Kim Stanley Robinson
58 Quotations from Kim Stanley Robinson
| AI n. | 1993 Red Mars . 13 But Frank had gotten the day’s emergency code out of the fire department AI that morning. |
| alien adj. | 1993 Red Mars . 89 They had stumbled upon a long-abandoned alien spaceport. |
| alternate world n. | 2002 in Locus Jan. 7/1 I thought it would be naive and something like racism in reverse to suggest that if we got rid of Europe the world would have happily put itself together. There are all kinds of double binds in writing an alternative history. Do you make the alternate world better or worse? |
| alternative history n. | 2002 in Locus Jan. 7/1 I thought it would be naive and something like racism in reverse to suggest that if we got rid of Europe the world would have happily put itself together. There are all kinds of double binds in writing an alternative history. Do you make the alternate world better or worse? |
| alternative history n. | 2002 in Locus Jan. 7/2 The science fiction tradition of the alternative history and the time travel story often discuss the same set of hypotheses. |
| areological adj. | 1992 Red Mars 240 Excavations accompanied by intensive areological studies were being conducted by scientists working for UNOMA and…the transnationals; all trying to find clues that would enable them to locate more deposits. |
| areological adj. | 1992 Red Mars 419 ‘See,’ Nadia said, pointing at an areological map of the canyon that she had called onto the rover’s screen, ‘there’s a big fault there behind that whole overhanging piece.’ |
| areologist n. | 1985 in G. Dozois Isaac Asimov’s Mars (1991) 155 In the same way that a tongue will go to a sore tooth over and over, Roger finds himself following Hans and Arthus to hear the areologist’s explanation. |
| areologist n. | 1992 Red Mars 10 Daedalia Planum appears to be the remains of an impact basin 4500 kilometers across. Those are big; but then there are areologists who believe that the entire northern hemisphere of Mars is an ancient impact basin. |
| areologist n. | 1993 Red Mars (1993) 217 As the areologists sipped, he cleaned the dishes…and asked how their investigation was going. They were looking for evidence of ancient glacial episodes, which if found would support a model of the planet’s early history that included oceans filling the low spots. |
| areologist n. | 1993 Green Mars (new ed.) 114 Fantastic to actually see one of the big landslides—most areologists and geologists had to rely on explosions, or computer simulations. |
| areology n. | 1993 Red Mars (1993) 221 Another part of the mystery: no one had ever explained why the northern and southern hemispheres were so different, it was the problem in areology, a solution to which might prove the key to explaining all the other enigmas of the Martian landscape, as tectonic plate theory had once explained so many different problems in geology. |
| areology n. | 1993 Red Mars (1993) 217 The canals had been sky areology; and many more bad hypotheses had been formulated in the same way, hypotheses that were only now being tested with the rigor of ground areology. |
| Clarke orbit n. | 1984 Icehenge (1990) 208 Well, Connie, we're in a Clarke orbit, so we don’t have to worry about orbital velocity. |
| earthborn adj. | 1993 Green Mars (new ed.) 439 So now, as the grinning Earthborn hydrologists showed her as she stepped into an observation gallery cut into the side of the lava tube… |
| face plate n. | 1993 Red Mars .89 The sun was overhead, too bright to look at even through her faceplate. |
| genetically engineered adj. | 1990 Pacific Edge (1992) 197 They pedaled into a grove of immense genetically engineered sycamores. |
| gravity well n. | 1993 Green Mars (new ed.) 334 Given the acute population and environmental problems on Earth, and the space elevator currently being constructed there to match the one already on Mars, the gravity wells could be surmounted and mass emigration would certainly follow… |
| holo n. | 1984 Icehenge (1990) 78 Xhosa, give this place a structural check and get holo crews in here. Holos of every room. |
| home planet n. | 1993 Red Mars . 299 Meanwhile we've got more pressing problems…Or a home planet going critical. |
| Jovian adj. | 1984 Icehenge (1990) 211 Nearly half of the first Jovian colonies were her projects, as I understand it. |
| Jovian adj. | 1993 Green Mars (new ed.) 159 We would need the thrust of almost all of them to get ourselves back down into the plane of the ecliptic in time to intersect the Jovian system. |
| kipple n. | 2012 2312 546 Rock scattered everywhere, rubble, kipple, ejecta. |
| Martian adj. | 1993 Red Mars . 9 When he says we will make an indigenous Martian culture, he only means some of the Terran cultures here will be promoted. |
| Martian adj. | 1993 Red Mars (1993) 285 There are too many people coming up. You know that. They're not Martian, and they don’t care what happens here. |
| Mercurian n. | 1996 Blue Mars 395 Meetings between the Martian delegation and the Mercurians had been going on in Terminator for weeks, and Zo was tired of them, both the meetings and the Mercurial negotiators, a secretive self-important group of oligarchic mullahs haughty and fawning at the same time, who had not yet comprehended the new order of things in the solar system. |
| nova n. | 1993 Red Mars . 67 The situation was about to ‘go nova’, as Mission Control put it. |
| nova n. | 1993 Red Mars ii. 73 Now that they were about to reach Mars, the expedition was getting a lot more TV time, and the situation was about to ‘go nova’, as Mission Control put it. |
| planet-wide adv. | 1993 Red Mars 258 Is there anything to stop it from growing planetwide? |
| Plutonian n. 1 | 2012 2312 527 So to my mind, we’ll have administered justice, and bought ourselves some time. So I’m glad there’s been agreement from the Plutonians and the Mondragon and all the other relevant parties, including Shukra. And hopefully Swan, when she hears about it, and everyone else. |
| pseudogravity n. | 1993 Red Mars ii. 31 The colonists sank to the floors, and stood in a pseudogravity of .38 g, very close to what they would feel on Mars. |
| robotics n. | 1993 Red Mars (1993) 283 Muscle and brain have extended out through an armature of robotics that is so large and powerful that it’s difficult to conceptualize it. |
| Saturnian n. 1 | 1996 Blue Mars xi. 481 These gas lanterns were now flying through the upper atmospheres of Jupiter and Uranus, collecting and burning helium, and other gases in flares whose light was reflected outward by electromagnetic disks. But the Saturnians had refused to allow them, because they did not want to disturb the ringed planet’s appearance. |
| sci-fi n. | 1993 Red Mars (1993) 405 You and all your friends are trying to live out a fantasy rebellion, some kind of sci-fi 1776, frontiersmen throwing off the yoke of tyranny, but it isn’t like that here! |
| skyhook n. 4 | 1992 Red Mars 269 ‘A few hundred elevators at least will be attached to the cable, and loads will be lifted into orbit using a counterweight system. There will be lots of material to load down from Earth as usual, so energy requirements for lifts will be minimized. It will also be possible to use the cable’s rotation as a slingshot; objects released from the ballast asteroid toward Earth will be using the power of Mars’s rotation as their push, and will have an energy-free high-speed take-off. It’s a clean, efficient, extraordinarily cheap method, both for lifting bulk into space and for accelerating it toward Earth… Once a carbonaceous asteroid is pushed into the proper orbit, and a nuclear-powered robotic cable plant put to work on it, the plant will extrude cable like a spider spinning its thread.’… The miracle of the skyhook. Jack and the Beanstalk, the Ascension to Heaven; it definitely had an air of the miraculous to it. |
| solar sail n. | 1993 Green Mars (new ed.) 135 The material of the two silicate asteroids was transformed by their robot crews into sheets of solar sail material. |
| space elevator n. | 1993 Red Mars (1993) 267 This apparently made the south rim of Pavonis the perfect tethering point for a space elevator, as it was both directly on the equator, and twenty-seven kilometres above the datum. |
