Stephen Baxter Quotes

Two damaged people, thrown together in a hostile world, doing their best. What else was there to life, in the end?

This is a strange situation, sir. Perhaps imagination is what we need.

We ought to call ourselves Homo clamorans. Noisemaking man.

Before starting work on this book, we had to ask ourselves a question what is science fiction? Seemingly simple, but in reality the answer was hard to formulate. This is the definition we settled upon:
Science fiction is a member of a group of fictional genres whose narrative drive depends upon events, technologies, societies, etc. that are impossible, unreal, or that are depicted as occurring at some time in the future, the past or in a world of secondary creation. These attributes vary widely in terms of actuality, likelihood, possibility and in the intent with which they are employed by the creator. The fundamental difference between science fiction and the other "fantastical genres" of fantasy and horror is this: the basis for the fiction is one of rationality. The sciences this rationality generates can be speculative, largely erroneous, or even impossible, but explanations are, nevertheless, generated through a materialistic worldview. The supernatural is not invoked.

Imagine God inside your computer, your phone, everyone else's computer. Imagine someone who almost is the Black Corporation, with all its power and riches and reach. And who, despite all this, seems pretty sane and beneficent by the standards of most gods. Oh, and who sometimes swears in Tibetan ...

The "gravity train" was devised in the seventeenth century by British scientist Robert Hooke, who presented the idea in a letter to Isaac Newton. The idea has been seriously presented a few times, such as to the Paris Academy of Sciences in the nineteenth century.

Earth stuff, Mars boy.

We could try the Turin test," said Lobsang.
"Oh, machines have been able to pass the Turing test for years."
"No, the Turin test. We both pray for an hour, and see if God can tell the difference.

I quoted to him what I remembered of Charles Darwin: "'Judging by the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity ... '"
"Darwin was right," Nebogipfel said gently.

The folk of Hell-Knows-Where by default still thought of themselves as Americans.

And maybe a hundred billion cephalopod minds, out in the Trojans, just light-minutes apart, have become something - "
"Transcendent.

A citizen of the Roman Empire, for example, would have placed less value on individual liberty in the modern Western sense than on collective responsibility.

The Earth gave you life, gave you food and language and intelligence, and will take you back when you die.

Our citizens must be protected, even from being dumb, which is not a crime.

Every door I pass is one way. So I may as well look around, and see what there is beyond the next door, and the next.

A sentient mind refuses to be confined by the parameters of its programming.

An ability to believe in things that weren't true was a powerful tool.

Rome strikes back!

The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future.
Cut loose the past; it is dead weight.
Let the Extirpation continue. Let it never end.

[F]olks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid [nitrogen] and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It would not surprise me if reading that book causes birth defects.

Here, the Prophet was born in a settled and stable province of a strong Roman Empire. Much as in our timeline, Islamic civilisation, the dar-al Islam, flourished, but under Roman protection. There were no centuries of inter-faith conflict in Europe – no crusades, for instance. Even in the pre-Christian days, the Romans were always pragmatic about local religions. To the Romans, Islam is a muscular sister creed of the Christianity that is their official state religion.

And it wasn't just the subjugation of human beings that distressed her but the level of daily, almost casual brutality. Even for routine punishments there were blood-stained stakes, lead-tipped whips. She's always rather admired the Romans, for their literacy, their order, their engineering, their respect for the law. Now, she was finding, she'd never fully imagined this side of their civilisation.

And our sailors of space have a legend of the furthest star of all, where the gods lay their plans against us, or plot the catastrophes of the end of time: the pachacuti. We call this undiscovered star Karu, which means 'far'.'
'As we speak of Ultima,' Quintus mused.

Well, don't stand about like that, man; if you're no use you're certainly no ornament. Bring that in and tell me what it says.

In the Vortex that lies beyond time and space tumbled a police box that was not a police box.

We seem to be young, in a very old Galaxy. We're like kids tiptoeing through a ruined mansion.

Authority. The antithesis of science.

