Blue Mars (Mars Trilogy, #3)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Mostly a matter of instructions to AIs, as usual. It was getting to the point where having conceived a clear idea of what one wanted to do, one could just say to an AI, “please do thus and such”—please spin the soletta and annular mirror into Venusian orbit, and adjust the slats of the soletta so that it becomes a parasol shielding the planet from all of its incoming insolation; and the AIs would calculate the trajectories and the rocket firings and the mirror angles necessary, and it would be done.

Not far away, yet so far away. But will happen.

“This global versus local problem is going to be hard,” Art said one night. “It’s a real contradiction, I think. I mean it’s not just the result of confused thinking. We truly want some global control, and yet we want freedom for the tents as well. Two of our most essential values are in contradiction.”

Critique on similar tension in US?

“Sunnis are fighting Shiites—Lebanon is devastated—the oil-rich states are hated by the oil-poor states—the North African countries are a metanat—Syria and Iraq hate each other—Iraq and Egypt hate each other—we all hate the Iranians, except for the Shiites—and we all hate Israel of course, and the Palestinians too—and even though I am from Egypt I am actually Bedouin, and we despise the Nile Egyptians, and in fact we don’t get along well with the Bedouin from Jordan. And everyone hates the Saudis, who are as corrupt as you can get. So when you ask me what is the Arab view, what can I say to you?” He shook his head darkly.

But now with the new AIs, and a continuing stream of new immigrants speaking the full array of Terran languages, it looked like things might broaden back out again, as new nisei stayed with their primary languages and used AIs as their lingua franca instead of English.

In these firms all employees were co-owners, and they bought into their positions by paying the equivalent of about a year’s wages to the firm’s equity fund, wages earned in apprentice programs of various kinds at the end of schooling. This buy-in fee became the starter of their share in the firm, which grew every year they stayed, until it was given back to them as pension or departure payment. Councils elected from

precedent for this?

Certainly there’s a lot of women doing it this way.” “In Dorsa Brevia.” “Everywhere. The biological family isn’t really a Martian institution, is it.”

“My boy,” he said at last, dreamily. The whole city was quiet. Coyote muttered as if falling asleep. “What does the hero do when the tale is over? Swim over the waterfall. Drift out on the tide.”

Only a few people in this world were lucky enough to run into their true partners—it took outrageous luck for it to happen, then the sense to recognize it, and the courage to act. Few could be expected to have all that, and then to have things go well. The rest had to make do.

order was not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible. This difference was what humans perceived as order.

Stoop and soar, stoop and soar; no blimpglider could fly like that, not even close. Birds were the greatest fliers, and the diana flew like a bird. Now, along with everything else, people were birds.

in those first twenty m-years people got most of whatever experience was ever going to give them, after that it was only a matter of repetition.

This issei was unteasable, unshockable; and his opinions were unpredictable, which was an unusual trait in the old, indeed in anyone. Most of the ancient ones Zo had met seemed especially bound in the tightly warped spacetime of their values; and as the way people lived their values was in inverse proportion to how tightly they were bound in them, the old had ended up Tartuffes to a man, or so she had thought, hypocrites for whom she had no patience at all.

you really think it takes centuries to become human, that no one was human until you geriatrics came along? Keats died at twenty-five, have you read Hyperion? Do you think this hole in a rock is as sublime as even a phrase of Hyperion? Really, you issei are so horrible. And you especially. For you to judge me, when you haven’t changed from the moment you touched Mars.…”

Wherever you go, there we are.

Thus the emotional charge of an event had much to do with how fully it was laid out in the memory. Things happened, and the consciousness witnessed or experienced them, and inevitably a great deal of this experience changed the brain, and became part of it forever; particularly the events heightened by emotion. This description seemed right to Sax; what he had felt most he remembered best—or forgot most assiduously, as certain experiments suggested, with an unconscious constant effort that was not true forgetting at all, but repression.

“Perhaps the combination should be called blue,” Ann said one evening, looking over the side at the water. “Brown isn’t very attractive, and it reeks of compromise. Maybe we should be thinking of something entirely new.”

“I love you!” he shouted. She didn’t hear him.