Gerhard’s Reviews > Fortress Sol > Status Update

Humans think in very narrow categories. They assumed that the rest of the universe was like them ...

‘After millennia of human despoliation. At the very least – tens of millennia if you want to go back to the beginning of farming, and the forest clearings, the stone-tool users who inflicted the first mass extinctions—’

there will always be subversion ...

Just about every political system humans ever devised was about control by a central few, generally with the use of monstrous lies. Look up religions – it took generations of geniuses like Kepler to start cutting through all that hierarchy of controlling untruth. The maturing of political science, and the development of a truly rational, truly fair form of democracy, didn’t happen until it was born on the Moon ...

There was no reason why people had to drive every extraction opportunity to its limit.

A slow, archaic cycle, like the breathing of a very old person. Archaic, and yet imposed on peoples and colonies who had otherwise lost touch with the home world – who, perhaps, had otherwise forgotten about their origins altogether. A kind of institutional memory.

‘You don’t get many visitors on a generation starship.’