Fifty Degrees Below

Kim Stanley Robinson; Fifty Degrees Below

pp. 107-708

Sociobiology was a bad habit you could never get rid of. Once it invaded your thoughts it was hard to forget that human beings were apes, with desires shaped by life on the savannah, so that every move in lab politics or boardroom maneuvers became clearly a shove for food or sex, every verbal putdown from a male boss like the back of the hand from some hairy silverback, every flirt and dismissal from a woman like the head-turning-aside baboon, refusing acknowledgment, saying: You don't get to fuck me and if you try my sisters will beat you up; and very acquiescence like the baboons who accidentally had their pink butts stuck out when you went by, saying: I'm in estrus you can fuck me if you want, shouldering you companionably or staring off into space as if bored-

But the problem was, thinking of interactions with other people in this way was not actually very helpful to him. For one thing it could often reduce him to speechlessness. Like at the gym for instance, my lord if that was not the savannah he didn't know what was - and if that was the primal discourse, then he'd rather pass, thank you very much, and be a solitary. He was too inhibited to just lay it out there, and too honest to try to say it in euphemistic code. He was too self-conscious. He was too chicken. There was an awesome power in sex, he wanted it to go right. He wanted it to be a part of a whole monogamy. He wanted love to be real. Science could go fuck itself!

Or: become useful. Become a help, for God's sake. It was the same in his personal life as it was for the world at large; if science wasn't helping then it was a sterile waste of time. It had to help or it was all for naught, and the world still nothing but a miserable fuck-up. And him too.