The Sirens of Mars Quotes

“Nature, God, whatever you want to call the creator of the universe,” the elder Vishniac had once opined, “comes through the microscope clearly and strongly. Everything made by human hands looks terrible under magnification—crude, rough, and unsymmetrical. But in nature, every bit of life is lovely. And the more magnification we use, the more details are brought out, perfectly formed, like endless sets of boxes within boxes.”
― Sarah Stewart Johnson, The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World

“It felt wrong to kill it, but how many lives had I taken inadvertently, without even thinking. There had been countless little genocides that morning alone, just as I walked through the meadow to class. What universes were down there? What noises were too small to hear below those blades of grass.”
― Sarah Stewart Johnson, The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World

“…and since there were no visible boundaries between regions or nations, lowell reasoned that the planet had probably reached a kind of geopolitical end state where a group of benevolent oligarchs had come to direct the social order.”
― Sarah Stewart Johnson, The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World

“Out in the frozen terrain of Antarctica, where no rain has fallen in two million years—in the land of bleached skies, of no dogs or children—Wolf Vishniac had been attempting to connect what was known about the geology of Mars to what he knew about biology on Earth, to understand whether microbes could survive the harsh conditions.”
― Sarah Stewart Johnson, The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World