I hope we don’t start shooting, but what I hope will happen and what actually happens are almost never the same. - James S. A. Corey

Writing science fiction is a race between the author's imagination and the progress of science and history. Fiction is always on the losing end; the question is only how fast.

It was the single central argument that the universe had made to her through her whole life, and she was only now seeing it clearly: Wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies were reconciled. Anything else was just a postponement of the next round of violence.

The aliens that sent the protomolecule hadn’t needed to destroy humanity. They’d given humans the opportunity to destroy themselves, and as a species, they’d leaped on it.