Home > Work > Before Mars (Planetfall, #3)
1 " No one wants to hear anything like the truth during these landmark times. It has to be one emotion, a positive one - unless it's a quiet, heartfelt confession of fear or nervousness that can utterly disarm listeners and give them the opportunity to be reassuring - just to keep the social wheels turning in the way that makes everyone feel secure. "
― Emma Newman , Before Mars (Planetfall, #3)
2 " I simply couldn't understand why they all wanted to talk about baby stuff. We were immersed in it, twenty-four hours a day; it made no sense to me to meet up with people I barely knew and talk to them about it too. I wanted to find someone like me, someone desperate for human contact with an adult and conversation about anything other than milk and sleep and shit. "
3 " Motherhood is a social minefield. From the moment you become aware of being pregnant, every single time that information is shared, you risk stepping on something explosive... I would not be my own person anymore... but something owned by society as a whole. "
4 " I can remember my grandmother talking about the scientists before the collapse of democracy...All gone now. Doing something for the good of humankind, for the sheer ideologicial ambition of extending our footprint beyond Earth, simply isn't profitable enough. "
5 " It's the consistency that's important. It helps to form a pattern and that pattern is more important than the detail when it comes to changing people's minds. "
6 " There’s no incentive to buy a house now; in the collapse of the ’30s, it all got so irretrievably fucked that only the emerging gov-corp—which had effectively eaten all the banks—could actually afford anything. The “solution” was touted as “neosocialism,” but really it was all about reestablishing top-down control. Allocating housing and deducting rent from corporate salaries were the easiest ways to incentivize people to climb the ladder. "
7 " Standing next to him is Dr. Petranek, nonbinary, in hir mid-thirties with the broad cheekbones of Eastern European heritage and curly brown hair. Ze, too, is tall and confident, standing with hir thumbs hooked into hir belt loops and laughing heartily at something Banks has said. Dr. Petranek is one of the best Noropean engineers of hir generation and the designer of several systems used to keep us alive here, I recall from the show. Secondary specializations in synthetic biology and human biology. "
