Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

The white world outside the green, the opposite of Hiroko's green world outside the white. And they had opposite feelings about them. Looking from the green side, when Hiroko confronted something mysterious, she loved it and it made her happy -- it was viriditas, a holy power. Looking from the white side, when Sax confronted something mysterious, it was the Great Unexplainable, dangerous an awful. He was interested in the true, while Hiroko was interested in the real. Or perhaps it was the other way around -- those words are tricky.

p. 13

I like the contrast here of joy at a mystery and fight against what we don't know. And which is truth and which is real? Great stuff!

Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

This is the second volume. It concerns much of the terraforming efforts to make Mars livable. Mostly it is the same characters.

Enjoy.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Late in this quiet meal Ann looked around curiously at her companions, suddenly awed by the spectacle of human adaptability. Here they were eating their dinner, talking over the low boom from the north, in a perfect illusion of dining-room conviviality; it might have been anytime, anywhere, and their tired faces bright with some collective success, or merely with the pleasure of eating together -- while just outside their chamber the broken world roared, and a rockfall could annihilate them at any instant. And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they came into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created in a concerted effort to ignore the chaos they were imbedded in. And so they ate, and talked, and enjoyed each other's company; this was the way it had been in the caves, on the savannah, in the tenements and the trenches and the the cities under bombardment.

p. 504

I love dinner and the times we get together with friends and families ad we eat and talk. What a special time and how lucky we are to be able to share this time. It reinforces our humanity in so many ways. We celebrate our animal nature with the eating, and yet we celebrate our collective intelligence by doing it socially. How sad it is that some people cannot see this. And Hail to the Baha'is who use a shared meal as the basic religious ceremony. 

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

"Live," as the Japanese said helpfully, "as if you were already dead."

p. 371

What a concept from this society where everyone is always aware of the reactions of other people. To live as if one were dead means to live as if there were no consequences. I will have to check this out.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy.

p. 379

Are there people who always have a political purpose? What a weird thing. I guess this is one reason I have trouble in meetings and school politics. I know that I am hard for many Japanese to understand. I always say what I mean or keep silent. I where my agenda on my sleeve. Some Japanese are always trying to figure out what I rally mean and what my real agenda is. I am also crippled because I take everything everyone says at face value. Do I have political Asperger's Syndrome?

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

" A talib is a seeker and the seeker's tariqat is his path, his special path you know, on the road to reality."

p. 281

These are Arabic terms, from Sufi's that are roving Mars. What a concept that we are all on a journey towards reality. Very Buddhist. And if we are all moving towards death, is death the ultimate reality? What a depressing thought.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

"... If you don't go ahead and assign values to a number of non-physical things, then electricians and plumbers and other infrastructure workers would always rate as the most productive of society, while artists and the like would be seen as contributing nothing at all."

"sounds about right to me," John joked, but Vlad and Marina ignored him. 

"Anyway, that's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then they pretend that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful."

p. 269

Economics as astrology - yeah. I always thought the advice I got from my astrologer was better han the advice that I got from my broker. And I never thought that either one had much of a grounding in reality.