Quotes from Stephen Baxter

The squid are leaving, Maura…

And maybe a hundred billion cephalopod minds, out in the Trojans, just light-minutes apart, have become something—" "Transcendent.

But, yeah, it was a totally weird place, looking back. But the right kind of weird. Good weird. The nuns had a lot of freedom. We read Carl Sagan before the Old Testament.

Which one of you's the bitch?

A citizen of the Roman Empire, for example, would have placed less value on individual liberty in the modern Western sense than on collective responsibility.

I despise the religions we have, nothing but flummery and manipulation based on texts and materials so reworked over time they're all meaningless. I despise the division religions religions bring; humans have enough problems without that. I despise con men like Father Melly. And yet, and yet …

Agnes could read the history of this place, this hilltop. The first settlers here must have made a start clearing fields for their crops or livestock, even put up these grand houses. Then, after no tile at all, they had evidently given up and wondered off to do – well, whatever it was most people did around here to make a living these days. And now here was the forest already taking back the land, or trying to.

That's the trouble with happy endings," he told me after the funeral. "You just live on and on, until you've sucked all the juice out, and it turns out not to be so happy after all.

She had always had a streak of recklessness about her, a willingness to go chasing hurricanes and tsunamis, all in the name of science, always willing to go that bit further than anybody else. Disaster hunting, she called it, surfing the extreme weather.

The Hallelujahs are a lovely visual concept, ins in part by the Huang Shan Mountains of China, specta karst limestone formations that themselves look too deli vertical to exist.

Colonel Quaritch likes to welcome newcomers to Pandora with a scary depiction of its dangerous life forms, in plants, the animals, the natives, all of which, according him, want nothing more than to kill humans. But Pandora would be a ferociously hazardous place eve without any life forms at all

But this is an instance where we also have to allow for some creative licence. Avatar is about a clash of cultures, the heavy handed technological human civilisation versus the gracef Navi, living lightly in their world.

to begin with, the Na'vi must be smart, with cognitive skills at least similar to humans. Even an arrow with a shaft, a head, or some kind of flight is a multi-part tool.

And Cameron did base his vision of the forests of Pandora partly) on the coral reefs he encountered in the ocean's depths. This is appropriate because a coral reef, like a rain forest is an example of a climax ecosystem a complex and rich environment in which large numbers of animals and plants have coevolved

You know you will get what you need, if not necessarily what you ask for.

another proof of smartness is the fact that the Na'vi evidently targeted the tyres, which look like the vehicle's weak point

The mass of people was ignorant, driven by fashions, fads, and the tongues of orators...

Just like the Spanish on Earth in pursuit of gold, the twenty-second-century conquistadors of RDA, are here in pursuit of unobtainium, and have come face to face with hunter-gatherers of the forest

The past is altered, constantly, by our actions in the present.

ten thousand years ago every human on the planet lived much as the Na'vi do, by hunting, fishing, and harvesting the fruits of the great wildwoods

But few birds flew nowadays. Why fly when there was nothing to flee

people, with their faults and ambiguities and weaknesses, and plumbing.

It's so beautiful. Spinner stared at the eagle wings of the Nebula, drinking in its pale colors. Louise, I'm so lucky to be here, to see this. Uvarov might have sent someone else through the Locks, that first time; not me and Arrow Maker. You might have asked someone else to learn to run your nightfighter for you - and not me. Louise, I might have missed this. I might have died without seeing it - without ever knowing it existed.

There was a German called Leibniz. "The philosopher? Never heard of him." Entities that cannot be distinguished by any means whatsoever, even in principle, at any time in the past, present, and future have to be considered identical. This is called the Identity of Indiscernibles.