It’s the basic problem with religion, be it Jesus or Vishnu or God Emperors. Ideological purity never survives contact with the enemy. - James S. A. Corey

And if there was one thing that her decades in academic science had drilled into her consciousness, it was that power meant policy.

That’s what peace is, right? Postponing the conflict until the thing you were fighting over doesn’t matter.

But in the thousands of systems where life had solved the complex problem of defying entropy, there were only so many shapes. Sometimes weird shit was going to look familiar. An enemy alien was going to look like a tree or a vulva or a bird because there were too many things and not enough room in design space for all of them. ...
Maybe the wars were about that as much as anything. Who got to keep what shapes. Who got to define what they meant.