# Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter (born November 13, 1957) is a British science fiction writer.
    For the trilogy A Time Odyssey, and the novel The Light of Other Days, both co-written with Arthur C. Clarke, see Clarke's Wikiquote page.

## Quotes
### Short fiction
#### Return to Titan (2010)

Page numbers from Godlike Machines (ed. Jonathan Strahan), published by The Science Fiction Book Club, ISBN 978-1-61664-759-9
* “So that’s that,” Miriam said. “We have a plan.” “You have a shared delusion,” I said.
** p. 132
* We all project our petty lives upon the universe.
** p. 157

### Xeelee Sequence
#### Raft (1991)

    All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Xeelee: An Omnibus published by Gollancz ISBN 978-0-575-09041-5 in 2010
* The secret of a Scientist is not what he knows. It’s what he asks.
** Chapter 4 (p. 45)
* The essential condition for life is the existence of sharp energy gradients.
** Chapter 15 (p. 151)
* “Hunger,” Hollerbach said. “The universal imperative.”
** Chapter 15 (p. 153)
* Self-doubt is part of being human...but the main thing is to get on with the business of survival.
** Chapter 16 (p. 158)

#### Timelike Infinity (1992)

    All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Xeelee: An Omnibus published by Gollancz ISBN 978-0-575-09041-5 in 2010
* But you are a scientist, Michael Poole; and the skill of a scientist is in asking the right question.
** Chapter 7 (p. 218)
* It’s all a bit anarchic, I suppose, but it’s also highly effective. Flexible, responsive, mobile, heuristic, with intelligence distributed to the lowest level...A bit like an ideal human society, I suppose; free individuals seeking out ways to advance the common good.
** Chapter 12 (p. 266)
* “It was a ploy, Jaar. I was trying to manipulate you, to get you to fight, to make you do what I wanted you to do.” “I know that.” He smiled. “Of course I know that. But the motives behind your words don’t reduce their truth. Don’t you see that?”
** Chapter 12 (p. 271)
* If this was the basis of the faith of the Friends, then no wonder the Friends were so remote, so intense—so careless of their everyday lives, of the pain and death of others. History as it existed was nothing more than a shabby prototype of the global optimization to come, when the Ultimate Observer discarded all inferior worldlines. And no wonder then, he thought, the Friends were so leached of humanity. Their mystical vision had removed all significance from their own lives—the only lives they could experience, whatever the truth of their philosophy—and it had rendered them deeply flawed, less than human. He opened his eyes and studied Shira. He saw again the patient intensity which resided inside this fragile girl—and he saw now how damaged she was by her philosophy. She was not fully alive, and perhaps never could be; he pitied her, he realized.
** Chapter 13 (p. 281)
* “That’s the trouble with living so damned long,” Michael said. “Soured relationships last for ever.”
** Chapter 15 (p. 298)
* Human consciousness was an artificial thing. Once humans had believed that gods animated their souls, fighting their battles in the guise of humans. Later they had evolved the idea of the self-aware, self-directed consciousness. Now Michael saw that it had all been no more than an idea, a model, an illusion behind which to hide. He, the last man, need no longer cling to such outmoded comforts. There was no cognition, he realized. There was only perception.
** Chapter 16 (p. 307)

#### Flux (1993)

    All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Xeelee: An Omnibus published by Gollancz ISBN 978-0-575-09041-5 in 2010
* Mind you, flatulence was one skill he had bettered as he had got older.
** Chapter 2 (p. 326)
* Bzya touched his shoulder. “But that’s why you and I are here, old man. To keep the world away from boys like Farr and Cris—to give them a place that seems as stable and eternal as your parents did when you were a child—until they are old enough to cope with the truth.”
** Chapter 19 (p. 484)
* “But Parz was better than nothing: it offered stability, regulation, a framework to live in. People gripe about their tithes—and nobody’s going to pretend that the Committee gets it right all the time—but most of us would prefer taxes to living wild. With all respect to you, my friend.” He bit into his cake. “And that’s still true today; as true as it ever was.”
** Chapter 20 (p. 497)
* Why should it be so? It was as if humans built such places as this with the sole purpose of finding ways to dominate each other. Muub listened to Adda’s clumsy explanation of this. “But it’s inevitable,” he said, his face neutral. “You have to have organization—hierarchy—if you are to run the complex, interlinking systems which sustain a society like the City with its hinterland. And only within such a society can man afford art, science, wisdom—even leisure of the most brutish sort, like these Games. And with hierarchies comes power.” He smiled at Adda, condescending once more. “People aren’t very noble, upfluxer. Look around you. Their darker side will find expression in any situation where they can best each other.”
** Chapter 21 (p. 504)
* You’re a damn fool, boy. I want you to know that now, in case I don’t get a chance to tell you later.
** Chapter 27 (p. 554)

