Quotes from Stephen Baxter

Authority. The antithesis of science.

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

The Long Earth is bountiful but not forgiving.

the story of colonial-era America, rerun across an infinite frontier...All of which was fine, until the day you needed root-canal dentistry. Or your e-book reader broke down. Or you worried whether your kids were ever going to learn anything more than how to plough a field or trap a rabbit. Or you got sick of the mosquitoes. Or, damn it, you just wanted to go shopping .

Look, whatever hayseed laws you pass in Who-Knows-What - Hell-Knows-Where. Don't amount to a hill of beans back here, as your type might say.

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.

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

Thinking about paradoxes is the way human understanding advances. I think the Fermi paradox is telling us something very profound about the universe, and our place in it.

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

We are a side-effect of the universe, not its central function – which seems to be to create star stuff, to form stars.

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.

Testing was never going to be fashionable, but you could hardly run a respectable software development shop with no testing effort at all.

Earth stuff, Mars boy.

We are all creatures of logic, at root. Of little switches turning on and off in our heads, metaphorically speaking.

And if some self-proclaimed expert tells you that Martians are disembodied creatures of brain without emotion, let him listen to the recordings that were made of those cries, of victory, of vengeance, of exultation. 'Ulla! Ulla!' We

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.