Quotes from Stephen Baxter

Even the deep inner senses: even proprioception

Even the stars had been obscured, their light stolen by Dyson masks: dense orbiting habitat clouds, even solid spheres, asteroids and planets dismantled and made into traps for every stray photon. It was a depressing sight: an engineered sky, a sky full of scaffolding and ruins.

I am not a man who enjoys such insights into his own character.

Once, all humans lived as the Navi do.

But most of them, as you may have insinuated, Gine, do nothing but rehash their education, look up the theories of their predecessors, and debate them afresh.

Otherwise Na'vi religion contains elements of many forms of religion on Earth, from monotheism, worship of one true god, to animism. the idea that the gods are immanent in every aspects of the world.

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.

Humanity is a young species in a very old universe, it was expected that any intelligence out there, if they exist all, were probably much older than mankind-and perhaps that very advancement was why we couldn't perceive them.

The Army set a trap at a place called Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and they've been held up there.

Blake's Seven.

And one candidate answer to the question of life here on Earth is: It didn't begin here at all. It started somewhere else and travelled here.

The idea of panspermia-life propagating between worlds perhaps even between the stars goes back to the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras who as long as the fifth century imaged seeds of life spreading through the universe.

Paul? Well, I see we have differing points of view. How – healthy. Why don't we sit and talk? Come

If I don't speak the name of this thing, it still feels like it isn't real. Does that make any sense?' The ColU spoke to them now, whispering in their earphones. 'It makes plenty of sense, Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson. The power of names: probably one of the oldest human superstitions, going back to the birth of language itself. To deny a name is to deny a thing reality. And yet now it is time to name names.

Colonists of, ah, Per Ardua, meet your autonomous colonisation unit!

Honesty doesn't excuse ignorance. But it helps.

To the Navi, Eywa is their mother goddess - and, in a sense their heaven. She takes them into herself when they die.

Every world needed an artist.

Some essence of tie dead Navi survive within Eywa, and the living can communicate with them by plugging a queue into a natural porta such as the Tree of Voices. This is why the amputation of Tsu'tey's queue was so cruel; worse even than murder, denies him immortality among his ancestors.

Eywa is central to the Navi and their world. Jake learns is the Navi see the world as a network of energy, flowing through all living things; the energy is only borrowed an you have to give it back. Eywa, the great mother, she protects the balance of life. As such, per haps she is a sister to our own Gaia.

But the word avatar has much deeper roots. Ultimately in derives from the Hindu, from a word for descent. An avatar is a manifestation of a god on the Earth. This is not like the divinity of Christ in the Christian religion; through the Incarnation Christ was God made man, whereas a Hindu avatar is more literally a god walking the Earth. Perhaps an avatar is more like an angel of Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions.

evaded her, and she sensed they did not believe her

But the Moon has its own intrinsic geography.

Even now the blind scalpels of evolution took raw material adapted for a vanished world, and cut and shaped it for the conditions of the new.