Zima Blue Quotes

Life is precious. Infinitely so. Perhaps it takes a machine intelligence to appreciate that." ~"Understanding Space & Time

...the next time you need a piece of apparently obscure information, try asking a science fiction writer. You might be surprised.

Do you have to sound so damned indifferent to it all? Here we are talking about how we're likely to be dead in a few hours and you're acting like it's only a minor inconvenience. ~"Spirey & the Queen

There has been much debate on the matter, but the present state of understanding is that no useful information can ever emerge from a black hole." ~"Understanding Space & Time

But without fallibility there is no art. And without art there is no truth.

Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours. A man once spent his entire life searching for a particular shade of blue that he remembered encountering in childhood. He began to despair of ever finding it, thinking he must have imagined that precise shade, that it could not possibly exist in nature. Then one day he chanced upon it. It was the colour of a beetle in a museum of natural history. He wept for joy.’ - "Zima Blue" by Alastair Reynolds

Just because it came from the heart didn’t make it good.

I'll die? I'm going to die anyway, so what difference does it make?"She paused, allowing the melancholic chorus of the machines to swell and fill the room. "Probably by the end of the week. And all I've got to look forward to is the inside of this room or the view out this window. At least let me see something different." ~"Understanding Space & Time

All I do know is that in six hours I could be suffering from acute existence failure.

Some people get it. Most people never will. But that’s art.

acute existence failure.

All I knew was the way that colour spoke to me, as if I'd been waiting my whole life to find it, to set it free." He thought for a moment. "There's always been something about blue. A thousand years ago Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours.

You've found a way to stay sane, Renfew--even if that means admitting a tiny piece of piano-playing madness into your world. But there's a cost to that sanity, and it isn't moi. the cost is you can't ever allow yourself an instant of hope, because hope is something that will always be crushed, crushed utterly, and in the crushing of hope you will be weakened forever, just as surely as if you'd mainlined some slow-acting poison." ~"Understanding Space & Time

But what Mick remembered, more than anything, was not being cold and wet, but the feeling of relief when they arrived at some cosy warm pub at the end of the day, both of them ravenous and thirsty and high on what they’d achieved. Good memories, all of them.

But one of the truly delightful things about science fiction is that it is far less about new ideas than it is about finding new ways to think about old ones.

When you recall something - this conversation, perhaps, a hundred years from now - there will be things about it that you misremember. Yet those misremembered details will themselves become part of your memory, gaining solidity and texture with each instance of recall. A thousand years from now, your memory of this conversation might bear little resemblance to reality. Yet you’d swear your recollection was accurate.

Keep trying,’ Merlin said. ‘Keep making mistakes, and learning from them. That’s all any culture ever does.

So the next time you need a piece of apparently obscure information, try asking a science fiction writer. You might be surprised.

If it took a monster to do that, doesn’t that mean we sometimes need monsters?’ ‘Maybe we do. But that doesn’t mean we should forgive them for what they are, even for an instant.