Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson

These books were full of so many wonderful things, but the unexpected and quite unassuming insights were often worth writing down. An example:

history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died; and how much more so now.

The compelling visions of a colonised solar system that were fleshed out in this last book were fascinating, This ridiculously awesome vision of Jupiter:

... and flying gas lanturns had been dropped into the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, clusters of them igniting some of the planets helium3 in points of light that were too brilliant to look directly at for more than a second. The fusion burns were suspended before electro magnetic reflecting dishes that put all the light out into the planet's plane of the ecliptic, thus the banded monster ball was now made an even more spectacular sight by the achingly bright diamond dots of some twenty gas lanturns wandering its surface.

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