With gritty action and realistic science, Peter Watts brings to life a dark and vivid world.
Learn to control ego. Humans hold their dogmas and biases too tightly, and we only think that our opponents are dogmatic! But we all need criticism. Criticism is the only known antidote to error.
You don’t have conversations with microprocessors. You tell them what to do, then helplessly watch the disaster when they take you literally!
The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.
It’s said that ‘power corrupts,’ but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.
As sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. But science fiction has not been forgiven for its crap. The reason is that science fiction inherently distrusts the ‘eternal verities’ on which literature graduates base their doctoral dissertations. Literature departments were uncomfortable with that. But things change.
The greedy and the power-hungry will always look for ways to break the rules, or twist them to their advantage.
Every time humans discovered a new resource, or technique for using mass and energy, one side effect has always been pollution. Why should the information age be any different from those of coal, petroleum, or the atom?
Men can be brilliant and strong, they whispered to one another. But men can be mad, as well. And the mad ones can ruin the world.
It was called ‘the Big Lie’ technique, Johnny. Just sound like you know what you’re talking about – as if you’re citing real facts. Talk very fast. Weave your lies into the shape of a conspiracy theory and repeat your assertions over and over again. Those who want an excuse to hate or blame – those with big but weak egos – will leap at a simple, neat explanation for the way the world is. Those types will never call you on the facts.
Deep down, most humans prefer living out their lives surrounded by comfortable certainties, guided by warm myths and metaphors, knowing that they’ll understand their children, and their children will understand them.
Science gives man what he needs, but magic gives man what he wants.
Someone once said that one measure of sentience was how much energy a sophont spent on matters other than survival. Fiben.
Magic and art arise from an egomaniac’s insistence that the artist is right, and the universe wrong.
Yet egotism can also be useful to ambitious creatures, driving their single-minded pursuit of success. Madness seems essential in order to be “great.
It wasn’t his place to judge the women. Theirs was the harder job, here in the wilderness. His tasks were simple – to hunt, fight, and if need be, to die. Theirs was to go on, whatever it took.
There was a time, in living memory, when this nation bestrode the planet like a titan.
Where is it written that one should only care about big things?
And yet we’ve flashed from caveman to world wrecker in just three hundred generations. One moment there are these barefoot Neolithic hunters, bickering over a frozen caribou carcass. Turn around, and their children’s children talk about tapping energy from pulsars.
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
June nodded. “Oh, now we know that. But then? The net was supposed to be their baby. Their tool! It would replace big banks as an instrument of control, above nations and governments. Above even money.