“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… - Kim Stanley Robinson

There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future.

But one had to trust instruments over instincts, that was science.

No one could complain about it, or moan for the good old days, without revealing nostalgia for a heroic age that had not actually been heroic—or, along with heroic, had also been suppressed, limited, inconvenient and dangerous. No, Nirgal had no desire for nostalgia—the meaning of life lay not in the past but in the present, not in resistance but in expression.