Mark Ferguson > Mark's Quotes

“Nemed was a smart kid, but like almost all kids he operated under the delusion that adults were genuinely as knowledgeable and certain as they pretended to be in front of kids.”
― Mark Ferguson, Terra Incognita

“The problem was time. Her augmented physiology had given her the time to go from hardened bigot to tolerant, relaxed progressive, reserving fear and hatred for the truer Enemy. She even had time to regress back. Alder Malone probably wasn’t going to have the time.
"He changed clothes in front of me … like I was some pet, some dog. Privacy is between humans.”
― Mark Ferguson, Terra Incognita

“For a moment of nearly five seconds Nemed had wanted to correct, to interject with the boasting recitation of a child who has just learned something interesting about the subject at hand and wants to amaze the adults; he had wanted to tell Emer that the Inrisus were not magical or truly evil, and that their medicine was amazing. The tablet suggested that the Inrisus were entirely made of tumor cells; long ago, blue historians believed, the Inrisus had conquered cancer and found a way to separate its resilience to radiation and chemical attack from its malignancy, producing cells both immortal and functional. Their brains and hearts and other parts would keep showing up on medical scans, like blotches in a smoker’s lungs. Carcinogens simply made an Inrisus pregnant.
But then Nemed realized that Emer was wearing beaver hide, that no part of his costume even had a zipper; he might not even know what cancer was. He wouldn’t know that it could be treated with radiation or chemicals; he wouldn’t appreciate the Inrisus and their ability to turn cancer into eternal life. He would probably call it necromancy, or a form of vampirism, stealing the life of an unborn infant because that was supposed to be the only way to live forever in the old stories of the Folk.
I think less of him, Nemed realized. Him, and the others.”
― Mark Ferguson, Terra Incognita

“In all bluefolk the immune system is quite advanced. A large number of relevant genes seem to be imported from the crocodile: those creatures live in stagnant, muddy water in much warmer climates, where they are exposed to many diseases and parasites. Wrestling with prey or each other, they may be wounded, but the dirty swamp water in the cut is mostly harmless. It was a very important acquisition by the Auravelus; it meant that virtually none of the old bioweapons were effective against them. More ordinary bluefolk could still suffer under a few recipes, but often no more than a rash. Chemical weapons had to be used instead. Infection or contamination through wounds was largely useless; our Asian friends determined that inhalation was a more viable route. Concoctions made against the lungs, as aerosols, were the most successful”
― Mark Ferguson, Terra Incognita

“On the Larch Scape humans had never managed to extend a sizeable population across entire continents, so much of the megafauna considered to be a distant Pleistocene memory on other Scapes had lingered. The mammoths, giant sloths and woolly rhinoceroses were extinct, but there were hyenas, fanged cats and amphicyonids hunting bison, omnivorous deer, glyptodons, great boars, and wild horses too large for men to ride south of the Laurentian Sea, in what was called Illinois on Malone’s Scape. The island of Manhattan was not an island due to the lower sea level, and it was uninhabited by men, an impenetrable mass of old growth larch trees ruled by creatures thought to be related to the raccoon. The Larch ‘raccoon’ was frequently said to be too intelligent to domesticate; in groups they would destroy shelters and eat the faces of sleeping humans. The atrox cat had been genetically sequenced in cooperation with Austral scientists years ago and determined to be more closely related to the lion than the cougar, and it had enjoyed a range extending north of the Laurentian Sea up to the glaciers until very recently. It was a dark creature with a thick mane in both genders; besides the elements, their prides were the deadliest things to encounter in the far north.”
― Mark Ferguson, Terra Incognita

“Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up.”
― Stephen King, Everything's Eventual