s.penkevich > Books: sci-fi‎ (79)

Brolin doesn’t have a favorite passage but says, “I love haikus.” He reads a passage from the book, “‘Lie down in the light, as fictional characters watch you from afar.’ I love that because it’s pointing out the fact that this is not real, but there’s nothing more real. The light is real, lying down is real, the sand is real, the experience is real, and yet, it’s this great contrasting thing.”

‘We realized it was impossible to protect any one place if the place next door was drowning or on fire. We realized the old boundaries weren’t meant to keep the undesirables out, but to hoard resources within, And the hoarders were the core of the problem.’

‘Stealing from people is not what I made these for! I made them to help us give! To cure the deep-seated culture of corruption by giving people hope and a sense of patriotism. Remember?’

‘The Corporation Rim has always been a slave state, though it calls its institutionalized slavery “contract labor.” The production of human/bot constructs is just a more horrific twist, a mental slavery as well as a physical one. At least victims of contract labor are free to think their own thoughts. But we tell ourselves that constructs aren’t aware of their predicament. What SecUnit makes us realize is that this is not true; they are all aware of what they are and what’s been done to them. But the only choice they are ever offered is obedience or pain and death.’

‘since the thing that happened I don’t think I’ve had an emotion that wasn’t the visual equivalent of a wet blanket crumpled on a floor.’

‘I’m not one for a fine touch. I’m a man. I barrel through life, guns blazing, asking questions rarely. For her, though, I’ll dig through my guts for the right approach.’

‘There is no such thing as a meaningless job in the Fleet. Everything has a purpose, a recognisable benefit. If you have food on your plate, you thank a farmer. If you have clothing, you thank a textile manufacturer. If you have murals to brighten your day, you thank an artist. Even the most menial of tasks benefits someone, benefits all.’

‘Our species doesn’t operate by reality. It operates by stories. Cities are a story. Money is a story. Space was a story, once. A king tells us a story about who we are and why we’re great, and that story is enough to make us go kill people who tell a different story. Or maybe the people kill the king because they don’t like his story and have begun to tell themselves a different one. When our planet started dying, our species was so caught up in stories. We had thousands of stories about ourselves – that’s still true, don’t forget that for a minute – but not enough of us were looking at the reality of things. Once reality caught up with us and we started changing our stories to acknowledge it, it was too late.’

‘Show me a species who has never wronged another. Show me a species who has always been perfect or fair…either we are all worthy of the Commons or none of us are.’

‘Our children do not speak, and cannot hear. They can see, usually, and often do respond to gestures. They can be taught simple tasks. They move and walk, but with little of the fluidity with which an adult is imbued. Having been snatched back from the embrace of death, they move jerkily, as if in spasms. Nor do they live nearly as long as we do. Many generations of children we have created might well pass away before we succumb to death ourselves.’

‘readers of all ages should know that Octavia Estelle Butler was once a little Black girl growing up during the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race…Her stories merge history, anthropology, sociology, biology, and technology. The biographical speculative poems in Star Child attempt to do the same.’