Science fiction

“Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.”

“Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould.”

“Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.”

“I don't know of any science fiction writer who really attempts to be a prophet. Such authors accomplish their tasks not by being correct in their predictions, necessarily, but merely by hammering home—in story after story—the notion that life is going to be different.”

“Science fiction always bases its future visions on changes in the levels of science and technology. And the reason for that consistency is simply that—in reality—all other changes throughout history have been irrelevant and trivial.”

“The rockets that have made spaceflight possible are an advance that, more than any other technological victory of the twentieth century, was grounded in science fiction… . One thing that no science fiction writer visualized, however, as far as I know, was that the landings on the Moon would be watched by people on Earth by way of television.”

“If you start putting very large numbers of human brain cells into primates, suddenly you might transform primates into something that has some of the capacities that we regard as distinctively human – speech or other ways of being able to manipulate or relate to a human. These possibilities, at the moment, are largely being explored in fiction but we need to start thinking about them now.”

“The hardest theme in science fiction is that of the alien. The simplest solution of all is in fact quite profound — that the real difficulty lies not in understanding what is alien, but in understanding what is self. We are all aliens to each other, all different and divided. We are even aliens to ourselves at different stages of our lives. Do any of us remember precisely what it was like to be a baby?”

“Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.”

“Science-fiction works hand-in-glove with the universe.”

“Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.”

“People who love science fiction really do love sex.”

“I hate the whole ubermensch, superman temptation that pervades science fiction. I believe no protagonist should be so competent, so awe-inspiring, that a committee of 20 really hard-working, intelligent people couldn't do the same thing.”

“Not only is every sci fi innovation kept secret, so that its flaws won't be uncovered and dealt with ahead of time, but the public seldom is invited to share in the New Thing. Or, if they do partake, they are portrayed using it as stupidly as possible, as in the flick Surrogates, where the brilliant invention of remote robotic surrogacy is only used to look good. Talk about a jaundiced view of your fellow citizens.”

“No less a critic than C. S. Lewis has described the ravenous addiction that these magazines inspired; the same phenomenon has led me to call science fiction the only genuine consciousness-expanding drug.”

“Nothing is deader than yesterday's science-fiction.”

“SF has never really aimed to tell us when we might reach other planets, or develop new technologies, or meet aliens. SF speculates about why we might want to do these things, and how their consequences might affect our lives and our planet.”

“Science Fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.”

“Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation.”

“There, Master Niketas," Baudolino said, "when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. ... There is nothing better than imagining other worlds," he said, "to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.”

“Everyone likes watching an epic sci-fi battle. But whether it’s Star Trek’s Federation versus the Borg, Battlestar Galactica versus the Cylons, or the Rebel Alliance versus the Empire, most veterans are left wondering, “It’s like a thousand years in the future. Why are they fighting like it’s the Bronze Age or something?””

“The last manned fighter planes that will ever be produced are being manufactured right now. Even with that, pilots in Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars are still dueling at short range as though it was World War II. Larger spaceships (I’m looking at you, Millenium Falcon) even have bubble turrets, with gunners swivelling around like on a B-17.”

“I think that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it's written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change.”

““Arguably, one of the most familiar memes of science fiction is that of going to foreign countries and colonising the natives, and as I’ve said elsewhere, for many of us, that’s not a thrilling adventure story; it’s non-fiction, and we are on the wrong side of the strange-looking ship that appears out of nowhere. To be a person of colour writing science fiction is to be under suspicion of having internalised one’s colonisation”.”

“What we get from science fiction—what keeps us reading it, in spite of our doubts and occasional disgust—is not different from the thing that makes mainstream stories rewarding, but only expressed differently. We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in the big ones of space and time.”

“Science fiction is an internationalist genre. When a novel is set in a galaxy far, far, away current geopolitical boundaries don't have a lot of meaning. However, Kaufman says there was a time when you could sell a novel set in space, but you couldn't sell a science fiction novel set in Australia.”

“I like to present my characters—whether they are in the past or in the future—with interesting moral choices, and it seems to me that science-fiction writers are, or should be, the prophets and moralists of today. I am fairly well up on the biological sciences, but I am deeply uninterested in gadgets. A writer's job is to write about people with sympathy and insight.”

“The whiteness of speculative fiction is something I have myself done extensive research on, beginning with the earliest examples of speculative fiction first set in, and then originating from, Southern Africa – H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines in 1885.”

“Real science is as amenable to exciting and engrossing fiction as fake science, and I think it is important to exploit every opportunity to convey scientific ideas in a civilization which is both based upon science and does almost nothing to ensure that science is understood.”

“Many scientists deeply involved in the exploration of the solar system (myself among them) were first turned in that direction by science fiction. And the fact that some of that science fiction was not of the highest quality is irrelevant. Ten-year-olds do not read the scientific literature.”

“Situated within the considerable body of creative material that is set in a future Australia, only a small body of this literary work has been authored by First Nations writers. These works include Archie Weller’s 1999 novel Land of The Golden Clouds , Alexis Wright’s 2013 novel The Swan Book, Ambellin Kwaymullina’s young adult Tribe series, Ellen van Neervan’s 2014 short story “Water” from Heat and Light, and Claire G. Coleman’s 2017 novel Terra Nullius.”

“It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable.”

“Remember that Jules Verne was a sort of Shakespeare of science fiction, and we would feel derelict if we did not give his stories in our columns.”

“There is no such thing as science fiction, there is only science eventuality.”

“Science fiction is a very big canvas for a film maker to work on because if you are doing a drama, society imposes its rules on you and you have to live by those guidelines; more or less. But in science fiction you get to make up the rules of the world you create.”

“The "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable … soon.”

“I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "Science Fiction" ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”