Brian Aldiss

What the twentieth century had managed, we could certainly better, and on a grander scale, in our century.

Lake Louise, the pellucid waters of which seemed to lend colour to the sky.

When it’s known – all’s known!

But I am of a species more extraordinary than anything else there ever was.

You have to experience Mars in its majesty to know that to try to alter – to terraform – this ancient place would be wrong.

We should not alter this planet. We must try to alter ourselves.’

Interstellar matrix teemed with radiations and particles, so that to naked experience ‘space’ had come to have a Victorian ring about it.

Studies of magneto-gravitic irregularities revealed a remarkably high gravity reading for the region near Olympus Mons. I discovered that Kathi was interested in this. No such anomaly existed on Earth, she claimed. She was reading many scientific papers on her Ambient, and told me she believed there was a connection between magneto-gravitic influences and consciousness, so that at present she was looking for a dimensionless quality, but I did not understand her.

The influence of hidden-symmetry monopoles on consciousness was subtle and elusive – or appeared to be so as yet. The sophistry underlying the apparently simple laws of the physical universe, the exceptional qualities of many elementary particles, might lead one to suspect the universe of possessing a teleological character.

There seemed little for biochemists and xenobiologists to do once it was agreed that Mars held no life and that its early life forms – archebacteria and so forth – had perished many millions of years before mankind appeared on Earth.
The heliopause, with its strange turbulences, was studied. While Mars was regarded as a completely dead world, indications of life on Ganymede, one of the moons of Jupiter already mentioned, were observed by new instruments.