SCIENCE FICTION QUOTES
quotations about science fiction
That's all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different.
RAY BRADBURY
"No News, or, What Killed the Dog?"
I ... wanted science fiction to be more naturalistic. There had been a poverty of description in much of it. The technology depicted was so slick and clean that it was practically invisible. What would any given SF favorite look like if we could crank up the resolution? As it was then, much of it was like video games before the invention of fractal dirt. I wanted to see dirt in the corners.
WILLIAM GIBSON
The Paris Review, summer 2011
Erase myself from the human race
All aboard this rocket into space
I'll die Sci-Fi
And kiss the earth goodbye
WEDNESDAY 13
"Die Sci Fi"
In science fiction, we dream. In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of whack, to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required.
RAY BRADBURY
Playboy, 1996
When I was a young writer if you went to a party and told somebody you were a science-fiction writer you would be insulted. They would call you Flash Gordon all evening, or Buck Rogers.
RAY BRADBURY
The Paris Review, spring 2010
The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. You look at the world around you, and you take it apart into all its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens. That's the method: restructure the world we live in in some way, then see what happens.
FREDERIK POHL
Locus Magazine, October 2000
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
J. G. BALLARD
"Fictions of Every Kind"
Some writers are still blindly enamored with science and gadgetry, but I don't think it's as prevalent as it once was. Almost everybody these days pays lip service to literary value; some people talk the talk without walking the walk, but I do believe that most SF/fantasy writers are aiming above the least common denominator.
JAMES ALAN GARDNER
Strange Horizons, January 7, 2002
It's not speculation, it's true! Mobile phones, laptops, tablets, the Internet, all were predicted and dreamed up in science fiction first. Science fiction writers speculate when they write. I don't just make random things up. I consider the world around me. I live in it. I experience it. I love it. I hate it. I worry about it. Then I imagine what's to come.
NNEDI OKOROAFOR
"Exclusive Interview with Nigerian Science Fiction Writer, Nnedi Okoroafor", Ventures Africa, September 23, 2015
Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness
Most of what I do is science fiction. Some of the things I do are fantasy. I don't like the labels, they're marketing tools, and I certainly don't worry about them when I'm writing. They are also inhibiting factors; you wind up not getting read by certain people, or not getting sold to certain people because they think they know what you write. You say science fiction and everybody thinks Star Wars or Star Trek.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
interview, 1991
?I do a lot of work on prison abolition. What can justice look like outside the context of prisons and police, and really rooted in community accountability, healing, and restorative ideas of justice? Science fiction is a perfect testing ground for these issues, because the vast majority of people can't imagine a world without prisons.
WALIDAH IMARISHA
"Why Science Fiction Is a Fabulous Tool in the Fight for Social Justice", The Nation, June 2, 2015
Science fiction is held in low regard as a branch of literature, and perhaps it deserves this critical contempt. But if we view it as a kind of sociology of the future, rather than as literature, science fiction has immense value as a mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation. Our children should be studying Arthur C. Clarke, William Tenn, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Robert Sheckley, not because these writers can tell them about rocket ships and time machines but, more important, because they can lead young minds through an imaginative exploration of the jungle of political, social, psychological, and ethical issues that will confront these children as adults.
ALVIN TOFFLER
Future Shock
I miss the hopeful side of science fiction, which really goes back to the roots of the genre, and that is: What can we achieve if we put our minds to it?
SETH MACFARLANE
"'Star Trek: Discovery' continues familiar but vital mission: comforting earthlings", Minneapolis Star Tribune, September 20, 2017
Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
RAY BRADBURY
The Paris Review, spring 2010
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.
ISAAC ASIMOV
"My Own View", The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
The power of science fiction, and what's positive about it, is that you're able to experience the worst-case scenario without actually having to live it.
RYAN GOSLING
"The Replicant: Inside the Dark Future of Blade Runner 2049", Wired, September 19, 2017
Climate-themed fiction, like most science fiction, is extension, not invention. But as scientists' projections about the effects of climate change have increasingly become reality, some works of apocalyptic fiction have begun to seem all too plausible.
LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA
"Is Climate-Themed Fiction All Too Real? We Asked the Experts", New York Times, September 26, 2017
I will argue for an understanding of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement ... whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment.
DARKO SUVIN
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction
The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism. That's the aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation that I really go for.
CHINA MIÉVILLE
interview, 3:AM Magazine, 2003