Regan Makoto Cullen broke with her great teacher Adolf Richter Brill on November fourth, 2191. “Break with” is easy to say, but not so easy to do, to face the man who has been your patron, teacher, foster father for twenty-five years, the man all Earth hails as the great mind of the century, who mapped the psyche in undreamt-of detail, who revolutionized education, linguistics, justice, to face him down and say, “Sir, you are wrong. So wrong that I shall turn the world against you. It’s not the numbers, not these rare psyches you’re charting that stimulate great progress. It’s groups. I’ve studied the same inventors, authors, leaders that you have, and the thing that most reliably produces many at once—the effect you’ve worked so hard to replicate—is when people abandon the nuclear family to live in a collective household, four to twenty friends, rearing children and ideas together in a haven of mutual discourse and play. We don’t need to revolutionize the kindergartens, we need to revolutionize the family.”

— Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning, Tor Books, Ch. 20, 2016 (via)