#### Ring (1994)

    All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Xeelee: An Omnibus published by Gollancz ISBN 978-0-575-09041-5 in 2010
    All italics as in the book
* “You know, in principle, why our world is as it is. Isn’t that sufficient? Is it really necessary for you to understand every detail?” But if I don’t understand, Morrow thought sourly, then you can control me. Arbitrarily. And that’s what I find hard to accept.
** Chapter 8 (p. 649)
* Try to remember this lesson. It might keep you alive a little longer. The most precious thing to a human being is a mind-set: more precious than one’s own life, even. Human history has taught us that lesson time and again, with its endless parade of wars—human sacrifices en masse—thousands of deaths over the most trivial of differences of religious interpretation.
** Chapter 10 (p. 669)
* “No,” Morrow said. “I can’t accept that. I don’t always agree with the Planners. But they aren’t killers.” “You think not?” Uvarov laughed again. “The survivalists—your ‘Planners’—are psychotic. Of course. As I am. And you. We are a fundamentally flawed species. Most of humanity, for most of its history, has been driven by a series of mass psychotic delusions. The labels changed, but the nature of the delusions barely varied...”
** Chapter 10 (p. 669)
* “But that’s insane,” Morrow protested. Uvarov hissed, “No one ever said it wasn’t. We’re human beings. What do you expect?”
** Chapter 10 (p. 680)
* She tried, sometimes, to remember how it had been to be young. Or even, not quite so old.
** Chapter 13 (p. 704)
* Understanding is the key to turning anything from a threat into an opportunity.
** Chapter 17 (p. 736)
* Empty. Barren. These were the true conditions of the Universe, she thought; life, and variety, and energy, were isolated aberrations.
** Chapter 18 (p. 743)
* It was too anthropomorphic to consider the lifecycle of a star as some analogy of human birth, life and death. A star was a construct of physical processes; the evolution it went through was simply a search for equilibrium stages between changing, opposing forces. There was no life or death involved, no loss or gain: just process. Why shouldn’t it be beautiful?
** Chapter 19 (p. 755)
* Maybe it’s time we humans abandoned our species-specific chauvinism—our petty outrage that the Universe has unfolded in a way that doesn’t suit us.
** Chapter 27 (p. 825)
* Maybe we should gather a few more facts before wasting our time speculating.
** Chapter 30 (p. 852)
* The river of time flowed unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.
** Chapter 35 (p. 891; closing words)

#### Vacuum Diagrams (1997)

    Page numbers from the mass market edition, published by Eos Books; ISBN 0-06-105904-8, first printing, April 2001
    Winner of the 1999 Philip K. Dick Award
    Short fiction set in the Xeelee Sequence. See Stephen Baxter's Internet Science Fiction Database page for original publication details.
* Time stretches like a lazy leopard when it wants to.
** More Than Time or Distance (p. 161)
* I’ve made myself a rich man. You shouldn’t assume that makes me a fool.
** The Quagma Datum (p. 201)
* Paul closed his eyes, hoping to make the incomprehensible Universe disappear into the vacuum from which it had sprung.
** Vacuum Diagrams (p. 266)
* There was no cognition he realized. There was only perception.
** Secret History (p. 350)
* The last of the Qax had come sliding through the interstices of space and now hovered with him over the frigid surface of the star. Human and Qax, huddled around the chill proton star, did not attempt to communicate. There was nothing more to say. The river of time flowed, unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.
** The Baryonic Lords (p. 467)

