Gavin > Books

When the old industries faltered in Britain, the ingenious spirit of the backroom boys survived. The urge to build the future detached itself from lathes and wind tunnels, and reappeared in the new technologies of software, gene sequencing and wireless communications.

It isn’t a category mistake, or an idle compliment, to call PACE2 poetry. Engineering is poetic, in the ancient sense of the original Greek word our ‘poetry’ derives from. Poesis meant making. And so every maker is a kind of poet; everyone who wants to subject ideas to the tempering of existence, and is willing to stay with the process as the ideas are changed by being realised, and cares enough to labour until the creation comes right. The words that might be used to describe a piece of engineering are secondary things, limping attempts to convey an act of making that didn’t happen in the medium that’s now being asked to express it. The poetry isn’t in the description. It’s in the numbers, it’s in the algorithms, it’s in the system design... We used to quote the joking definition of art,’ John Causebrook told me. ‘“An art is a science with more than seven variables.” So we used to say, yeah, we’ve got more than seven variables. We must be artists.’

Every tool, every machine that human beings ever invented has created the possibility of a new physical state for the person using it...

Whether the components are atoms or bits, ideas or steel girders, building something is a process of subduing wishes to possibilities. Some of the best bridges, programs, novels – not all of the best, but some – come about because their makers have immersed themselves in the task with such concentration, such intent openness to what the task may bring, that the effort of making wishes real itself breeds new wishes. ...

More than any rocket ever built in Europe, [Concorde] was the European equivalent to the Apollo programme, a gasp-inducing, consciously grand undertaking that changed the sense, in those who contemplated it, of what human beings were capable of... Concorde has a payload capacity of only 7 per cent of its takeoff mass, a ratio more reminiscent of a satellite launcher

Asserting a proprietary right over the whole genome was not like holding a patent for, say, a particular model of car; it was like saying you had a patent on the very idea of a car in general, a patent that covered every conceivable self-propelled personal transportation device there ever had been – and ever might be in future – while your patent lasted. People kept saying, in 1998, that the twenty-first century was going to be the age of the life sciences, the century when applied genetics banished a thousand diseases, abolished a thousand sources of suffering, creating the same kind of step change in human mastery over the terms of human existence that mass mobility had done in the twentieth century thanks to the internal combustion engine. Well, in 1898, tiny manufacturers all over Europe and North America had been experimenting with different ways to fit a petrol motor together with four wheels and a transmission. Only a few designs, from a few firms, prospered; but it was the multiple experiments in multiple directions that allowed the few successful designs to emerge and to form the foundation of the car industry.

Those who survive from the heyday of British rocketry all live in detached, modern houses in Home Counties commuter villages or Midlands suburbs. So does Mr Dommett. He, like them, drove home every day from establishments shrouded in secrecy to family tea and an after-supper pint in the Green Man. But he inhabits a much shaggier version of suburban pastoral than his colleagues. Their houses are ultra-neat, with outbreaks of supernaturally competent DIY, like externalisations of the kind of mind that adjusts a complex system until it’s just so. His is surrounded by a runaway experiment in growing wild flowers... These Morris men came dancing up the street, led by this big fat bloke in a kind of Andy Pandy outfit who was bopping people on the head with a pig’s bladder – and I said to my wife, “Sweetheart, you won’t believe me, but that man is one of the brains behind Britain’s nuclear defence.”’

To a good half of their fellow students, of course, they were just indistinguishable nerds. They had come to a place where the arts/sciences split in British education (and British culture, for that matter) manifested itself as a social split. Humanities students mostly didn’t hang out with science students, and vice versa. This wasn’t a matter of class division, since the science students came from the same mix of backgrounds as the arts ones, or of active hostility either: indifference and mutual incomprehension did the work of separation. It was a difference of style, more than anything. The arts students valued verbal prowess and they looked for the complexity that made their studies exciting in the forest of unpredictable connections that law or history or literature or anthropology kept ceaselessly throwing up. In their spare time, they put on plays, drank cheap Bulgarian wine, and protested against Mrs Thatcher. Oh, and had sex without worrying about their parents hearing them through the bedroom wall. To them, the way the scientists got their helping of complexity, by rooting around among the factual bones of the universe, was out of reach. They weren’t mathematically equipped to see it...

by having people who were proud of what they were doing, the British were getting the kind of quality that was needed without the sophisticated quality control methods that were being used in America.

