First Lines of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Green Mars"

"The point isn't to make another Earth. Not another Alaska or Tibet, not a Vermont nor a Venice, not even an Antarctica. The point is to make something new and strange, something Martian.
In a sense, our intentions don't even matter. Even if we try to make another Siberia or Sahara, it won't work. Evolution won't allow it, and at its heart this is an evolutionary process, an endeavor driven at a level below intention, as when life made its first miracle leap out of matter, or when it crawled out of sea onto land."

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars.

I was compelled last week to read the amazing last 100 pages of Red Mars again, which led me straight away into the second book of KSR's Mars trilogy. Green Mars starts off on a different tack then its predecessor - the revolution is in the background, and KSR shows us the life in hiding for those committed to keeping Mars as unblemished as possible. While the first 65 pages contain as much landscape description as advertised, it's still a very compelling book: KSR has a gift, unequaled by any other SciFi writer i'm familiar with, to write compellingly both about science and about human nature.