### The Time Ships (1995)

    All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Eos ISBN 978-0-06-105648-2 in June 2000, 13th printing
    All italics and ellipses as in the book
* Like all the works of man, I saw, even these great structures were transient chimeras, destined to impermanence compared to the chthonian patience of the land.
** Book 1, “Dark Night”, Chapter 1, “Time Traveling” (p. 8)
* I was struck by how ignorant we humans are, or make ourselves, of the passage of time itself. How brief our lives are!—and how meaningless the events which assail our little selves, when seen against the perspective of the great plastic sweep of History. We are less than mayflies, helpless in the face of the unbending forces of geology and evolution—forces which mold inexorably, and yet so slowly that, day to day, we are not even aware of their existence!
** Chapter 1, “Time Traveling” (p. 8)
* My fear was gone, to be replaced by a numbing sense of tedium: it is remarkable how rapidly the human mind can accommodate the most remarkable of changed circumstances.
** Chapter 8, “A Visitor” (p. 37)
* One might imagine that, in any conflict between rational humans and religious humans, the rational ought to win. After all, it is rationality that invented gunpowder! And yet—at least up to our nineteenth century—the religious tendency has generally won out, and natural selection operated, leaving us with a population of religiously-inclined sheep—it has sometimes seemed to me—capable of being deluded by any smooth-tongued preacher. The paradox is explained because religion provides a goal for men to fight for. The religious man will soak some bit of “sacred” land with his blood, sacrificing far more than the land’s intrinsic economic or other value.
** Chapter 13, “How the Morlocks Lived” (p. 66)
* I have always been distrustful of personal power—for I have met not one man wise enough to be entrusted with it.
** Chapter 14, “Constructions and Divergences” (p. 71)
* Men thought of war—always the next one—as a great cleansing, as the last war that ever need to be fought. But it was not so, I could see now: men fought wars because of the legacy of the brute inside them, and any justification was a mere rationalization supplied by our oversized brains.
** Chapter 18, “The New Eloi” (p. 92)
* For what goal is there for intelligent creatures, but to gather and store all available information?
** Chapter 18, “The New Eloi” (p. 94)
* Your flexibility of mind is impressive, for a man of your evolutionary era.
** Chapter 22, “Rotations and Deceptions” (p. 118)
* Cause and Effect, when Time Machines are about, are rather awkward concepts.
** Book 2, “Paradox”, Chapter 6, “Persuasion and Skepticism” (p. 154)
* The hugeness of time, and the littleness of man and his achievements, quite crushed me; and my own, petty concerns seemed of absurd insignificance. The story of Humanity seemed trivial, a flash-lamp moment lost in the dark, mindless halls of Eternity.
** Book 3, “The War with the Germans”, Chapter 17, “The Watcher” (p. 263)
* It was a striking demonstration of how geomorphology, the shape of the landscape, dominates human geography.
** Book 4, “The Paleocene Sea”, Chapter 19, “Lights in the Sky” (p. 365)
* You can observe for yourself the degradation of the air and water around us. The earth has a limited capacity to absorb the waste products of human industry, and with enough development, the planet could even be rendered uninhabitable.
** Chapter 19, “Lights in the Sky” (p. 367)
* “No. You are wrong. These structures are alive.” “What?” “By any reasonable definition of the word. They can reproduce themselves. They can manipulate the external world, creating local conditions of increased order. They have internal states which can change independently of external inputs; they have memories which can be accessed at will…All these are characteristics of Life, and Mind.
** Book 5, “White Earth”, Chapter 3, “The Universal Constructor” (p. 399)
* “You see, a species cannot survive for long if it continues to carry around the freight of antique motivations that you bear. No offense.” “None taken,” I said drily. “I mean, of course, territoriality, aggression, the violent settlement of disputes… Imperialist designs and the like become unimaginable when technology advances past a certain point.”
** Chapter 8, “A Proposition” (p. 427)
* Information—its gathering, interpretation and storage—is the ultimate goal of all intelligent life.
** Chapter 8, “A Proposition” (p. 428)

### Manifold
#### Time (1999)

    All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Del Rey ISBN 978-0-345-43076-2, in December 2000, 14th printing
    Nominated for the 2000 Arthur C. Clarke Award
    There are no chapter division in the book; only a brief prologue and the four large sections listed
    All italics as in the book
* There’s nothing an entrepreneur likes more than the sound of the word free.
** p. 2

##### Part One: Bootstrap

* Malenfant had moved his corporation here, out of New York, five years ago. A good place for business, he said. God bless Nevada. Distract the marks with gambling toys and virtual titties while you pick their pockets.
** p. 24
* I think we’ve all become desensitized to the state of our world. We live in a closed economy, an economy of limits. Grain yields globally have been falling since 1984, fishing yields since 1990. And yet the human population continues to grow. This is the stark reality of the years to come.
** p. 31
* It seems to me our best hope for getting through the next century or so is to reach some kind of steady state: recycle as much as possible; try to minimize the impact of industry on the planet; try to stabilize the population numbers. For the last five to ten years I have, in my small way, been working toward exactly that goal, that new order. I don’t see that any responsible politician has a choice. I must say I entered politics with rather higher hopes of the future than I enjoy now.
** p. 31
* But even the steady state, our best-hope future, may not be achievable without space. Without power and materials from space we are doomed to shuffle a known—in fact diminishing—stockpile of resources around the planet. Some players get rich; others get poor. But it’s not even a zero-sum game; in the long term we are all losers.
** p. 31
* Emma trying to figure that for herself. But, like most probability problems, the answer was counterintuitive.
** p. 48
* “I don’t believe this for a second,” Emma said flatly. “It is impossible to prove, but hard to refute,” said Cornelius.
** p. 50
* If you have kids you’re a slave to your genes. Just a conduit from past to future, from the primeval ocean to galactic empire.
** p. 54
* This remains a place of grinding poverty. Misguided aid efforts had flooded the area with cheap Western clothes, and local crooks had use them to undercut and wipe out the textile factories that had once kept everyone employed.
** p. 75
* From the air Illinois was a vast emptiness studded by lost-looking little towns.
** p. 83
* In engineering, experience gained is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined.
** p. 98

##### Part Two: Downstream

* “The only advantage of e-therapists,” Maura murmured, “is that their horseshit is cheaper than humans’.”
** p. 132
* All the tabloid-fed hysteria, the religious ravings, the pompous and hostile commentaries, made no sense, of course. If to abandon ten or a thousand sentient squid was a crime, so was abandoning one. But when, she thought sourly, had sense and rationality been a predominant element in public debate on science and technology?
** p. 167
* It seems to me that age, growing old, is a war between wisdom and bitterness. I’m not sure how I’ll come out of that war myself, assuming I get so far. Maybe some things are more important than life itself. But what?
** p. 225

##### Part Three: Cruithne

* Since 1970 or thereabouts going to space has not been part of our national agenda. NASA has kept complete control over space. But since 1970 NASA has produced paper, not spaceships.
** p. 247
* Anyhow, she knew when she looked into her heart she’d never really wanted kids anyhow. She’d seen how kids dropped from the sky and exploded people’s lives like squalling neutron bombs. She was honest enough to admit she was too selfish for that; her life, her only life, was her own.
** pp. 260-261
* The future, it seemed, was turning out to be one damn thing after another.
** p. 299
* It seems to me that the human race simply isn’t advanced enough yet to be able to trust any subset of itself with the power to run the lives of the rest.
** pp. 328-329
* I did not enter politics to be involved in this kind of operation. But who did? And I have learned that leadership is, more often than not, the art of choosing the least worst among evils.
** p. 329

##### Part Four: Manifold

* To some extent the human race today seems to react as a single organism to great events. After all, we live in a wired world. Memes—information, ideas, fears, and hopes—spread around the media and online information channels literally at light speed. It may be that this mass reaction is the greatest single danger facing us.
** p. 355
* It was a war that was inevitable because it was a war that everybody wanted.
** p. 356
* Everyone was used to official manipulation of the truth—to zhilu weima, to point at a deer and call it a horse, as the expression went.
** p. 358
* It is of course a truism that all logically possible universes must exist.
** p. 406
* “Have you studied history, Anna?” “Yes. The information is limited, the interpretation is partial. But it is interesting.”
** p. 409
* Almost all of history was a carefully constructed mythology for use as propaganda or nation building.
** p. 442
* The immediate future, regardless of Carter, was as dangerous as it had ever been. And the temptation many people seemed to feel to sacrifice their freedom to stern utopians who promised to order that future for them was growing stronger.
** p. 444
* There was a great wave of extinctions that, ultimately, couldn’t be stopped. How bad was it? Well, Oona, we don’t really know. We didn’t even get as far as counting all the species before destroying them. Yes, that’s right; a lot of species must have died out before we even knew they were there. Shivery thought, isn’t it?
** p. 457
* Well, the world may be heading for the iceberg, but the dead hand of old Darwin is still on the tiller. What am I talking about? Just this: if most people stop breeding, the handful of people who love kids and want to have them—people like me—are, within a generation or two, going to outnumber everyone else. Simple math. And that’s exactly what is happening.
** p. 458

#### Space (2000)

    All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Del Rey, ISBN 0-345-43078-6, in January 2002, 4th printing
* Maura pulled an elaborate face. “Don’t these people realize the cat is already out of the bag? You can’t control the public’s access to information anymore—and you certainly can’t control their response. Nor should you try, in my opinion.”
** Chapter 3 (p. 39)
* As an engineer, he knew that a bucket-load of philosophical principles wasn’t worth a grain of good hard fact.
** Chapter 3 (p. 39)
* The law is a weapon of government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
** Chapter 8 (p. 102)
* Madeleine’s heart sank. Nemoto would be hard to deal with rationally. People with missions always were.
** Chapter 14 (p. 173)
* She wondered if the gerontocrats—conservative, selfish, reclusive, obsessive—were responsible for a more general malaise that seemed to her to have afflicted this fast-forwarded world. There had been change—new fashions, gadgetry, terminology—but, it seemed to her, no progress. In science and art she could see no signs of meaningful innovation. The world’s nations evolved, but the various supranational structures had not changed for decades: the political institutions that wielded the power had ossified.
** Chapter 14 (p. 174)
* After a time it became unbearable, the lesson blinding in its cruelty: but if the universe didn’t get you, other sentient beings would.
** Chapter 17 (p. 211)
* The shortness of human lives, she thought. Our curse. Every generation thinks it is immortal, that it has been born into a world that has never changed, and will never change.
** Chapter 22 (p. 295)
* Life seems to be emergent from the very fabric of the universe that contains us, hardwired into physical law. And so, I suppose, mind is emergent too.
** Chapter 23 (p. 306)
* She laughed. “Guilt: the Catholic Church’s first patent.”
** Chapter 30 (p. 427)
* He dug into the ground until he came up with a stone the size of his thumbnail. “—if the universe was the size of this rock, then each star would be the size of a quark.”
** Chapter 32 (p. 461)
* Life, Cassiopeia said, was emergent everywhere. Planets were the crucible. Life curdled, took hold, evolved, in every nook and cranny it could find in the great nursery that was the Galaxy.
** Chapter 33 (p. 465)

