Kim Stanley Robinson

Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can’t grasp the current situation.

Maya was very insistent that they learn their math well. “You’re getting a horrible education,” she would say, shaking her head darkly. “But if you learn your math you can catch up later.”

“Part of a team,” Ann said dully.

“Well, you are.”

“I know.” She sighed. “We’ll all say that. We’ll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it’s all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we’ll be here, and we’ll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.”

Ridiculous. But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.

“You just don’t have faith!” Frank repeated.

”Well I hope I never get it! It’s like being hit by a hammer in the head!”

Their thinking clashed radically with Western thought; for instance the separation of church and state was wrong to them, making it impossible for them to agree with Westerners on the very basis of government. And they were so patriarchal that some of their women were said to be illiterate—illiterates, on Mars! That was a sign. And indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in that sense they were all madmen.

“And with our work,” John continued, “we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story”—i.e., the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics.

“Whenever scientists say they’re Christian,” Sax said, “I take it to be an aesthetic statement.”

“The church of the wouldn’t-it-be-pretty-to-think-so,” Frank said.

“But that may be Freudianism.”

“In other words something like the theory of phlogiston.”

She laughed. “Exactly.”

The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.