★★★★★ (5/5)
A selection of my favourite passages from the book
NOVA PACIFICA, 2313
“The past,” Ms. Coron continued, “thus accumulating bit by bit through recursion, becomes the future.”
Western-style cottage, paper suits, paper dress
“See how the universe is straightforward, but to understand it with the intellect, to turn it into language, requires a twist, a sharp turn? Between the World and the Word, there lies an extra curve.
Family is a story that is told to you, but the story that matters the most you must tell yourself.”
Sometimes understanding comes to you not through thought, but through this throbbing of the heart, this tenderness in the chest that hurts.
Maxwell’s Demon
A war opened a door in men, and whatever was inside just tumbled out. The entropy of the world increased, in the absence of a demon by the door. That was the way of war, wasn’t it?
The Reborn
“Do you not alter your behavior, your expressions, even your speech when you’re with your childhood friends from your hometown compared to when you’re with your new friends from the big city? Do you not laugh differently, cry differently, even become angry differently when you’re with your family than when you’re with me?”
The idea of a justice system so limited by the opacity of the individual that it must resort to ritualized adversarial combat rather than direct access to the truth of the mind must seem to them a barbarity.
The past does not die; it seeps, leaks, infiltrates, waits for an opportunity to spring up. You are what you remember.…”
Thoughts and Prayers
From afar, I watched the trolls swarm around my brother’s family with uncoordinated precision, with aimless malice, with malevolent glee.
Rather than focusing on judging the behavior of speakers, they’ve devoted resources to letting listeners shield themselves.
That this pro- free- speech ethos happens to align with more profit is no doubt a mere afterthought.
Sometimes I wonder if we have misunderstood the notion of freedom. We prize “freedom to” so much more than “freedom from.”
A public life is an inauthentic one. Anyone who enters the arena must be prepared for the consequences.
Byzantine Empathy
Smells probed into the deepest part of your brain and stirred up the rawest emotions, like the blade of a hoe breaking up the numbed clods of modernity to reveal the wriggling pink flesh of wounded earthworms.
A consensus of feelings had replaced the consensus of facts. The emotional labor of vicarious experience through virtual reality had replaced the physical and mental work of investigation, of evaluating costs and benefits, of exercising rational judgment. Once again, proof- of- work was used to guarantee authenticity, just a different kind of work.
As she put it, “America is only a democracy for those lucky enough to be Americans. To everybody else, it’s just a dictator with the biggest bombs and missiles.” She wants the perfection of disintermediated chaos rather than the imperfect stability of awed institutions that could be perfected.
Just because there’s suffering doesn’t mean there is always a better choice; just because people die doesn’t mean we must abandon greater principles. The world isn’t always black and white.
“Empathy isn’t always a good thing,” I say. “Irresponsible empathy makes the world unstable. In each conflict, there are multiple claims for empathy, leading to emotional involvement by outsiders that widens the conflict. To sort through the morass, you must reason your way to the least harmful answer, the right answer.
But I’ve learned over the years that rationality with her, as with many, is just a matter of rationalization. She wants a picture just big enough to justify what her government does.
Empathy for you is but another weapon to be wielded, instead of a fundamental value of being human.
The Gods Will Not Be Chained
The brain is holonomic. Each part of the mind, like points in a hologram, encodes some information about the whole image. We were arrogant to think that we could isolate the personality away from the technical know- how.”
Once you’ve experienced the impossible, no conspiracy seemed unbelievable.
Staying Behind
“They think they can cheat death. But they died the minute they decided to abandon the real world for a simulation. So long as there’s sin, there must be death. It is the measure by which life gains meaning.”
In my old existence, I felt life but dimly and from a distance, cushioned, constrained, tied down by the body. But now I am free, a bare soul exposed to the full tides of eternal Life.
She taught me that our mortality makes us human. The limited time given to each of us makes what we do meaningful. We die to make place for our children, and through our children a piece of us lives on, the only form of immortality that is real.