#### Origin (2001)

    All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Del Rey ISBN 0-345-43080-8, in January 2003, 3rd printing
    There are no chapter division in the book; only a brief prologue and the five large sections listed
    All italics as in the book
* When everybody else was snuggling at the drive-in, you used to lecture me on how space is a high frontier, a sky to be mined, a resource for humanity. But is that all there is? Is the sky really nothing more than an empty stage for mankind to strut and squabble?
** p. 1
* The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile and ultimately lethal.
** p. 3

##### Part One: Wheel

* No organization was a rational place. Organizations were bear pits where people fought for their own projects, which might or might not have something to do with the organization’s supposed mission. The wise person accepted that, and found a way to get what she wanted in spite of it all.
** p. 16

##### Part Two: Red Moon

* The main reason to exercise, he thought: It stops your brain working, lets your body remind you you’re still an animal. It was the only respite he got from being himself.
** p. 78

##### Part Three: Hominids

* A pinch of observation is worth a mountain of hypothesis.
** p. 210
* Only children chatter of an afterlife. We are nothing but transient dissipative structures. In your cherishing the bone dust of the dead you are seeking to deny the basic truth of existence: that when we die, we are gone.
** p. 284
* There were no cop cars cruising through that darkness, no watching choppers or surveillance satellites, nobody out there to help him—no law operating save the savagely impartial rule of nature. And yet every day he was struck by the strange orderliness of the place. Decaying animal corpses did not litter the ground, save for a handful of bleached bones here and there; it was rare to walk into so much as a heap of dung. There was death here, yes, there was blood and pain—but it was as if every creature, including the hominids, were a cog in some vaster machine, that served to sustain all their lives. And every creature, presumably unconsciously, accepted its place and the sacrifices that came with it. All say one species of hominid, it seemed: Homo sap himself, who was forever seeking to tear up the world around him.
** p. 316
* One must admire efficiency when one finds it, whatever one’s moral qualms.
** p. 341
* They talked further, an incoherent conversation of disconnected fragments, peppered by misunderstanding, suffused by mistrust.
** p. 354
* Superstition! A fatal flaw for a regime whose legitimacy comes entirely from religion.
** p. 387
* We must consider the possibility that the manifold of universes through which we wonder is in fact infinite.
** p. 405

##### Part Four: World Engine

* No wonder you can’t figure out the Fermi Paradox, Malenfant, if you don’t know your own wife’s dress size.
** p. 416
* But what would humans do, she mused, if they stumbled on a situation like this? Well they wouldn’t be satisfied with the generosity of Candyland. They’d breed until the caves were overflowing. The hunters would start ranging farther until all the animals in the area were eaten or driven away. Then agriculture would start, with everybody forced to bend their bodies to back-breaking toil, day after day. As the population exploded the forests would be cut back, the animals decimated. Then would come the famines and the wars.
** pp. 451-452
* “We’d carve a place out of the wilderness—” “But there is no wilderness, Mane said. “Even without war, even if you found a space not already cultivated, you would be forced to occupy a region, delineated in space, time, and energy flow, already exploited by another portion of the ecology.” It took some time for Emma to figure that out. “Yes,” she said. “There is bound to be some environmental impact. But—” “Other species would find reduced living space. Diversity would fall. And so it would go on. Soon the world would be covered from pole to pole by humans, fighting over the diminishing resources.”
** pp. 470-471
* A lion takes only the last deer in the herd. She does not dream of having so many cubs that the plains would be full of nothing but lions. There are simple laws. Most species figure them out; you are the exception. An ecology of a single species is not viable. A diverse, stable world would provide for you.
** p. 471
* They see the universe as essentially bountiful, a generous motherland. We see the universe as an enemy nation, to be occupied and mastered.
** p. 474

##### Part Five: Manifold

* He walks on, across the hot crimson dust.
** p. 518 (closing words)