It's never going to stop,' Malenfant whispered. 'It will consume the Solar System, the stars - '
This isn't some local phenomenon, Malenfant. This is a fundamental change in the structure of the universe. It will never stop. It will sweep on, growing at light speed, a runaway feedback fueled by the collapse of the vacuum itself. The Galaxy will be gone in a hundred thousand years, Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, in a couple of million years. It will take time, but eventually -
'The future has gone,' Malenfant said. 'My God. That's what this means, isn't it? The downstream can't happen now. All of it is gone. The colonization of the Galaxy; the settlement of the universe; the long, patient fight against entropy...' That immense future had been cut off to die, like a tree chopped through at the root. 'Why, Michael? Why have the children done this? Burned the house down, destroyed the future - '
Because it was the wrong future. Michael looked around the sky. He pointed to the lumpy, spreading edge of the unreality bubble.
There. Can you see that? It's already starting...
'What is?'
The budding... The growth of the true vacuum region is not even. There will be pockets of the false vacuum - remnants of our universe - isolated by the spreading true vacuum. The fragments of false vacuum will collapse. Like -
'Like black holes.' And in that instant, Malenfant understood. 'That's what this is for. This is just a better way of making black

I despise the religions we have, nothing but flummery and manipulation based on texts and materials so reworked over time they're all meaningless. I despise the division religions religions bring; humans have enough problems without that. I despise con men like Father Melly. And yet, and yet …

They actually have working gasoline cars, and motels and roadside diners. They even have halls where they pump in toxic fumes so you can smell how it was when we were kids.

If I was a cynic I would be wondering if sooner or later some charismatic douche-bag might stomp all over this Little House on the Prairie dream of yours.

We do teach our kids the golden rule - Do as you would be done by.

In the afterglow of the Big Bang, humans spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across billions upon billions of years.
Everywhere they found life.
Nowhere did they find mind - save what they brought with them or created - no other against which human advancement could be tested.
With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages.
They learned of other universes from which theirs had evolved. Those earlier, simpler realities too were empty of mind, a branching tree of emptiness reaching deep into the hyperpast.
It is impossible to understand what minds of that age - the peak of humankind, a species hundreds of billions of times older than humankind - were like. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They had nothing in common with us, their ancestors of the afterglow.
Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.
The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile, and ultimately lethal.
There was despair and loneliness.
There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bo

This is what I have learned, Malenfant. This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.

There'll be a sky full of babies and their shit, suspended overhead. You do not want to get caught in that rain when it falls.

He took refuge in the concept that sometimes slowest is the fastest in the end.

Is it really conceivable, given all of that immensity, all that structure, that we are truly alone? That life emerged here, and nowhere else?

The squid are leaving, Maura…

Rees, the secret of a Scientist is not what he knows. It's what he asks.

By now there were whole new Industrial Revolutions going on in the Low Earths; the British seemed to have the building of steam engines and railways in their genes.

Those redshift numbers. The cephalopods must be leaving at close to light speed."
"Where do you think they are going?"
"Maybe that isn't the point, Maura. Maybe the point is what they are trying to flee.

I have a vision of a Galaxy overrun by mankind from Core to rim. Of four hundred billion stars each enslaved to the rhythm of Earth's day, Earth's year. I have a vision of a trillion planets pulsing to the beat of a human heart.

Every world needed an artist.

Wow. Pioneers with ice-cream."
Joshua felt motivated to defend his home. "Well, it doesn't have to be like the Donner Party, Sally-

Joshua felt" title="Stephen Baxter Quotes: Wow. Pioneers with ice-cream."
Joshua felt" width="913px" height="515px" loading="lazy"/>

We're going to bollocks up our second chance at Eden, even before the paint has dried.

... It was dark. There were no dead stars, no rogue planets. Matter itself had long evaporated, burned up by proton decay, leaving nothing but a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at lightspeed. But even now there was something rather than nothing. The creatures of this age drifted like clouds, immense, slow, coded in immense wispy atoms. Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took these cloud-beings longer to complete a single thought than it once took species to rise and fall on Earth ...

If I don't speak the name of this thing, it still feels like it isn't real. Does that make any sense?'
The ColU spoke to them now, whispering in their earphones. 'It makes plenty of sense, Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson. The power of names: probably one of the oldest human superstitions, going back to the birth of language itself. To deny a name is to deny a thing reality. And yet now it is time to name names.

Evaded her, and she sensed they did not believe her

If something is so far beyond your imagination, it's hard even to fear it.

The ColU, sitting on its tabletop, seemed to Stef to twinkle. 'I'm Colius the Oracle now.

A brief life burns brightly.

You'll feel like Jesu Himself in the End Times, when He will descend on Rome with Augustus and Vespasian on His left and right hands, to establish the final dominion of the Caesars across the stars.

The Long Earth is bountiful but not forgiving.