A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought, #2)

by Vernor Vinge

Nau raised his glass. “So a toast. To an end of mistakes, and to our common undertaking. May there be a greater focus in the future.”

ha ha it's a pun

The average academic type comes up with maybe twenty ideas in a lifetime. Underhill has twenty an hour;

I feel like this is most of us except the ideas are almost entirely bad

The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don’t always get what you thought you were asking for. From this era on, I think invention will be the parent of necessity—and not the other way around.”

“See, Pham, you—all you Qeng Ho—grew up wearing blinders. You just know certain things are impossible. I see the clichés in your literature: ‘Garbage input means garbage output’ ‘The trouble with automation is that it does exactly what you ask it’ ‘Automation can never be truly creative.’ Humankind has accepted such claims for thousands of years. But we Emergents have disproved them! With ziphead support, I can get correct performance from ambiguous inputs. I can get effective natural language translation. I can get human-quality judgment as part of the automation!”

“Yes…just listen to the peace. It’s a gift to be able to do that. Too much time is spent in frenzied rushing. Listen to the breeze in the lestras. Watch Fred try to figure us out. Listen to the laughter of your children and your grandchildren. Enjoy the time you have, however it is given to you, and for however long.”

Abuse of the community’s resources. It was the primal sin.

Not for the first time, Ezr realized this was almost like having family, a family that argued endlessly about problems that never seemed to change.

for starfarers, a living park is the greatest symbol of power and ability in space.