### Evolution (2002)

    All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Del Rey ISBN 0-345-45783-8 in February 2004, 1st printing
    All italics as in the book
* Bex shrugged. “You think anybody’s going to listen to a bunch of scientists? No offense. But nobody has so far.”
** Prologue (p. 6)
* If you were part of a group there was always the chance that the predator would take the next guy, not you. It was a cold-blooded lottery that paid off often enough to be worthwhile adapting for. But there were disadvantages to group living: mainly, if there were large numbers of you, there was increased competition for food. As that competition resolved itself, the inevitable result was social complexity—and the size of the adapids’ brains had increased so that they were capable of handling that complexity. Then, of course, they were forced to become even more efficient at searching for food to fuel those big brains. It was the way of the future. As primate societies became ever more complex, a kind of cognitive arms race would continue, increasing smartness fueled by increasing social complications.
** Chapter 5 “The Time of Long Shadows” section I (p. 113)
* There was no design in this: no sense of improvement, of purpose. All that was happening was that each organism was struggling to preserve itself, its offspring, and its kin. But as the environment slowly changed, so through relentless selection did the species that inhabited it. It was not a process fueled by life, but by death: the elimination of the less well adapted, the endless culling of inappropriate possibilities. But the potential of an unseen future was no consolation to those who lived through the relentless culling.
** Chapter 5 “The Time of Long Shadows” section II (pp. 120-121)
* The rodents’ vast litters incidentally offered up much raw material to the blind sculptors of natural selection; their evolutionary rate was ferocious.
** Chapter 5 “The Time of Long Shadows” section III (p. 132)
* On the longest of timescales, over millions of years, the workings of chance defied human intuition. Humans were equipped with a subjective consciousness of risk and improbability suitable for creatures with a lifespan of less than a century or so. Event that came much less frequently than that—such as asteroid impacts—were place, in human minds, in the category not of rare, but of never. But the impacts happened even so, and to a creature with a lifespan of, say, ten million years, would not have seemed so improbable at all. Given enough time even such unlikely events as ocean crossings from Africa to South America would inevitably occur, over and again, and would shape the destiny of life.
** Chapter 6 “The Crossing” section IV (p. 185)
* With his eland meat Brow was able to reinforce his political position among the men—and buy access to the women, which was ultimately the only purpose of his endless battle for dominance.
** Chapter 9 “The Walkers” section I (p. 256)
* There were other ways for primates to live, other kinds of societies that could be imagined. But once the pattern had been set, it was all but impossible to break.
** Chapter 9 “The Walkers” section I (p. 257)
* Relentless Pleistocene selection was shaping everything that would make up humanity. Even love was a by-product of evolution. Love, and the pain of loss.
** Chapter 10 “The Crowded Land” section II (p. 308)
* 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.
** Chapter 11 “Mother’s People” section I (p. 337)
* The emergent humans were still animals, still bound by natural law. No innovation in the way they lived would have taken root if it had not given them an adaptive advantage in the endless struggle to survive. An ability to believe in things that weren’t true was a powerful tool.
** Chapter 11 “Mother’s People” section IV (p. 367)
* A growing belief that behind every event lay intention—be it an evil thought in the mind of another, or the benevolent whim of a god in the sky—was perhaps inevitable in creatures with an innate understanding of causality. If you were smart enough to make multicomponent tools, you eventually came to believe in gods, the end of all causal chains. There would be costs, of course. In the future, to serve their new gods and shamans, the people would have to sacrifice much: time, wealth, even the right to have children. Sometimes they would even have to lay down their lives. But the payback was that they no longer had to be afraid of dying.
** Chapter 11 “Mother’s People” section IV (pp. 370-371)
* In this marginal land accurate information was at a premium; to know the land was to prosper, not to know it meant starvation, and experts were a lot more valuable than bosses.
** Chapter 13 “Last Contact” section I (pp. 406-407)
* Her story was a creation myth, a legend already more than twenty thousand years old. Such tales—which said that Jahna’s people were the pinnacle of creation, that theirs was the only right way, and that all others were less than human—taught the people to care passionately about themselves, their kin, and a few treasured ideals. But to the exclusion of all other humans, let alone such non-people as the Old Man’s kind.
** Chapter 13 “Last Contact” section III (p. 432)
* It (i. e., agriculture) was the most profound revolution in hominid living since Homo erectus had left the forest and committed themselves to the savannah. Compared to this phase shift, the advances of the future—even genetic engineering—were details. There would never be so significant a change again, not until humans themselves disappeared from the planet.
** Chapter 14 “The Swarming People” section II (p. 456)
* But even if it is true, even if we are governed by the legacy of an animal past, then it is up to us to behave as if it were not so.
** Chapter 15 “The Dying Light” section III (p. 501)
* In the last centuries of the empire, educational standards and literacy had fallen. In the dulled heads of the masses, distracted by cheap food and the barbaric spectacles of the coliseums, the values on which Rome had been founded and the ancient rationalism of the Greeks had been replaced by mysticism and superstition. It was—Honorius had explained to his pupil—as if a whole culture was losing its mind. People were forgetting how to think, and soon they would forget they had forgotten. And, to Honorius’s thinking, Christianity only exacerbated that problem. “You know, Augustine warned us that belief in the old myths was fading—even a century and a half ago, as the dogma of the Christians took root. And with the loss of the myths, so vanishes the learning of a thousand years, which are codified in those myths, and the monolithic dogmas of the Church will snuff out rational inquiry for ten more centuries. The light is fading, Athalric.”
** Chapter 15 “The Dying Light” section III (p. 502)
* The fault is all ours. We have become overwhelming. About one in twenty of all the people who have ever existed is alive today, compared to just one in a thousand of other species. As a result we are depleting the earth. But even now the question is still asked: Does it really matter? So we lose a few cute mammals, and a lot of bugs nobody ever heard of. So what? We’re still here. Yes, we are. But the ecosystem is like a vast life-support machine. It is built on the interaction of species on all scales of life, from the humblest fungi filaments that sustain the roots of plants to the tremendous global cycles of water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Darwin’s entangled bank, indeed. How does the machine stay stable? We don’t know. Which are its most important components? We don’t know. How much of it can we take out safely? We don’t know that either. Even if we could identify and save the species that are critical for our survival, we wouldn’t know which species they depend on in turn. But if we keep on our present course, we will soon find out the limits of robustness. I may be biased, but I believe it will matter a great deal if we were to die by our own foolishness. Because we bring to the world something that no other creature in all its long history has had, and that is conscious purpose. We can think our way out of this. So my question is—consciously, purposefully, what are we going to do?
** Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section I (pp. 509-510)
* What makes you think anybody with power will listen to a bunch of scientists? They never have before.
** Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section I (p. 513)
* As the natural systems of the planet broke down, humans would discover conclusively that they were still, after all, just animals in an ecosystem; and as it died back, so did they.
** Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section II (p. 525)
* “You aren’t doing much for morale, Sidewise.” Sidewise shot back, “And what about my morale? It does me no damn good to ignore what’s blindingly obvious all around us.”
** Chapter 17 “A Long Shadow” section II (p. 539)
* Nothing mankind had done in its short and bloody history had made the slightest bit of difference to this patient geographical realignment. Meanwhile the Earth, left to its own devices, had deployed a variety of healing mechanisms, physical, chemical, biological, and geological, to recover from the devastating interventions of its human inhabitants. Air pollutants had been broken up by sunlight and dispersed. Bog ore had absorbed much metallic waste. Vegetation had recolonized abandoned landscapes, roots breaking up concrete and asphalt, overgrowing ditches and canals. Erosion by wind and water had caused the final collapse of the last structures, washing it all into sand. Meanwhile the relentless processes of variation and selection had worked to fill an empty world.
** Chapter 18 “The Kingdom of the Rats” section II (p. 579)
* For the genes it made sense, of course. Otherwise it would not have happened.
** Chapter 18 “The Kingdom of the Rats” section III (p. 597)
* 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.
** Chapter 19 “A Far Distant Futurity” section III (p. 636)
* Anyhow, that’s our story. And I think, in my glimpses of the great encompassing mechanism that has shaped us all, I’ve seen a little of the numinous. That’s enough of God for me.
** Epilogue (p. 644)

