Gaia giveth even as she taketh away. The warming of the global climate over the past century had melted permafrost and glaciers, shifted rainfall patterns, altered animal migratory routes, disrupted agriculture, drowned cities, and similarly necessitated a thousand thousand adjustments, recalibrations and hasty retreats. But humanity's unintentional experiment with the biosphere had also brought some benefits. Now we could grow oysters in New England.Six hundred years ago, oysters flourished as far north as the Hudson. Native Americans had accumulated vast middens of shells on the shores of what would become Manhattan. Then, prior to the industrial age, there was a small climate shift, and oysters vanished from those waters. Now, however, the tasty bivalves were back, their range extending almost to Maine.The commercial beds of the Cape Cod Archipelago produced shellfish as good as any from the heyday of Chesapeake Bay. Several large wikis maintained, regulated and harvested these beds, constituting a large share of the local economy. But as anyone might have predicted, wherever a natural resource existed, sprawling and hard of defense, poachers would be found. Paul Di Filippo
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  1. There comes a point when you either embrace who and what you are, or condemn yourself to be miserable all your days. Other people will try to make you miserable; don't help them by doing the job yourself. - Laurell K. Hamilton
  2. A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. - Frederik Pohl
  3. Science is the desperate effort to catch up with the 13.8 billion year-old facts (give or take an eon or two). - Torin Sarasas
  4. Science is about the desperate effort to catch up with the 13.7 billion year-old facts (give or take an eon or two). - Torin Sarasas
  5. His men had begun gathering the wounded or stunned into a small group some distance back up the slope. Here and there an animal or human stirred, but not many. There were few cries of pain or fear now. Mostly, it was eerily quiet. Even... - Derek Donais
More Quotes By Paul Di Filippo
  1. Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.
  2. As many authors have said, if the writer is not surprised by events, then chances are that the reader will not be either, and grow bored.
  3. What had happened was this. When still young, I had gotten the idea from somewhere that I might be able to write.. Maybe the deadly notion came from liking to read so much. Maybe I was in love with the image of being a writer....
  4. The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate.
  5. That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding.
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