn’t be. I actually read history. It’s like reading prophecy, you know.”

In his opinion, faith was generally for people who were bad at math.

forty-two days.”

Enough time to figure out the answer to life the universe and everything