Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [96]

Mars is a rock—cold, empty, almost airless, dead. Yet it’s heaven in a way. We can see it in the night sky, a whole other world, but too nearby, too close within the reach of the people who’ve made such a hell of life here on Earth. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 96

Note

The negations accumulate like a planetary eulogy until ‘Yet it’s heaven in a way’ flips them, and then the passage indicts itself: the same nearness that makes Mars visible makes it unreachable, since the people close enough to reach it are the ones who ruined the place it’s measured against.