As an engineer, he knew that a bucket-load of philosophical principles wasn’t worth a grain of good hard fact. - Stephen Baxter

If you were capable of thinking of an object from more than one point of view, you could imagine it doing all sorts of things. For Mother, consciousness was becoming more than just a tool for lying.

Life had always been chancy. And now life had found ways of surviving the ultimate extinction event. In new oceans and on strange lands, evolution had begun again.
But it had nothing to do with mankind.

The rodents’ vast litters incidentally offered up much raw material to the blind sculptors of natural selection; their evolutionary rate was ferocious.