Quotes by Science Fiction Writers - Page 2

The way I came to miss the end of the world – well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years – was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it.
John Wyndham
Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying.
Octavia E. Butler
If you work hard enough at something that doesn’t matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.
Octavia E. Butler
And if I were to open you up - would you see anything less remarkable? Less intricately dazzling, in its squelching, spongy way? Lungs and heart and spleen, and all the rest - ticking away, as it were? Yet you walk down the boulevard, and pass any number of such wonderful devices, all ticking away as they walk, and think it no great marvel.
K.W. Jeter
Great,' I said. 'Visit exotic Australia. Get bitten by an exotic snake. Die exotically.
Steven Gould
It was a bland, tranquilized, life-adjusted, group-integrated sort of face -- the face turned out in thousands of copies every year by the educational production lines on Terra.
H. Beam Piper
It was the dog Abel, who - as animals have been reported to do - had made his way over all England's hills and rivers, to return to that home where he was first kindly treated. The warm fire, by which he sleeps even now, and the fattening dish will be his rewards to the end of his days.
K.W. Jeter
It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.
John Wyndham
Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books - a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred. ... Like the Nazis, antebellum whites had known quite a bit about torture - quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.
Octavia E. Butler
Take a drink because you pity yourself, and then the drink pities you and has a drink, and then two good drinks get together and that calls for drinks all around.
H. Beam Piper
The finest SF comes to grips with life's mysteries, with our resentments against our own natures and our limited societies. It does so by asking basic questions in the artful, liberating way that is unique to this form of writing. Echoes of it are found in other forms of fiction - in the novel of ideas, in the historical novel, in the writings of the great philosophers and scientists; but the best SF does this all more searchingly, by taking what is in most people only a moment of wonder and rebellion against the arbitrariness of existence and making of it an art enriched by knowledge and possibility, expressing our deepest human longing to penetrate into the dark heart of the unknown.
George Zebrowski
Tut, tut. We can't let mere sentiment intrude. This is Science.
K.W. Jeter
Consider--We are bornNot with purpose,But with potential.
Octavia E. Butler
Was an eternity of absolute ease just another name for hell?
Octavia E. Butler
Well, if a Little Fuzzy finds a door open, I’d like to know why he shouldn’t come in and look around.
H. Beam Piper
I had a lot of other ideas, now and then, but every time I took a second look at one, it got sick and died.
H. Beam Piper
There is no endTo what a living worldWill demand of you.
Octavia E. Butler
[Telzey] took out a pocket edition law library and sat down at the table. She clicked on the library's viewscreen, tapped the clearing and index buttons. Behind the screen, one of the multiple rows of pinhead tapes shifted slightly as the index was flicked into reading position.
James H. Schmitz
I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.
Octavia E. Butler
I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation--which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about.
John Wyndham
I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.
Octavia E. Butler
I don't think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It's instructive to imagine how they would react, with different technologies on different worlds. That's why I write science fiction -- even though the term 'science fiction' excites disdain in certain persons.
Kage Baker
Read every day and learn from what you read.
Octavia E. Butler
Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: 'There is change. Look, today's fantastic story is tomorrow's fact.
A.E. van Vogt
There is an abandonment, an escape, that physical labor bestows.
Steven Gould
I had thought Chicago was inevitable, like diarrhea.
John Varley
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.
Octavia E. Butler
All attempts at law, all religion, all ethical norms might be nothing more than attempts by the weak to restrain the strong. Then, within the law, arise the new strong, who subvert the law for their own ends of power and family interest, leaving the old strong outside their circle to pursue the waiting possibilities which they call crime. The weak, the cowardly, the decent ones, live between these groups.
George Zebrowski
Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.
Eric Temple Bell
Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative—an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary... That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly—that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do...
John Wyndham
There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.
Octavia E. Butler
You can't kill an idea the way they try to. You can keep it down awhile, but sooner or later it'll come out. Now what you've got to understand is that the wheel's not evil. Never mind what the scared men all tell you. no discovery is good or evil until men make it that way." -The Wheel, John Wtndham
John Wyndham
There is a certain concentrated, avid-for-blood look that appears on the faces of reporters on the trail of a very big story that you'd have to visit the big cat house at the zoo to see duplicated in its primal state. From the look on Brenda's face, if a tiger was standing between her and this story right now, the cat would soon have a tall-journalist-sized hole in him.
John Varley
I don't think it had ever occurred to me that man's supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain's capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays. His civilization, all that he had achieved or might achieve, hung upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red to violet. Without that, he was lost.
John Wyndham
What do you think it is that makes a man"I started on the Definition. He cut me of after five words."It is not!" he said. "A wax figure could have all that, and he'd still be a wax figure, wouldn't he?" ..."Well, then, what makes a man a man is something inside him.""A soul?" I suggested."No... souls are just counters for churches to collect, all the same value, like nails. No, what makes man man is mind; it's not a thing, it's a quality, and minds aren't all the same value; they're better or worse, and the better they are, the more they mean.