The Gods Will Not Be Slain
“The cables that make up the internet with pulses of light follow the right- of- way of nineteenth- century railroads, and those followed the wagon trails of pioneers, who followed the paths of the Indians before them. When the world falls apart, it falls apart in layers, too. We’re peeling away the skin of the present to live on the bones of the past.”
Apocalypse did not come with a bang, but slowly, as an irresistible downward spiral.
The Gods Have Not Died in Vain
The amount of energy it takes to run the infrastructure that would support the creation and delivery of a single tomato is many times what it took to build the Great Pyramid. Is it really worth enslaving the whole planet so that you can have the experience of a tomato through the interface of the flesh instead of generating the same impulse from a bit of silicon?”
Would that bring people closer, so that they all shared the same universe without the constraints of scarcity? Or would it push them apart, so that each lived in their own world, a king of infinite space?
Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts
“But what does the job a person has been channeled into have to do with who they are?”
One night, as I lay in the habitat drifting over the balmy subtropical Pacific, the stars spun over my face in their habitual course, a million diamantine points of crisp, mathematical light. I realized, with a startled understanding reminiscent of the clarity of childhood, that the face of the heavens was a collage.
Only in solitude it is possible to live as self- contained as a star. I am content to have this. To have now.
“Who are we to warm a planet for a dream and to cool it for nostalgia?”
Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard
miniature electronics that put brains in grains of rice, continent- spanning networks that fulfilled every desire, virtual gold summoned out of thin air… The laws of nature our ancestors thought they understood no longer applied, and monsters sprang forth in sea and on land, punishing them for their hubris.
She would listen, she would hide, she would scheme, she would even fight— but she would never turn away from the essence of compassion.
A Chase Beyond the Storms: An excerpt from ‘The Veiled Throne’, The Dandelion Dynasty, book three
To the south, the meteorological wonder loomed like a mountain range sculpted out of cyclones, typhoons, sheets of rain so dense that they might as wel be solid water, and roiling clouds lit up from within by bolts of lightning,
“Where does this obsession with living on in song and story instead of thriving in this world come from? The world right here, right now, between the Veil of Incarnation and the River- on- Which- Nothing- Floats, is where we can make the most difference.
‘Sometimes a paving stone is essential on the path to mine pure jade.’ Even an impractical idea may spark a better plan down the road.”
The Hidden Girl
“We’re all thieves in this world of suffering,”
“What is your code then?” “To disdain the moral pronouncements of hypocrites; to be true to my word; to always do what I promise, no more and no less. To hone my talent and wield it like a beacon in a darkening world.” I laugh. “What is your talent, Mistress Thief?” “I steal lives.”
“This is a time of chaos,” Teacher said. “The great lords of the land are filled with ambition. They take everything they can from the people they’re sworn to protect, shepherds who have turned into wolves preying on their flocks. They increase the taxes until all the walls in their palaces are gleaming with gold and silver; they take sons away from mothers until their armies swell like the current of the Yellow River; they plot and scheme and redraw lines on maps as though the country is nothing but a platter of sand, upon which the peasants creep and crawl like terrified ants.”
“We are the winter snowstorm descending upon a house rotten with termites,” she said. “Only by hurrying the decay of the old can we bring about the rebirth of the new. We are the vengeance of a weary world.”
Seven Birthdays
“I wish the kite could y higher,” I say, desperate to keep the words owing, as though unspooling more conversation will keep something precious aloft. “If I cut the line, will it fly across the Pacific?”
It isn’t right for one species in the latest stage of a planet’s long history to monopolize all its resources. It isn’t just for humanity to claim for itself the title of evolution’s crowning achievement. Isn’t it the duty of every intelligent species to rescue all life, even from the dark abyss of time? There is always a technical solution.
But isn’t it the dream of every species to have the chance to do it over? To see if it’s possible to prevent the fall from grace that darkens our gaze upon the stars?
She wraps me in a fierce hug, squeezing my face against hers. She smells like the glow of new stars being born in the embers of a supernova, like fresh comets emerging from the primeval nebula.
Cutting
The act of remembering is an act of retracing, and by doing so we erase and change the stencil.
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