Under the recessed halogen lights of the Red Carpet Club, very little contradicted this perspective. There were logos woven into the carpet, and printed onto the porcelain of the coffee cups. No one was gross enough to demand actual cash for the coffee, or for the orange juice in the glass jug on the snowy linen cloth... This was a room for the new masters of the universe. Out there, beyond the smoked-glass windows, everything existed in order to be bought and sold, from thousand-acre lots of edge-city building land down to... the order of the nucleotides in every human cell; everything existed in order to be divided, packaged, transformed, exchanged, shifted between the multiplying warehouses of proliferating business parks, and gently squeezed, gently milked for the margin that you then paid to be admitted back into little bubbles of quiet corporate utopia like this, where the flight announcements were delivered at a sympathetic murmur and every article you read in the free copies of Fast Company and Business 2.0 in the magazine rack confirmed that moving goods through the market was the one, the true, the only occupation of mankind.

It didn’t obey the rules of scientific speech, which say that you should only claim what you are already sure of, what you have proved. Instead, it followed the rules of good PR, as taught by every investment bank presently engaged in guiding unprofitable companies along the short, beautiful road to a listing on the NASDAQ. These rules were different: you should claim everything you can, they said, that can’t be disproved. Claim Big, in other words, and Cover Your Back. Accordingly, the press release ended with the standard piece of legal boilerplate that insured against baulky behaviour by the future you’d just declared you were seizing. ‘Certain statements in this press release and its attachments are forward-looking. These may be identified by the use of forward-looking words or phrases such as “believe”, “expect”, “anticipate”, “intend”, “should”, “planned”, “estimated”, “potential” and “will” among others … The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides a “safe harbour” for such forward-looking statements.’

Dribbles of HTP left behind after a test in the twists of a pipe assembly would drain out onto the sleeve of the person taking it apart: ‘Instantly the whole sleeve catches fire, pooff, as quickly as that. So everybody worked in twos, with one of them holding a running hose, and you just flicked the hose onto your mate when he was on fire, and he’d go, “Oh, that was a nuisance...

'I would not underestimate the romantic reasons why we got into Black Arrow,’ he says. ‘Even people who worked in the ministry went home and read science fiction, saw science-fiction stuff on the television; they dreamed too

‘If you don’t know what to do, do something, and measure it'...

No one I met in radio engineering talks the way other British engineers do, with a rueful sense of operating small, of having to make do with inadequate means, and this is part of the reason why. Vodafone had the cash. It could pay the price of its ambitions. From now on, Vodafone would be a bidder in almost every competition for a mobile licence, everywhere.

he asked what had happened to their civilization, which had embraced over a thousand light-years. They smiled kindly at his lack of comprehension and told him they were done with it. Their battle for knowledge, they said, was won; they knew everything worth knowing. What they were, therefore, had no further purpose in the context of their achievement. They were now embarked on a completely different path of development, one last final application of their glorious heritage. Life itself would become pleasant and simple. Their bodies were modifying and adapting, melding to fit perfectly with a natural planetary environment. But unlike a primitive, pretechnology society, they would never starve or become ill, for this was a designed simplicity, taking advantage of everything their planet could provide. Their minds would quiet over the generations until the joy of a single sunset provided as much satisfaction as breaking down the barriers of space and time with the mental tools of mathematics and physics... closing themselves away from reality like a flower at the end of the day

I'm offering you virtual immortality lived as a plutocrat, and you're turning that down?

"Why not just give them the classics like Pratchett and Tolkien?"
"I don't think they're very relevant to today."

