Sf Quotes

You can use logic to justify just about anything, that's its power and it's flaw.

It's--my God--like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and crashed a 747 into it.

I put tape on the mirrors in my house so I don't accidentally walk through into another dimension.

Science Fiction has always attracted more talented writers than it could reward adequately.

Some guys step on a rake in the dark, and get mad and go punch somebody. Others step on a rake in the dark and fall down laughing at themselves. I know which kind of guy I'd rather be. So do my friends.

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

You retain the Ki. Whether or not you become a warrior is for you to discover.

Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?""Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.

Once a Buddha, always a Buddha, Sam. Dust off some of your old parables. You have about fifteen minutes.' Sam held out his hand. "Give me some tobacco and a paper.

Answer me immediately or I'll start cutting away everything that's pretty on you...and then put it back.

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.

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.

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.

Nobody ever kills everybody anywhere, big man. Somebody always gets away.

But it wasn't anyone! ... What could I say I was a freak - an Empty.

To my surprise, the sensation of query filled my stomach, spreading through to every corner. This was followed by each point of query ending at the same answer. Device Nineteen had responded to the question by coming to the conclusion that oblivion was the end of every

Rover did not know in the least where the moon's path led to, and at present he was much too frightened and excited to ask, and anyway he was beginning to get used to extraordinary things happening to him.

How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of "authenticity" by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the "authenticity" of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for "authenticity" in such novels almost always ends up being "how much do the women suffer", instead of - as might also be the case - "how sexist are the heroes".And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can't they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of "authenticity" is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing.-Comment at Staffer's Book Review 4/18/2012 to "Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency

A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.

Step up to red alert."Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb." - Rimmer & Kryten, "Red Dwarf

By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them.Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.These are worth it. These are what I have come for.

The day of battle dawned pink as the fresh-bitten thigh of a maiden.

Lend me your wings, bird. I'll spread them and fly on the thermals.