Dave Buck

“Someone once said, probably, that exploring an alien planet was terribly intrepid, bold and glamorous, and that someone can sod off, frankly. Because, once you have a full-on space industry and alien planets you can physically go to, you find it’s actually quite inconvenient to do so. The business of physically exploring them becomes devolved to your society’s equivalent of the unpaid office intern. Someone who won’t be missed, and whose sudden demise won’t much impede the mission.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“Mostly it’s human sweat and toil, though. This sort of thing is hard to properly automate, while humans are good at adjusting and adapting on the job. That’s part of it. More than that, though, it’s expensive to automate, and would require a highly trained crew of valuable technicians and operators running your fleet of shiny machines. Because once you invest in automation, you have to take care of your junk. With labourer-class people, not so much. It’s cheaper to have a half-assed crew of expendables that you know you’re never going to have to return in good condition or risk losing your deposit. Earth has a lot of surplus people”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“Life went on. That was the terrible thing. They were ripped out of their world, their lives, their sense of who and what they were. Their history. They were killed, or made to watch the people they loved die. And then, at some point, they were hungry. Thirsty. They had to piss. Someone told a joke, and they laughed, however darkly. They washed dishes. Changed clothes. Held funerals. It felt like it should have stopped, all of it, and it didn’t. The slow, low pulse of being alive kept making its demands, no matter what. However bad it was, however mind-breaking and strange and painful, the mundane insisted on its cut.”
― James S.A. Corey, The Mercy of Gods

“not fighting for, just fighting against.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Dogs of War