Brian Aldiss

What the twentieth century had managed, we could certainly better, and on a grander scale, in our century.

Lake Louise, the pellucid waters of which seemed to lend colour to the sky.

When it’s known – all’s known!

But I am of a species more extraordinary than anything else there ever was.

You have to experience Mars in its majesty to know that to try to alter – to terraform – this ancient place would be wrong.

We should not alter this planet. We must try to alter ourselves.’

Interstellar matrix teemed with radiations and particles, so that to naked experience ‘space’ had come to have a Victorian ring about it.