Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes

“But that may be Freudianism.”
“In other words something like the theory of phlogiston.”
She laughed. “Exactly.”

The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.

“You just don’t have faith!” Frank repeated.
”Well I hope I never get it! It’s like being hit by a hammer in the head!”

“Whenever scientists say they’re Christian,” Sax said, “I take it to be an aesthetic statement.”
“The church of the wouldn’t-it-be-pretty-to-think-so,” Frank said.

Their thinking clashed radically with Western thought; for instance the separation of church and state was wrong to them, making it impossible for them to agree with Westerners on the very basis of government. And they were so patriarchal that some of their women were said to be illiterate—illiterates, on Mars! That was a sign. And indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in that sense they were all madmen.

Ridiculous. But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.

“And with our work,” John continued, “we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story”—i.e., the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics.

Now I like climbing as much as anybody, almost, but I am not going to try to claim to you that it is an exceptionally sane activity.

Science is--or should be--the greenest force of all.

I think the US is in a terrible state of denial … Worse than that, we seem to be caught in a kind of Götterdämmerung response: we'd rather have the world go down in flames than change our lifestyle or admit we're wrong.

If the amount of money going into the war economy were invested in landscape restoration, we would be in a far more positive position. It may get a little dire before we pull together, but I think when the prosperous nations, and in particular the US, realise they're wrecking their own kids' lives, there will be a mass change in value. It will be a difficult century, and ugly, but I don't think that in the end people are so stupid as to kill themselves off.

Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making. The whole process of science is wildly under-represented in science fiction because it's not easy to write about. There are many facets of science that are almost exactly opposite of dramatic narrative. It's slow, tedious, inconclusive, it's hard to tell good guys from bad guys — it's everything that a normal hour of Star Trek is not.