Maelstrom Quotes

“Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding—a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they'd wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted.

There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“But only part of him was listening. Another part, even if it hadn't read Chomsky or Jung or Sheldrake—who had time for dead guys anyway?— at least had a basic understanding of what those guys had gone on about. Quantum nonlocality, quantum consciousness—Desjardins had seen too many cases of mass coincidence to dismiss the idea that nine billion human minds could be imperceptibly interconnected somehow. He’d never really thought about it much, but on some level he’d believed in the Collective Unconscious for years.

He just hadn’t realized that the fucking thing had a death wish.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“You know what happens when you keep a dog locked away from every living thing, except you visit once a day and kick the shit out of him?"

Perreault laughed nervously. "Someone actually tried that?"

"What happens is, the dog's a social animal, and it gets so lonely it actually looks forward to the shit-kicking. It asks to be kicked. It begs.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Carbon’s just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories. Electrons can do all that stuff, if they’re coded the right way. It’s all just pattern.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Nine days after Perreault first saw the woman in black, an Indonesian mother of four came out of her tent long enough to claim that the mermaid had risen, fully-formed, from the very center of the quake.

One of her boys, hearing this, said that he'd heard it was the other way around.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.

Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Intuition is not clairvoyance. It’s not guesswork either. Intuition is executive summary, that 90 percent of the higher brain that functions subconsciously—but no less rigorously—than the self-aware subroutine that thinks of itself as the person.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“It’s the pattern that matters, you see. Not the choice of building materials. Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Carbon’s just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories. Electrons can do all that stuff, if they’re coded the right way. It’s all just pattern.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“They’d done the analyses from every angle. The off-world option was least cost-effective and most vulnerable to acts of groundside retribution: orbital stations weren’t exactly inconspicuous targets, and it was a fair bet that at least some of those left behind would be ungracious enough to lob a vindictive nuke or two up the well. And if groundside quarantine tech had been up to the job, they wouldn’t have been in this situation in the first place; that option must have been on the table only to accommodate a bureaucratic obsession with completist detail. Or maybe as some kind of sick joke.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Do you have any idea what it’s like to be—to be haunted by happiness?” She managed a bitter laugh. “All those months I kept denying it, chalking it up to stroke and hallucination because shit, Ken, I couldn’t have had a happy childhood. My parents couldn’t be anything but monsters, you see? The monsters made me what I am. They’re the only reason I survived all the shit that came later, they’re the only thing that kept me going. I was not gonna let those stumpfucks win. Everything that drove me, every time I didn’t quit, every time I beat the odds, it was a slap in their big smug all-powerful monster faces. Everything I ever did I did against them. Everything I am is against them. And now you stand there and tell me the monsters never even existed …”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Do you know the story of Scheherezade? Do you remember why she told her stories?”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Less than one percent of the Lakes hailed from runoff or rainfall; she swam through the liquid remains of a glacier that had melted ten thousand years before. It would never refill once human appetites had drained it dry.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“You’re like any other mammal, Doctor. Your sense of reality is anchored in the present. You’ll naturally inflate the near term and sell the long term short; tomorrow’s disaster will always feel less real than today’s inconvenience. You may be unbeatable at putting out brush fires, but I shudder to think of how you’d handle issues that extend into the next decade, let alone the next century. Guilt Trip would herd you toward the short-term payoff every time.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Maybe you don’t have to let them turn you into one big conditioned reflex. Maybe you just want them to, because then it’s not really your responsibility, is it? It’s so easy never to have to make your own decisions. Addictive, even. Maybe you even got hooked on it, and you’re going through a little bit of withdrawal now.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Draw the threads together. Squeeze the signal through the usual statistical gauntlet: path analysis, Boltzmann transforms, half a dozen breeds of nonlinear estimation. Discriminant functions. Hankins filters. Principal component analysis. Interferometry profiles across a range of wavelengths. Lynn-Hardy hyperniche tables. Repeat all analyses with intervariable time lags in sequence from zero days to thirty.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Don’t you believe in truth in advertising? You don’t hide any of that stuff. Mostly.” “I like to control the flow rate, though.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“National identity was so irrelevant that nobody'd even bothered to dismantle it.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Since when did personality become a "treatable disorder"?”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Intuition is executive summary, that ninety percent of the higher brain that functions subconsciously—but no less rigorously—than the self-aware subroutine that thinks of itself as the person.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Lertzman the bureaucrat. The cyst in "system", too dormant to contribute, too deeply embedded to excise, too ineffective to matter.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Conscience is overrated anyway, [...] not everyone even has a conscience, and the people that do are invariably exploited by the ones that don't. Conscience is—irrational, when you get right down to it.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“archetypal middleman; his career had coasted to that comfortable plateau above those who actually did productive work, but safely short of a position where he had to make any vital decisions.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Может, все вокруг настолько привыкли к побоям, что помогают любому, у кого ботинки побольше.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“You should get more sleep," he remarked. "You won't need so many chemicals."
She raised an eyebrow. "This from the man with half his bloodstream registered in the patent office." Jovellanos hadn't had her shots yet. She didn't need them in her current position, but she was too good at her job to stay where she was much longer. Desjardins looked forward to the day when her righteous stance on the Sanctity of Free Will went head-to-head against the legal prerequisites for promotion. She'd probably take one look at the list of perks and the new salary, and cave.
He had, anyway.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“By now it’s got as much in common with its origins as a humpback whale would have with the sperm cells from a therapsid lizard. Still,”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom