Conspiracy theory was tremendously popular, always and forever. People wanted such catastrophes to mean something more than mere individual madness, … - Kim Stanley Robinson

Immigration worked as a time machine, bringing up little islands of the past into the present.

“Yeah yeah. We’d better call a meeting then,” Peter said, looking as annoyed at her as she felt at him.
“Yeah yeah,” Ann said heavily. Meetings. But they had their uses; people could assume they meant something, while the real work went on elsewhere.

And it seemed to him as he drove on day after day that history was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren’t looking—an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.