Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

It’s clear, then, that always our real interest has been not in any particular place, but rather in our ability to get to that place. It’s the process of exploration itself that fascinates us, not the places we explore.

But no matter where I go, I can never escape myself, the country no one can ever really know. In that sense travel is useless. Maybe we look to the next step in order to avoid seeing ourselves. Not narcissism, then, but an attempt to forget.

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

he was so old he had outlived even nostalgia.

America is more of a one-party state than China. It’s entirely ruled by the market. Actually the market is the only party in the world now, or it wants to be. So every nation has to deal with that in its own way.” “They usually say we have a two-party system,” Fred mentioned. “Your parties are just factions. That’s why people in your country are so angry. They can see it’s just one party, and one-party states are always corrupt. Polyarchies are better because power gets distributed to various groups. They’re inefficient and messy, with lots of turf battles, but that’s the cost of distributing power. It’s better than concentrated power.”

“Suggestive, likely, persuasive, probable, conclusive, compelling.” “What is this list?” “This is a list of scientists’ adjectives, used often in their papers to indicate their judgment of the strength of an assertion.” “Because they don’t have much imagination when it comes to language?” “No. Because they want a rough scale to indicate to each other how strong a case they think has been made in their own specialty. Scientists have to be able to communicate across disciplines to other scientists who don’t know the details of their discipline, and so they have worked up this rating vocabulary over time to suggest judgments concerning reliability of assertions.” “Do they know they have this vocabulary?” “No. It is an ad hoc system, visible in the literature, and intuitively understood by those who use it.”

“We do blockchain governance,” one of the others said. “The census is part of that.” “Blockchain governance? Meaning what?” “All our activities and decisions are recorded in a secure distributed network, including our comings and goings, but also everything we do as a town. We call it documented anarchy. A full-disclosure commons. Anyone can do anything, but everyone gets to know what that is.”

“My sympathies about your mother. I was sorry to hear.” “She had a good life.” “Yes. Still, when your mother goes, it changes something inside you.” “It does. No more umbrella.” “No more umbrella.”

But these were just her mortal remains. Her spirit was somewhere else. If it was anywhere at all, it seemed to him, it was in his brain. Her soul was now a pattern of neurons in his brain, making a certain set of memories, certain habits of mind. He himself was what remained of her in this world.

But now it appeared that everywhere in the world governments were suffering a crisis of representation. Possibly this was because it was all one system, which one could call global capitalism with national characteristics, each variation around the Earth marked by the remaining vestiges of an earlier nation-state system, but still making together one larger global thing: capitalism. When it came to those national characteristics, China had the Party, the US its federal government, the EU its union; but all were ruled by the globalized market.

The solution is impossible, therefore when it is solved it will be solved.

QED stands for quod erat demonstrandum, Latin for “that which was to be demonstrated.” Sometimes translated or paraphrased by British scholars and students as “The Five Ws”: which was what we wanted.