Quotes from book
Glory Season

Glory Season
David Brin

Glory Season is a 1993 science fiction novel by David Brin. It was nominated for both the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1994. An announcement in the back of one edition of Earth is for a novel titled Stratos, to be released in the spring of 1992. It seems likely that this was delayed, and renamed Glory Season.

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“Cultural contamination that is directed outward is always seen as “enlightenment.””

David Brin book Glory Season

Introduction to Chapter 20 (p. 364)
Glory Season (1993)

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“A dragon’s inertia is not shifted by yanking its tail.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 27 (p. 551)

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“Maia recognized a look of true religion in the other woman’s eyes. A version and interpretation that conveniently justified what had already been decided.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 14 (p. 240)

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“The notions she fought with needed more than the simple algebra she’d been grudgingly taught at Lamai Hold. More and more she resented how they had robbed her of this, arguably her one talent, driving her from math and other abstractions by the simple expedient of making them seem boring.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 19 (p. 337)

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“Anyone who loves nature, as I do, cries out at the havoc being spread by humans, all over the globe. The pressures of city life can be appalling, as are the moral ambiguities that plague us, both at home and via yammering media. The temptation to seek uncomplicated certainty sends some rushing off to ashrams and crystal therapy, while many dive into the shelter of fundamentalism, and other folk yearn for better, “simpler” times. Certain popular writers urgently prescribe returning to ancient, nobler ways.
Ancient, nobler ways. It is a lovely image... and pretty much a lie. John Perlin, in his book A Forest Journey, tells how each prior culture, from tribal to pastoral to urban, wreaked calamities upon its own people and environment. I have been to Easter Island and seen the desert its native peoples wrought there. The greater harm we do today is due to our vast power and numbers, not something intrinsically vile about modern humankind.
Technology produces more food and comfort and lets fewer babies die. “Returning to older ways” would restore some balance all right, but entail a holocaust of untold proportion, followed by resumption of a kind of grinding misery never experienced by those who now wistfully toss off medieval fantasies and neolithic romances. A way of life that was nasty, brutish, and nearly always catastrophic for women.
That is not to say the pastoral image doesn’t offer hope. By extolling nature and a lifestyle closer to the Earth, some writers may be helping to create the very sort of wisdom they imagine to have existed in the past. Someday, truly idyllic pastoral cultures may be deliberately designed with the goal of providing placid and just happiness for all, while retaining enough technology to keep existence decent.
But to get there the path lies forward, not by diving into a dark, dank, miserable past. There is but one path to the gracious, ecologically sound, serene pastoralism sought by so many. That route passes, ironically, through successful consummation of this, our first and last chance, our scientific age.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Afterword (p. 563)
Glory Season (1993)

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“Maia lifted her gaze to watch low clouds briefly occult a brightly speckled, placid sea, its green shoals aflicker with silver schools of fish and the flapping shadows of hovering swoop-birds. The variegated colors were lush, voluptuous. Mixing with scents carried by the moist, heavy wind, they made a stew for the senses, spiced with fecund exudates of life.
The beauty was heavy-handed, adamantly consoling. She got the point—that life goes on.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 4 (p. 80)

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“We are programmed to find sex pleasurable for one simple reason—because animals who mate have offspring. Those who do not mate have none. Traits that result in successful reproduction get reinforced and passed on. Evolution is that simple.
It is therefore useless to bemoan as evil the fact that men tend toward aggression. Among our ancestors, aggression often helped males have more offspring than their competitors. “Good” and “evil” had little to do with it.
That is, until we reached consciousness, at which point, good and evil became pertinent indeed! Behaviors which might be excusable in dumb beasts can seem perverted, criminal, when performed by thinking beings. Just because a trait is “natural” does not oblige us to keep it.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Introduction to Chapter 7 (pp. 105-106)
Glory Season (1993)

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“As in elections, the law pretended universal rights, while securing the interests of powerful houses.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 27 (p. 553)

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“In the end, both extremes had more in common with each other than either did with the middle.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 24 (p. 470)

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“It could be worse. I can’t think how right now, but I’m sure it could be worse.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 4 (p. 74)

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“Wisdom. No match for the troublemaker Curiosity.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 16 (p. 265)

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“It’s magic,” the chief cook concluded, in awe.
”No, not magic,” the ship’s doctor replied. “It’s much more. It’s mathematics.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 24 (p. 466)

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“But it’s not so hard, learning to picture yourself as part of a great chain. One that began long before you, and will go on long after.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 21 (p. 387)

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“Life is the continuation of existence, yet no thing endures. We are all patterns, seeking to propagate. Patterns which bring other patterns into being, then vanish, as if we’ve never been.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 16 (p. 281)

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“What hope has any endeavor which is based on hate and fear?”

David Brin book Glory Season

Introduction to Chapter 12 (p. 191)
Glory Season (1993)

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“Intelligence is loose in the galaxy. Power is in our hands, for better or worse. We can modify Nature’s rules, if we dare, but we cannot ignore her lessons.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Introduction to Chapter 2 (p. 32)
Glory Season (1993)

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“Piss on the world, or it’ll piss on you.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 9 (p. 155)

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“It is dangerous these days for a male to write even glancingly on feminist themes. Did anyone attack Margaret Atwood’s right to extrapolate religio-machismo in The Handmaid’s Tale? Women writers appear vouchsafed insight into the souls of men—credit that seldom flows the other way. It is a sexist and offensive assumption, which does not advance understanding.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Afterword (p. 561)
Glory Season (1993)

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““I thought they were very good at what they did.”
”Of course they were good!” Brill glanced sharply. “The issue is what one chooses to be good at. The arts are fine, for hobbies. I play six instruments, myself. But they pose no great challenge to a mature mind.””

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 27 (p. 545)

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“Loneliness, her arch enemy, never seemed content.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 9 (p. 150)

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