Quotes from Stephen Baxter

death was a termination, an end of existence, and those who had gone were as meaningless as evaporated dew, their very identities lost after a generation.

If the answer is not the one you want, maybe you're not asking the right question.

Spoken like a feeble scientist, lad. You must learn to think like an engineer! To a scientist nothing is proven until it is demonstrated, every way up, before the eyes of a dozen of his sober-suited peers. But an engineer seeks what is possible. I don't care if this theory is right or wrong; I ask instead what I can do with it.

But he's proceeding at his own pace. That's the beauty of this project, of course. Johnnie is autonomous. Now that he's up there, he doesn't need anything from the ground. Since he and his sons won't cost us another dime, this is actually a low-budget project." Joan thought, Sons?

This is a strange situation, sir. Perhaps imagination is what we need.

Sculpting the very earth. That boast stuck in a corner of my mind, though I wasn't sure why, at the time. Perhaps in retrospect what I can only call my revelation was already stirring, like a seed in the watered ground. As I will relate in its place.

if something is so far beyond your imagination, it's hard even to fear it.

It is as if we are all embedded in a vast graph of possibilities, a graph with an axis marked time, for our own future destiny, and an axis marked space, for the possibilities of the universe.

Five million years was plenty of time to forget, as you evolved or devolved or whatever the hell.

A sentient mind refuses to be confined by the parameters of its programming.

The details to be left as an exercise to the student.

And they walked on until they crested the hill. Where they paused, panting.

My God,' said Josh Morris, sounding aghast. 'What have we done?' And he laughed.

Laschamps Excursion

It wasn't yet a full language. It wasn't even as rich as a creole. But it was a start, and it was growing fast. And in a sense Mother had discovered, not invented, that basic sentence structure.

A recent history of the British Aircraft Corporation's 'Mustard' concept of the 1960s is Dan Sharp's British Secret Projects 5: Britain's Space Shuttle (Crecy Publishing, 2016).

Rome strikes back!

what is existence but an endless, ultimately futile delaying of the inevitable?

You suffer when you crave something different from the here and now. So, stop craving.

The functions filled spacetime and they pierced his soul. Exhilarated, he rode their gaudy brilliance through the hearts of aging stars.

Space is for the cephalopods, Maura. It never was meant for us.

She was certainly schizophrenic. Perhaps she was no longer sane.

As an engineer, he knew that a bucket-load of philosophical principles wasn't worth a grain of good hard fact.

King said, "Come. Sit. Have some more drinks. Colonel Kalinski, will you sort that out? You