It was always the same with engineers, Stef had observed; nothing made — Stephen Baxter

"As an engineer, he knew that a bucket-load of philosophical principles wasn’t worth a grain of good hard fact."

"Life seems to be emergent from the very fabric of the universe that contains us, hardwired into physical law. And so, I suppose, mind is emergent too."

"If you were capable of thinking of an object from more than one point of view, you could imagine it doing all sorts of things. For Mother, consciousness was becoming more than just a tool for lying."

"“You aren’t doing much for morale, Sidewise.” Sidewise shot back, “And what about my morale? It does me no damn good to ignore what’s blindingly obvious all around us.”"

"He walks on, across the hot crimson dust."

"It’s all a bit anarchic, I suppose, but it’s also highly effective. Flexible, responsive, mobile, heuristic, with intelligence distributed to the lowest level...A bit like an ideal human society, I suppose; free individuals seeking out ways to advance the common good."