| space elevator n. | 1993 Green Mars (new ed.) 334 Given the acute population and environmental problems on Earth, and the space elevator currently being constructed there to match the one already on Mars, the gravity wells could be surmounted and mass emigration would certainly follow… |
| space elevator n. | 1993 Green Mars (new ed.) 99 Most of the other towns had been left in ruins, but Sheffield’s location remained the ideal place for tethering a space elevator. |
| space elevator n. | 1993 Red Mars (1993) 242 We'll hold onto it until it’s worth more. Or until they build that space elevator. |
| space fleet n. | 1984 Icehenge (1990) 57 The entire Soviet space fleet rebelled and pearl-harbored the rest of the Committee’s spaceships, with devastating success. |
| space liner n. | 2012 2312 462 The spaceliner ETH Mobile was not a hollowed asteroid but rather one of the very large manufactured ships built in lunar orbit in the previous century. |
| spaceport n. | 1993 Red Mars iii. 97 All of them were crusted the same red-orange as the ground: it was an odd, thrilling site, as if they had stumbled upon a long-abandoned alien spaceport. |
| spacesickness n. | 1993 Green Mars (new ed.) 94 He was only just getting the slightest touch of appetite back, after a timeless interval of space sickness that apparently in the real world had clocked in at three days… |
| space station n. | 1993 Red Mars ii. 74 The largest subsidiary mission was to dock a part of the disassembled Ares on Phobos, and begin transforming that moon into a space station. |
| space suit n. | 1993 Red Mars . 92/93 The walkers were designed for the Martian surface, and were not pressurized like spacesuits. |
| suit up v. | 1993 Red Mars iii. 92 They woke and suited up and went out again. |
| Terra n. | 1993 Green Mars (new ed.) 210 Terran stock markets were ballooning hysterically to mark the action, with no end in sight, despite the fact that Mars could only provide Terra with certain metals in certain quantities. |
| terraformed adj. | 1993 Green Mars (new ed.) 90 All its metals together total about twenty trillion dollars, but the value of a terraformed Mars is more in the neighbourhood of two hundred trillion dollars. |
| terraformer n. | 1993 Green Mars (new ed.) 123 It was, in fact, the Oceanus Borealis that some terraformers talked about—but buried, deeply buried, and mostly frozen, and mixed with regolith and dense fines… |
| terraforming n. | 1993 Red Mars ii. 88 The treaty also says we have to take measures to prevent the disruption of planetary environments, I think is how they put it. It’s in Article Seven. That seems to me to expressly forbid the terraforming that so many of you are talking about. |
| Terran n. 1 | 1996 Blue Mars 152 It was precisely the Terrans who showed an intense interest in Mars who were the most troubling to contemplate: certain metanat executives whose corporations had invested heavily in Martian terraformation; also certain national representatives from heavily populated countries, who would no doubt be very happy to have a place to send large numbers of their people. |
| Terran adj. | 1993 Green Mars (new ed.) 13 Of course, all the genetic templates for our new biota are Terran; the minds designing them are Terran, but the terrain is Martian. |
| Terran adj. | 1993 Red Mars iii. 120 So they had been on Mars for half a Martian year. Phyllis was using the calendar devised by planetary scientists; among the colonists it was becoming more common than the Terran system. |
| tractor beam n. | 1993 Green Mars (new ed.) 476 Everyone moved as if in a tractor beam, glasses in hand, all other thoughts gone as they came to the tent coping at the edge of the waterfront. |
| Uranian n. | 1996 Blue Mars 431 For the Uranians this freedom was worth more than light or gravity. |
| viewscreen n. | 1984 Icehenge (1990) 36 Ilene had set up a computer display on the big viewscreen, which indicated our two ships, the outline of the asteroid as seen from our original location, and the three police ships. |
| waldo n. | 1993 Red Mars (1993) 373 ‘We're like dwarves in a waldo’, Frank said to him angrily. ‘One of those really big waldo excavators. We're inside it and supposed to be moving a mountain, and instead of using the waldo capabilities we're leaning out of a window and digging with teaspoons. |