Charles Sheffield

Hans Rebka sat on a rounded pyramid never designed for contact with the human posterior, and thought about luck.
There was good luck, which mostly happened to other people. And there was bad luck, which usually happened to you. Sometimes, through observation, guile, and hard work, you could avoid bad luck—even make it look like good luck, to others. But you would know the difference, even if no one else did.
Well, suppose that for a change good luck came your way. How should you greet that stranger to your house? You could argue that its arrival was inevitable, that the laws of probability insisted that good and bad must average out over long enough times and large enough samples. Then you could welcome luck in, and feel pleased that your turn had come round at last.
Or you could hear what Hans Rebka was hearing: the small, still voice breathing in his ear, telling him that this good luck was an impostor, not to be trusted.

You just can’t tell. Brains won’t correlate with appearance.

Never get involved in a venture with a man who inherited his money and didn’t earn any himself. He’ll assume he’s smarter than you are, just because he’s rich and you’re not, and he’ll expect you to bow down to his greatness because for all his life people have.

The possible future is not just longer than the past. It is unimaginably longer.

Be an optimist! It’s the only way to live.

Engineers are dangerous because they’re obsessed by facts and you can’t divert them or buy them off.

Earth has been regarded for centuries as a giant self-regulating machine, absorbing all changes, great and small, and diluting their effects until they become invisible on a global scale. Mankind has taken that stability for granted. Careless of consequences, we have watched as forests were cleared, lakes poisoned, rivers dammed and diverted, mountains leveled, whole plains dug out for their mineral and fuel content. And nothing disastrous happened. Earth tolerated the insults, and always she restored the status quo.
Always—until now. Until finally some hidden critical point has been passed. The move away from a steady state is signalled in many ways: by increasing ocean temperatures, by drought and flood, by widespread loss of topsoil, by massive crop failure, and by the collapse of worldwide fishing industries.

A long time ago humans talked of terraforming Mars and Venus, but we never did it. Just too busy blowing ourselves up, I guess, ever to get round to it.

He was still young enough to hate looking like a fool more than anything in the world.

The heirs, naturally, wanted everything to be theirs as soon as possible. No one is more rapacious, ruthless, and impatient than a loving family member.

Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue.

When in doubt, follow the money trail. People could lie, motives could be disguised, even acts could be misunderstood. Money was as constant as human nature.

Darya stood up, heard her voice rising, and knew she was doing what she insisted what a scientist should never do: allowing passion and the defense of personal theories to interfere with logical analysis.

Humans harnessed a negligible fraction of tidal energy, although the available energy is huge. Other species do rather better, and the intertidal zones are the most biologically productive regions of the world, more so than even the tropical rainforests.

D'you know what homeostasis is?"
"I used to, before I rotted my brain with politics.