Our nonreturn would damage Zantiu-Braun's interstellar operations permanently, possibly even to the point of shutting them down. That would be a catastrophe we cannot permit to happen

You gave me a piece of a fucking animal to eat, and you ask me what the fucking matter is. An animal! A living creature. You're fucking crazy, that's my problem... He's eating fruit. Real fruit. Off a bush. They're all bloody Regressors

1517 Fund’s returns place it in the top one or two percent of all funds in its class. So the fact that we perform this well, are a brand new fund competing against the Yankees, and limit ourselves to investing in dropouts or people who never went to college is truly extraordinary.

At the end of our deliberations, we’d go to Peter’s house to show him who we were picking and why. The first year, we were in his dining room, standing around the table. Peter was looking down at a sheet of photographs of the twenty we’d chosen. Danielle remembers thinking, “Are we really doing this?” Peter scanned the photos in silence, nodded, and gave his customary approval: “Ok, looks good.”

' "Why do so many give, when it is so easy to take?" But you ask these questions because you know nothing of strength. For what is strength but the resolve to deny base inclinations—the determination to sacrifice in the name of one's brothers? You, Ikurei Conphas, know only weakness, and because it takes strength to acknowledge weakness, you call your weakness strength.'

The world is about to end. The world is about to end. Said enough times, any phrase — even this one — was sure to be leached of its meaning... Two thousand years of preparation, it seemed, had left them utterly unprepared...

Esmenet felt it then, overpowering her, and in the strange fashion of moving souls, she struggled to ward it away. But it was too late. For what seemed the first time, she understood: his pointless urgency, his desperation to be believed, his haggard love, his short-winded compassion—shadows of the Apocalypse, all. To witness the dissolution of nations, to be stripped night after night of everything cherished, everything fair. The miracle was that he still loved, that he still recognized mercy, pity

when the gears do not meet, they become as teeth. So it is with men and their machinations... Only when things were broken did their meaning become clear.

"For your entire life you yearned for a bold God, not one who skulked in scriptoriums, whispering the inaudible to the insane."

"The players of viramsata have made games of truth. They tell lies about who said what to whom, about who makes love to whomever, and so on. They do this continually, and what is more, they are at pains to act out the lies told by others, especially when they are elegant, so they might make them true. And so it goes from tongue to lip to tongue, until no distinction remains between what is a lie and what is true. "In the end, at a great ceremony, it is the most compelling tale that is declared Pirvirsut, a word that means 'this breath is ground' in ancient Vaparsi. The weak, the inelegant, have died, while others grow strong, yielding only to the Pirvirsut, the Breath-that-is-Ground. "Do you see? The viramsata, they become living things, and we are their battle plain."

the feeling of certainty is no more a marker of truth than the feeling of will is a marker of freedom

Kellhus had given these men more than gestures or promises, more even than insight or direction. He had given them dominion. Over their doubts. Over their most hated foes. He had made them strong. But how could lies do such a thing? ...what looked like hope or truth or love from within could be a scythe or a hammer, things wielded for other ends, when seen from without.

...He was no longer of the People. He was more. There was no thought he could not think. No act he could not undertake. No lips he could not kiss ... Nothing was forbidden... there were truces, the coming together of coincidental interests, but nothing else, nothing meaningful. Kellhus had taught him that. He cackled aloud when the revelation struck, and for a moment the world itself wobbled. A sense of power suffused him, so intense it seemed something other might snap from his frame, that throwing out his arms he could shear Joktha's walls from their foundations, cast them to the horizon. No reason bound him. Nothing. No scruple, no instinct, no habit, no calculation, no hate ... He stood beyond origin or outcome. He stood nowhere. "The men wonder," Troyatti said cautiously, "what amuses you, Lord." Cnaiür grinned. "That I once cared for my life."

[With horror:] They make us love! They make us love!

Because of the risks involved in defining oneself, most important academic treatises about Mexico have been written by foreigners...