John Wyndham
The longer I observe the way people really act, the happier I am that I never pay attention to them.
George Alec Effinger
All that you touchYou Change.All that you ChangeChanges you.The only lasting truthis Change.Godis Change.
Octavia E. Butler
I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.
Octavia E. Butler
Contentedly sat the old woman. Soon now, the sea would hold no terrors, and the blinds wouldn't have to be down, nor the windows shut; she would even be able to walk along the shore at midnight as of old; and they, whom she had deserted so long ago, would once more shrink from the irresistable energy aura of her new, young body.The sound of the sea came to her, where she sat so quietly; calm sound at first, almost gentle in the soft sibilation of each wave thrust. Farther out, the voices of the water were louder, more raucous, blatantly confident, but the meaning of what they said was blurred by the distance, a dim, clamorous confusion that rustled discordantly out of the gathering night.Night!She shouldn't be aware of night falling, when the blinds were drawn.("The Witch")
A.E. van Vogt
If I believe the same things today I did yesterday I've learned nothing.
A.E. van Vogt
His mind, grooved through the uncounted ages to ultimate despair, soared up insanely. His legs and arms glistened like tongues of living fire as they writhed and twisted in the light that blazed from the portholes. His mouth, a gash in his caricature of a human head, slavered a white frost that floated away in little frozen globules.
A.E. van Vogt
The Boy looked at him for a long time before responding. “Well, as long as you’re my friend, I’ll never ignore you,” he said with conviction. “I know what it’s like to be invisible to other people.
Mike Resnick
A man who never makes mistakes has long since ceased to do anything new. A man who is always making mistakes is a doomed man with swollen ambitions. But he who judiciously salts success with mistake is the rapid learner.
Donald Kingsbury
My relative examined you, observed a few of your normal body cells, compared them with what it had learned from other humans most like you, and said that you had not only a cancer, but a talent for cancer.
Octavia E. Butler
When I began to do a little public speaking, one of the questions I heard most often was, "What good is science fiction to Black people?" I was usually asked this by a Black person...What good is science fiction's thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what "everyone" is saying, doing, thinking -- whoever "everyone" happens to be this year.And what good is all this to Black people?
Octavia E. Butler
It was one of those rare times of shared happiness, of perfect contentment. We had a feeling of expectation, that what was already wonderful would only get better and better as time went on. These moments are one of the rarest, most fragile things in the world. You have to seize the day; you have to recall all the rotten, dirty things you endured to earn this peace. You have to remember to enjoy each minute, each hour, because although you may feel like it's going to last forever, the world plans otherwise. You want to be grateful for every precious second, but you simply can't do it. It's not in human nature to live life to the fullest. Haven't your ever noticed that equal amounts of pain and joy are not, in fact, equal in duration? Pain drags on until you wonder if life will ever be bearable again; pleasure, though, once it's reached its peak, fades faster than a trodden gardenia, and your memory searches in vain for the sweet scent.
George Alec Effinger
The two women looked at me as if I were the Messiah returning with their personal salvations sealed in separate envelopes.
George Alec Effinger
Power came the way a child came -- with agony.
Octavia E. Butler
Cirocco liked space, reading, and sex, not necessarily in that order. She had never been able to satisfactorily combine all three, but two was not bad.
John Varley
Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.
John Wyndham
But he survived, that radio announcer. His ship and five others out of the flotilla of ten came through, a bit radioactive, but otherwise unharmed. And I understand that the first thing that happened to him when he reported back to his office after treatmentwas a reprimand for the use of overcolloquial language which had given offense to a number of listeners by its neglect of the Third Commandment.
John Wyndham
Your teachersAre all around you.All that you perceive,All that you experience,All that is given to youor taken from you,All that you love or hate,need or fearWill teach you--If you will learn.God is your firstand your last teacher.God is your harshest teacher:subtle,demanding.Learn or die.
Octavia E. Butler
Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man or better than a man, but not like a man.
John W. Campbell Jr.
…after all, what is a planet but an island in space?
John Wyndham
Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.
Octavia E. Butler
Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.
Octavia E. Butler
The shortest horror story:The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.
Frederic Brown
We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn't, why would there be so many of them? There's something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell's pork and beans, defending one's family from marauders. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive. All those other folks will die. That's what after-the-bomb stories are all about.
John Varley
I like it where it gets dark at night, and if you want noise, you have to make it yourself.
H. Beam Piper
No amount of standing on hilltops on dark nights and surveying the heavens could prepare a man for the actuality of space travel, because the earthbound observer saw only the the stars, not what separated them. They glittered in his vision, filling his eyes, and he had no choice but to assign them a position of importance in the cosmic scheme. The space traveler saw things differently. He was made aware that the universe consisted of emptiness, that the suns and nebulae were almost an irrelevancy, that the stars were nothing more than a whiff of gas diffusing into infinity. And sooner or later that knowledge began to hurt.
Bob Shaw