“You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So y...” — Kim Stanley Robinson Quote

“You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.”

“They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.”

“He pointed to another number, changing as rapidly as the first, but on a lower trajectory; it rose to a high of 8.79 rem per hour. Several lifetimes of dentists’ X-rays, to be sure; but the radiation outside the storm shelter would have been a lethal dose, so they were getting off lightly. Still, the amount flying through the rest of the ship! Billions of particles were penetrating the ship and colliding with the atoms of water and metal they were huddled behind; hundreds of millions were flying between these atoms and then through the atoms of their bodies, touching nothing, as if they were no more than ghosts. Still, thousands were striking atoms of flesh and bone. Most of those collisions were harmless; but in all those thousands, there were in all probability one or two (or three?) in which a chromosome strand was taking a hit, and kinking in the wrong way: and there it was. Tumor initiation, begun with just that typo in the book of the self. And years later, unless the victim's DNA luckily repaired itself, the tumor promotion that was a more or less unavoidable part of living would have its effect, and there would appear a bloom of Something Else inside: cancer. Leukemia, most likely; and, most likely, death.”

“The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing.”

“So the claim that, just as children are not developmentally ready for certain concepts in mathematics or logic, so 'primitive' peoples are not intellectually able to grasp science and technology, is nonsense. This vestige of colonialism and racism is belied by the everyday activities of people living with no fixed abode and almost no possessions, the few remaining hunter-gatherers - the custodians of our deep past.”

“Science fiction's power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff.”

“Nobody knows what the whales may have to click and clack about, but it could be a form of voting-time to stop here and synchronously dive down in search of deep water squid, now time to resurface, move on, dive again. Clans also seem to caucus on which males they like and will mate with more or less as a group and which ones to collectively spurn. By all appearances, female sperm whales are terrible size queens. Over the generations, they have consistently voted in favor of enhanced male mass. Their dream candidate nowadays is some fellow named Moby, and he's three times their size.”

“It’s an exciting time to dive into the world of the lesser-known elements like actinides and see what unique possibilities forward-thinkers have envisioned for them.”

“The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.”