In its soul, Mexico is not—and perhaps never will be — a Western nation. But by trying to make the country more superficially democratic, more Western, more “presentable” abroad, the system’s roots in the population have weakened. It has become less truly democratic because it is less representative of real Mexicans. The more the system responds to the Americanized minority, the more blatant will be the contradictions within the country...

more evident than in Mexico’s almost aggressive sense of nationalism. The threats, attacks, invasions and occupations that have come from abroad since the time of Independence are more than sufficient to justify Mexico’s unspoken xenophobia... Feeling imprisoned historically and economically by the United States, Mexico has used a series of lesser political issues as loudspeakers for its nationalism. Its strong influence over local media and the discipline of its political apparatus enable the government to switch on nationalist “shows” at its convenience: issues that in one year become tests of national honor may be ignored the next year. Major “victories” have therefore been recorded on problems of little consequence to the United States and of great symbolic weight to Mexico... A drought that severely damaged Mexican agriculture in 1980 was attributed by some officials to hurricane seeding by the U.S. National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. On this occasion, embarrassed Mexican diplomats conceded privately that the nationalism was misplaced and the media “show” had taken off on its own. The following year, no credit was given to the United States for an excellent rainy season.


Mexico alone is truly mestizo: it is the only nation in the hemisphere where religious and political—as well as racial—mestizaje took place; it has the only political system that must be understood in a pre-Hispanic context; and its inhabitants alone are still more Oriental than Western

Conversely, the wife, who as an object of sex is considered an aberration from feminine perfection, must be humiliated, since a husband’s faithfulness or excessive affection would imply vulnerability and weakness

Whether or not this neo-Freudian analysis is wholly valid, the male-female relationship in Mexico is often marked by tension and distrust.

soon became apparent that much of the crime, in the main holdups and kidnappings, was being carried out in Mexico City by current and former members of the local police

on numerous occasions each year, politicians—men and women—will line up for hours in the hope of receiving an abrazo from the President.

the INI moved to recover direct control over Maya, Tarahumara, Mixtec and Nahuatl radio stations thought to be too independent.

Given the fatalism of the Indians and the repression prevailing throughout the country, revolution could only begin in the middle classes.

Today, Mexicans resent the arrogance of many Spanish migrants, with their well-earned reputation for “exploiting” local workers, but they feel drawn to all things Spanish, from singers and bullfighters to food and wines. At a national level, even though Mexico is today richer, more populous and more influential than Spain, it continues to look, perhaps subconsciously, for the mother country’s approval.

In 1992, Salinas restored Mexico’s diplomatic relations with the Vatican and relaxed controls on church activities. For the first time in seventy-five years, the clergy stopped being official pariahs.

There is resentment bequeathed by the loss of so much territory in the nineteenth century and by U.S. military interventions as recently as 1916. There is resistance to the oppressive weight of continuing U.S. political and economic influence in Mexico. There is intellectualized contempt for the materialistic culture exported by the United States. And there is the reassuring belief that “clever” Mexicans can always outwit “naïve” Americans. But among ordinary Mexicans there is also admiration for the United States and, above all, for its organization, honesty and affluence.

the country’s own historical record of defeats and betrayals has prepared Mexicans to expect — and accept — the worst. The official heroes — from Cuauhtémoc to Emiliano Zapata—have invariably been murdered, while the ideals enshrined in laws and constitutions have been universally betrayed. “The hero’s tomb is the cradle of the people,” the poet Octavio Paz

[The US is separated by] language, religion, race, philosophy and history. The United States is a nation barely two hundred years old and is lunging for the twenty-first century. Mexico is several thousand years old and is still held back by its past.

No former colony with a large indigenous population has ever climbed out of underdevelopment. No valid blueprint exists, no improvised plans seem to work. Even if Mexico’s political system survives in its present form, its managers harbored few illusions that the country’s deep social problems would be resolved before the year 2000: optimistically, it might resemble Greece; pessimistically, it will be more like India

The warming [of diplomatic relations] went unnoticed by most of us in the Mexico City foreign press corps