Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress (born January 20, 1948) is an American science fiction writer. She is also called Anna Kendall which is her pen name.

Kress in 2007

Quotes

Probability

Probability Moon (2000)

All page numbers are from the first mass market paperback edition, published by Tor in September 2002 ISBN 0-765-34341-X, second printing

Italics as in the book

• Serious thinkers pointed out that humankind was scarcely ready to colonize the stars, having solved none of its problems at home.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 36)

• She regarded boredom as a moral failing, the mark of a mind insufficiently stocked to occupy itself.
  • Chapter 4 (p. 39)

• Cooperation was, in the long run, a more powerful evolutionary strategy than violence, once a species was high-tech.
  • Chapter 5 (p. 58)

• And wasn’t that a common pattern in human history! Greedy religious orders, wanting to keep power for themselves, using customs and myth and threats and murder to keep the people in line and then making them believe it was all for their own good so they wouldn’t challenge the supremacy of the priesthood. Some political thinker of a few centuries ago had nailed it exactly: “Religion is the opiate of the people.”
  • Chapter 6 (p. 63)

• Judge not. No culture was better than another, no culture should be deemed in need of uplifting. Crap! It was the worst kind of moral laziness masquerading as cultural relativism.
  • Chapter 7 (p. 81)

• How to reasonably object to artificiality, when all of anthropology spotlighted how artificial all cultural institutions actually were?
  • Chapter 9 (p. 101)

• A conclusion is just the place where you got tired of thinking.
  • Chapter 17 (p. 184; quoting Arthur Bloch)

• But it would be anecdotal evidence only, undocumentable and, by definition, unrepeatable. Therefore, not science.
  • Chapter 31 (p. 292)

Probability Sun (2001)

All page numbers are from the first mass market paperback edition, published by Tor in February 2003 ISBN 0-765-34355-X, first printing

Nominated for the 2002 John W. Campbell Memorial Award

• An enormous amount of behavior grows out of genetic imperatives.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 38)

• He introduced Marbet as “project psychologist.”
  “I don’t believe in psychology,” Capelo said flatly.
  Marbet remain unruffled. “Even that based on physiology?”
  “If it’s based on chemistry, with replicable results from control experiments, then of course I believe in it. That’s science. Literary theories about the mind are not.”
  “Ah,” Marbet said.
  “Fairy tales, all. From Uncle Droselmeyer Freud to Lady Godiva Jennings, undressing some poor sap’s mind ‘consciousness layer’ by ‘consciousness layer.’ All for a large amount of money, of course.”
  • Chapter 4 (p. 45)

• Do you always interfere in other people’s confrontations? Are you that most dangerous of all people, a peace-at-any-price meddler?
  • Chapter 4 (p. 47)

• That’s not a hypothesis, Lyle. That’s sheer speculation, expressed in gibberish. It says nothing.
  • Chapter 11 (p. 131)

• When you don’t know what you’re doing, Kaufman reflected, you can easily recycle from other efforts where you also didn’t know what you were doing.
  • Chapter 17 (p. 187)

• In the military, it can be more fatal to admit you made a mistake than to actually make one.
  • Chapter 23 (p. 247)

Probability Space (2002)

All page numbers are from the first mass market paperback edition, published by Tor in January 2004 ISBN 0-765-34514-5, first printing

Won the 2003 John W. Campbell Memorial Award

• Every single war ever fought anywhere had spawned shadow battles between the warring governments and their own citizens. Black markets, war profiteering, blockade runners, quislings, conscientious objectors, organized crime and its less organized siblings. False government contracts, false traveling papers, false bills of lading, false passenger lists, and, for the really sophisticated, falsifying deebee programs. All it took were contacts and money.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 45)

• Amanda decided that if these people were God’s choice for instruments, then God was as crazy as Father Emil.
  • Chapter 4 (p. 50)

• She had to believe it; nothing else was bearable. Kaufman was looking at self-delusion in a character strong enough to elevate it to madness.
  • Chapter 9 (p. 109)

• Science should remain above politics, if it’s to do its job.
  • Chapter 18 (p. 200)

• By pure chance then, by pure chance now. Unfair.
  But he’d always known that was true of the universe.
  • Chapter 29 (p. 322)

• Kaufman’s fault. He had not planned, had not seen far enough ahead. Failure of vision was a sin the universe did not forgive.
  • Chapter 33 (p. 347)

• History isn’t morality.
  • Chapter 34 (p. 360)

• It takes two people to make a human tie. But only one to break it.
  • Chapter 34 (p. 361)