Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

“Wine is useless without poetry,” he said. “Just a little ethanol poisoning.”

“The moon,” Qi remarked at one point, “is like a miniature Hong Kong in a giant Tibet.”

“Don’t make fun,” Qi commanded. “I like Mao. Listen to this: ‘Not to have a correct political view is like having no soul.’ You hear that?” “I do,” Fred said. “But what’s correct?” “Maybe you can learn that here, it’s the very next quote. ‘Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice: the struggle to make things, the class struggle, and scientific experiment.’”

‘This process is never ending. In any society in which classes exist, class struggle will never end. In a classless society, the struggle between new and old and between truth and falsehood will never end. In the fields of the struggle for production and scientific experiment, humanity makes constant progress and nature undergoes constant change, they never remain at the same level. Therefore people have to go on discovering, inventing, creating and advancing. Ideas of stagnation, pessimism, and complacency are all wrong. They are wrong because they agree neither with the historical facts of social development, nor with the facts of nature so far known to us, as revealed in the history of celestial bodies, the earth, life, and other natural phenomena,’

Across the lake the monkeys were carefully rolling a bicycle into the water.

A spasm of sorrow passed through him, followed after a while by a wash of relief, as he realized that his mom was now finally freed of the intense burden of staying happy after his father was gone. Twenty years of driven, relentless effort.

This slow pedal through the heavy gravity of his grief quickly took on the nature of a penance or a funeral march.

All my life fusion has been twenty years away. It is like horizon. You move toward it and it moves away same speed.