### Ages in Chaos (2003)

    All page numbers from the American trade paperback edition published by Forge ISBN 978-0-765-31268-6
* Ussher’s intense and obsessive project seems very odd to the eyes of a modern scientist. After all he had deduced the age of the Earth without looking at a scrap of physical evidence—not a single rock.
** Chapter 2, “The first day of the creation is deduced” (p. 17)
* Francis Bacon, who died in the seventeenth century, argued strongly that philosophy and theology should be kept separate, and that we should concentrate our studies on the local problems and the interconnections between material and efficient causes. Final-cause analysis was just a distraction: ‘Inquiry into final causes is sterile, and, like a virgin consecrated to God, produces nothing.’
** Chapter 5, “The Earth’s blood is the veins of its waters” (p. 43)
* Buffon’s work created a great furore, of course. The theologians at the Sorbonne condemned him, and Buffon dutifully retracted. But he wasn’t sincere: ‘It is better to be humble than hanged.’
** Chapter 6, “Upon this chaos rode the distressed ark” (p. 55)
* ‘He set no great value on money, or, perhaps, to speak properly, he set on it no more than its true value.’
** Chapter 8, “A cursed country where one has to shape everything out of a block” (p. 68)
* In his reliance on evidence, preferably obtained at first hand, Hutton was showing the way to the geological methods of the future.
** Chapter 8, “A cursed country where one has to shape everything out of a block” (p. 70)
* Despite his friendship with Adam Smith, he believed in government intervention in agriculture, as it was too important to be left to market forces and chance: ‘The husbandman maintains the nation in all its ease, its affluence and its splendour,’ he wrote. But farmers too had a responsibility for the public good. Rotation of crops, ensuring equal acreages of different crops at any given time, would help keep prices stable.
** Chapter 10, “Assemblies of good fellows” (p. 95)
* Hutton became very critical of a system where appointments depended not on merit but on the support of those in power. Of one possible opening for Watt he wrote, ‘I think it only needs to have a man properly bestir himself but that is what few political people do unless to serve themselves.’
** Chapter 11, “The power of heat is unlimited” (p. 105)
* His overriding lesson for thinkers like Hutton was that scientists, even those occupied by an apparently ‘concrete’ discipline like geology, need to be careful not just about what they claim to know but also about how they claim to know it. Human reason is a fragile thing and prone to be overthrown by suggestibility.
** Chapter 13, “Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion” (p. 124)
* ‘If, in pursuing this object, we employ our skill in research, not in forming vain conjectures; and if data are to be found, on which Science may form just conclusions, we should not long remain in ignorance with respect to the natural history of this Earth, a subject on which hitherto opinion only, and not evidence, has decided. For in no subject is there naturally less defect of evidence, although philosophers, led by prejudice, or misguided by false theory, have neglected to employ that light by which they should have seen the system of the world.’
** Chapter 14, “We have now got to the end of our reasoning” (p. 130)
* ‘In matters of science, curiosity gratified begets not indolence, but new desires.’
** Chapter 15, “The world was tired out with geological theories” (p. 153)
* The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time; and while we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible how much farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow.
** Chapter 15, “The world was tired out with geological theories” (p. 160)
* Darwin had found a way in which a species could be shaped to fit its environment—not by divine intervention, not by mind, but through the steady, relentless working of natural law. Just like the Huttonian prescription for the Earth, it was a Newtonian scheme for life. For better or worse, Darwin transformed our view of our place in the universe. Humans too are not the outcome of a divine design, but simply products of the relentless workings of natural laws, just like rivers and mountains, beetles and whales.
** Chapter 20, “It altered the tone of one’s mind” (p. 208)
* Humans and their petty doings come and go, but the geology endures.
** Epilogue (p. 223)

