Startide Rising

The propensity of Earthlings to get into trouble, and to learn thereby, was the reason my owners agreed to this mad venture – although no one expected such a chain of unusual calamities as befell this ship. Your talents were underrated.

Even in dying, a Thennanin ship was reputed to be not worth putting out of its misery. In battle they were slow, unmaneuverable—and as hard to disable permanently as a cockroach.

Blatant idiocies had been tried by early men and women--foolishness that would never have been considered by species aware of the laws of nature. Desperate superstitions had bred during the savage centuries. Styles of government, intrigues, philosophies were tested with abandon. It was almost as if Orphan Earth had been a planetary laboratory, upon which a series of senseless and bizarre experiments were tried. Illogical and shameful as they seemed in retrospect, those experiences enriched modern Man. Few races had made so many mistakes in so short a time, or tried so many tentative solutions to hopeless problems.

[I]n practice, most species looked to the Library and only the Library for knowledge.... What was the point of researching what must have been discovered a thousand times over by those who came before? It was simple, for instance, to choose advanced spaceship designs from Library archives and follow them blindly, understanding only a fraction of what was built. Earth had a few such ships, and they were marvels. The Terragens Council ... once almost succumbed to that attractive logic. Many humans urged co-opting of Galactic models that older races had themselves co-opted from ancient designs. They cited the example of Japan, which in the nineteenth century had faced a similar problem—how to survive amongst nations immeasurably more powerful than itself. Meiji Japan concentrated all its energy on learning to imitate its neighbors, and succeeded in becoming just like them, in the end. A majority on the Terragens Council, including nearly all of the cetacean members, disagreed. They considered the Library a honey pot—tempting, and possibly nourishing, but also a terrible trap. They teared the "Golden Age" syndrome... a temptation to "look backward"—to find wisdom in the oldest, dustiest texts, instead of the latest journal.

You don’t have conversations with microprocessors. You tell them what to do, then helplessly watch the disaster when they take you literally.

Those who live All vibrate, * All, * And aid the world’s Singing

*Of what else Are heroes made *Than men and women Who, like us, Try--

The Tandu were daring, but they did not add to their crimes the gaucherie of originality.

Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.” “Why, as men do aland—the great ones eat up the little ones.” —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE King Richard the Second