Colonization Quotes

“strength and a weakness — an obsessive-compulsive breed of obstinacy. Those who couldn’t accept the obvious would slam their heads against the inevitable until they exhausted their numbers and dwindled to nothing.”
― Sean Platt, Colonization

“It was always easier to maintain strength for others than to face the demons inside.”
― Sean Platt, Colonization

“Hence computers: our attempts to recreate brains. And networks, which allow us to connect in a way our souls seem to crave.”
― Sean Platt, Colonization

“The slope graphing inequity in modern America (modern Earth, really) was sharp, and they all stood at its top. The outlands were lawless; outposts were poor and exploited for resources; larger cities were filled with opiated labor. Only the capitals were prosperous — and within the cities, you only had to go a few miles from the viceroy’s mansion to find the poor. This well-set table was the crème of even the elite crème. Nobody would fault the commander of the guard for being dainty when they were all (let’s be honest) fluffing their beds with human lives.”
― Sean Platt, Colonization

“Evil bloomed where humans gathered, like rust in oxygen. It only required time.”
― Sean Platt, Colonization

“The pattern’s been the same forever: They come, they build, maybe they teach. There’s a brief period of maturity, sufficient that later cultures don’t understand how the growth could even be possible. Then, all at once, there’s a reset. Those advanced cultures — Egyptians, Mayans, and on and on — vanish, leaving a handful of dumb ancestors who grow up able to do none of the things the old cultures could.” He raised a hand and ticked off points. “Not just the megaliths, but monuments like the Nazca lines, Sanskrit texts describing Vimanas and other obviously flying craft, the writings in the Zohar of the manna machine, the list goes on. Maybe past visitors have just wiped memories and destroyed records to erase all this knowledge instead of invoking a mass extinction, but then why do we sometimes hear the Ark of the Covenant described as if it were a radiation weapon?”
― Sean Platt, Colonization

“The big cop affected a servile voice. “Yes, sir, tell us what to do, Mr. Alien Overlord!”
― Sean Platt, Colonization

“Have you ever heard of a biodome?”  Cameron wanted to blink and ask the man to repeat himself.  “They kept trying them, before all this started,” Andreus continued. “In the years before the first Mars missions, they ramped up. There was one in Canada, another in Europe. Truly isolated environments. But do you know why they’re so difficult to pull off in the long term?”  The question was several paces ahead of Cameron. He knew nothing about biodomes beyond the concept: to wall off a piece of nature and see if it could sustain itself with no exchange beyond the bubble.  Cameron shook his head.  “It’s because nobody really understands the complex interactions of an ecosystem,” Nathan said, still glancing toward the window. “There’s the question of what eats what and what breathes what — biologist, ecologist stuff. But I think there’s a lot they’re forgetting, because it’s on a higher level. A thinking level perhaps. Like how a zoo animal will never truly behave like a wild one simply because it’s not free to wander.”
― Sean Platt, Colonization

“— but if they’ve just come here to … I don’t know … just wipe us out, then why the stone network? Why the abductions? Why go to all the trouble to narrow it down to the Nine? Why set up the capitals, the outposts, the patrols, all of it? I mean, shit, there are planes in the air again. The Internet is back. Why colonize if they only want to find the master kill switch and erase us all?”
― Sean Platt, Colonization

“Her odd sense of prescience had departed with Clara’s birth, but she couldn’t shake a strong mental image of cows fattened for slaughter, or masses kept dumb by social opiates. Getting”
― Sean Platt, Colonization

“But Lila, to whom that sounded like the thickest of bullshit, thought the idea of grabbing a coffee in a city watched over by an alien mothership and patrolled by alien animals was like singing in sinking lifeboats. Her”
― Sean Platt, Colonization

“Clara, who’d said”
― Johnny B. Truant, Colonization

“It was always easier to maintain strength for others than to face the demons inside. That’s probably why Cameron, on his band’s tours through so many borderline places later in life, had always made room for charity. Helping others fostered a sense of control. It made a person feel that some day, he might find the strength to help himself.”
― Johnny B. Truant, Colonization