Babylon’s Ashes
Imported from: Clippings/Corey-Babylons-Ashes.md
Notes built from this: corey-the-expanse, dual-process-cognition
Author: James S. A. Corey Source: My Clippings.txt
Highlights
“I thought if you told people facts, they’d draw their conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too. But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people.”
“History, Michio believed, was a long series of surprises that seemed inevitable in retrospect.”
“My life has become a single, ongoing revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.”
“The problem, of course, with the idea of nature versus nurture was that it posed a choice between determinisms.”
“It was what came of being a primate with a body built for the Pleistocene savanna. Fear and relief and lust and joy were all packed into the same little network of nerves somewhere deep in his amygdalae, and sometimes they touched.”
“Whoever screws up last loses. Whoever screws up second to last wins. That’s what war is.”
“Knowing that all you can give isn’t enough is its own burden.”
“Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’t come without the other, and Holden had to take comfort in that. The sense that however terrible humanity’s failings were, there was still a little more in them worth admiring.”
“We’re not people,” he said. “We’re the stories that people tell each other about us.”
[…] daydream fit together like a clamp bolt in its housing: It would be an end to working on the ship, and also they would never reach Callisto. The surviving shipyard on Callisto stood on the side permanently locked facing away from Jupiter. Its floodlights cast long, permanent shadows across the moon’s landscape and the ruins of its sister yard, a Martian base shattered years ago. Shattered in one of the first actions by the Free Navy. In Filip’s first command. The dust and fines stirred up by the actions of human commerce fell slowly on Callisto, giving an illusion of mist where there was no free water and only the most tenuous atmosphere to carry it. He watched the scattering of floodlights on the moon’s surface grow larger as they came in, white and bright and random like a handful of the star field had been grabbed and mashed into the dirt.
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Wiki links
- dual-process-cognition — “fear and relief and lust and joy… sometimes they touched” (Pleistocene amygdala)
- narrative-bias — “we run on stories” / “we’re the stories people tell each other about us”
- chaos-and-prediction — history as a series of surprises that seem inevitable in retrospect
- genes-are-not-destiny — nature vs. nurture as a false choice between determinisms
- corey-the-expanse — series wiki page