Charles Sheffield Quotes

The universe is all extremes. Monstrous gravity fields, or next-to-nothing ones; extreme cold, or heat so intense that solids and liquids cannot exist; multimillion atmosphere pressures, or near-vacuum.
Ice or fire. Niflheim or Muspelheim: the ancient alternatives, imagined by humans long before the Expansion.
It’s planets that are the oddities; the strange neutral zone between suns and space, the thin interface where moderate temperatures and pressures and gravity fields can exist. And if planets are anomalies, then planets able to support life are rarer yet—a zero-measure subset in that set of strangeness.
And within that alien totality, where do humans fit?

Maddy listened closely to John’s voice. It was calm, but with an odd undercurrent of excitement. She thought, That weirdo, he’s enjoying this. If I were a failing component, I’d get more of his attention than I do now. Engineers!

It’s no surprise that there are people like Anna Griss in the world. There always have been. Go back fifty thousand years, to a time when most of us were just grubbing along, looking for a decent bush of ripe berries or a fresher lump of meat. A few, like McAndrew, were busy inventing language or numbers, or painting the walls of the cave. And some, just a handful but too many in every generation, were seeking an edge over the rest of us: Water access, or mating rules, or restricted entry to heaven. No matter how few they were, Anna Griss would have been one of them.

Any other instructions?"
"Not without breaking one of my own golden rules. In an unpredictable situation, the man or woman on the spot should make the decisions, not the general sitting on his ass a million miles away from the action.

One thing you have to teach the young is that it’s wrong to run away from problems.

TIG. Trust In Government. An old political principle, to give your organization a name that’s the opposite of what you mean.

Darya found the logic of her thought processes so compelling that it never occurred to her that others might have a different reaction. But they did.

Everyone was polite; no one was happy.

Intelligence is too subtle an attribute to be inferred from appearance.

Maddy was not consumed by the immediate pressures of the here and now. She had been provided with a fatal indulgence: time to think.

The ship climbed steadily and laboriously up, away from the plane of the ecliptic. Finally, the parallax was sufficient to move the planets from their usual apparent positions. Mars, Earth, Venus, and Jupiter all sat in constellations that were no part of the familiar zodiac. Mercury was cowering close to the sun. Saturn alone, swinging out at the far end of her orbit, seemed right as seen from the ship. Bey Wolf, picking out their positions through a viewport, wondered idly how the astrologers would cope with such a situation. Mars seemed to be in the House of Andromeda, and Venus in the House of Cygnus. It would take an unusually talented practitioner to interpret those relationships and cast a horoscope for the success of this enterprise.

Darya had a few moments of wild hope before logic intruded.

Nothing in life produce a more powerful joy than a near miss by the Angel of Death.

To a logical entity, such as myself, the behavior of organic intelligences such as yourself, provides many anomalies. For example, the history of humanity, the species concerning which my data banks have most information, is replete with cases where humans, on little or no evidence, have believed in impossibilities. They have accepted the existence of a variety of improbable entities: of gods and demons, of fairies and elves, of 'good luck' charms, of magic potions, of curses and hexes and evil eyes."
"Tally, if you're going to blather about—"
"But at the same time, humans and other organic intelligences often seem unwilling to accept the implications and consequences of their own legitimate scientific theories.

The mills of bureaucracy may or may not grind fine, but they certainly grind exceeding slow.