### Flood (2008)

* "...Why Nimrod? Why that name?" Ramrod straight, he looked down at her. "I guess you skipped Bible studies at school. Genesis 10, verses 8 to 10: 'And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth... And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and-" "Babel?" "It was only generations after the flood of Noah. Chapter 11, verse 4. 'And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.'" "But God struck them down when they built the tower." "Yes. But why? 11, 6. 'Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.' That's what God said about mankind. He feared us, and so He struck us down. We have that verse up on the wall on big banners, to motivate the workforce. 'Nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.'" "Wow," Thandie said. "You're challenging God?" "Why the hell not?"
** Chapter 90

### Proxima (2013)

    All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Roc, ISBN 978-0-451-46771-3, in August 2015, 8th printing
* She was doing well with her schooling, scoring high in mathematics, sciences and deductive abilities, as well as in physical prowess and leadership skills. Her father had been paradoxically pleased when she had been flagged up with a warning about having introvert tendencies. “All great scientists are introverts,” he said. “All great engineers too, come to that. The sign of a strong, independent mind.”
** Chapter 4 (p. 22)
* It was always the same with engineers, Stef had observed; nothing made them happier than to be given a well-defined and achievable task, and to be left alone to get on with it.
** Chapter 38 (p. 204)
* If you were anywhere near the center of human affairs, even to the extent that she was, your predominant emotion had to be disappointment at the way in which an age when opportunities for humanity had never been greater, old flaws—territorialism, combativeness, reluctance to transcend cultural barriers, a sheer inability simply to see things from the other guy’s point of view—looked set to bring the sky crashing down on all their heads.
** Chapter 71 (pp. 398-399)

### Ultima (2014)

    All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Roc, ISBN 978-0-451-46773-7, in April 2016, 4th printing
* I know the military. The sooner they can kick a problem upstairs the happier they will be.
** Chapter 10 (p. 67)
* Ah, Mardina. Evidently you entirely lack imagination. You’ll go far in the Navy.
** Chapter 23 (p. 167)
* We underestimated the vindictiveness of mankind. Their retrospective tribunals. Their visiting of punishments on the children of the perpetrators. They never forgave us.
** Chapter 43 (p. 292)
* Let me face bare-handed a dozen highly trained and fully armed gladiators, each with a personal grudge against me, than a lawyer with a single pointed question.
** Chapter 49 (p. 325)
* In the hearts of a hundred billion worlds Across a trillion dying realities in a lethal multiverse— In the chthonic silence— All that could have been done had been done. In peace and satisfaction, minds diffuse and antique submitted to the End Time.
** Epilogue (p. 513)

## About Stephen Baxter

* [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.
** James Nicoll Usenet article <367B7C13.16F14557@home.com> (1998)
* As I've often said, I'm a fan of hard SF. No, it's more like I am addicted to it, even the stepped-on 20 times and cut with powered milk and rat-poison sort of hard SF. This gets us to Stephen Baxter's Mayflower II, published last year in a limited edition from PS Publishing. In one of the great tragedies of publishing, it was not a limited enough edition and so I have read it.
** James Nicoll Usenet article <cvneu0$29s$1@reader2.panix.com> (2005))