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Welcome!
Click here for My Resume |
That was how humans knew each other. Tiny fractions of their lives intersected or were known in any way to anybody else. It was much like living alone in the universe. Which was strange. A justification for living with friends, for marrying, for sharing rooms and lives as much as possible. Not that this made people truly intimate; but it reduced the sensation of solitude. So that one was still sailing solo through the oceans of the world, as in Mary Shelley's "The Last Man", a book that had much impressed Sax as a youth, in which the eponymous hero at the conclusion occasionally saw a sail, joined another ship, anchored against a shore, shared a meal -- then voyaged on, alone and solitary. An image of their lives; for every world was as empty as the one Mary Shelley had imagined, as empty as Mars had been in the beginning. -Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson |