science fiction Quotes

Matthew is twelve, and a completely normal child. Suddenly he starts asking unusual questions and behaving oddly. It is then that his parents become aware of Chocky.

“Everybody is surprised when Great Aunt Emma, who nobody’s ever heard of, comes to stay, but Tim and Beth start becoming more and more alarmed at her behaviour and must find the truth behind her.”

“Great Aunt Emma is no ordinary old lady. But why is she so strange? For a start, she just appeared, grinning, on the doorstep, as if from nowhere.”

“Soon Tim and Beth start noticing more and more odd things about the great-aunt they’ve nicknamed ‘Grinny.’ And before long, they make a horrifying discovery. ”

The theme of this story, the struggle that every colony has had to go through to gain their independence from the corporation making the rules through government lobbies.

‘If you mean that - but of course you don’t - you are greatly mistaken,’ said Grinny. ‘We will need a great number of things in a very short space of time if we are to survive in your planet. Our own resources will be quite inadequate.”

“As only to be expected with a book written in 1975 about the “future” (2005) I had to suspend my disbelief a little more than usual. Apparently by now we should be living on the Moon and on the continental shelves, and have abolished the internal combustion engine.”

“Don’t worry. Under water they’re nothing. In fact you have to wear a weighted belt in order to keep under even with tanks on. Down at Conshelf depths we breath different mixtures of gases depending on where we’re working.”

“The door swung open behind me, letting in a shaft of light and a babble to excited voices. There was a waft of exotic perfume. Real French perfume! The ferry from Earth must have arrived.These would be passengers on Moon Safari.”

“But that was long, long ago. Mother had been dead for five years, and I, Kepler Masterman, son of Moon Governor, was actually going to Earth myself. Already I was over the first hurdle, the wearisome three day journey on the old beat-up Moon ferry to the space station.”

“I had another idea. Remember your Aunt Janet... my photographer sister? She and you uncle Ted work in one of the undersea labs, Conshelf Ten. They have a son, Jon, about your age. How would you like to spend the rest of your Earth time living under the sea with them?”

“I catch the rose petals as they fall from my cheeks, as they float around the frame of my body, as they cover me in something that feels like the absence of courage.”

“After millennia of earthbound foreplay, Mankind’s achievements on a noteworthy level began with its political unification and the gradual colonization of Mars.”

“All trough the decades, traveling to, and later settling on Mars had been envisioned as quick, relatively easy affairs, complicated but feasible and manageable in short term.”

“The first steps on Mars were taken not by astronauts, but by barefoot children on lush, biosynthetic grass.”

“The bioengineered humans range from worm-like humans to insectivores and modular and cell-based species. The book follows the progress of these new humans as they either go extinct or regain sapience in wildly different forms and gradually discover that the Qu experimented on them.”

“They are, themselves, destroyed by the Asteromorphs, the descendants of the human species who escaped experimentation by the Qu. The final chapters of the book detail humanity’s rebound as a post human species, their first contact with another galaxy’s life, rediscovering and defeating the Qu, and concluding with the rediscovery of Earth.”