Olaf Stapledon - Collected Quotes

"Great are the stars, and man is of no account of them." (Olaf Stapledon, "Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future", 1930)

"Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man." (Olaf Stapledon, "Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future", 1930)

"Presently nothing was left in the whole cosmos but darkness and the dark whiffs of dust that once were galaxies." (Olaf Stapledon, "Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future", 1930)

"This is the goal of all living, that the cosmos may be known, and admired, and that it may be crowned with further beauties. Nowhere and at no time, so far as we can tell, at least within our own galaxy, has the adventure reached further than in ourselves. And in us, what has been achieved is but a minute beginning. But it is a real beginning." (Olaf Stapledon, "Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future", 1930)

"All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"In such a universe as this what significance could there be in our fortuitous, our frail, our evanescent community?" (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"In that instant when I had seen the blazing star that was the Star Maker, I had glimpsed, in the very eye of that splendour, strange vistas of being; as though in the depths of the hypercosmical past and the hypercosmical future also, yet coexistent in eternity, lay cosmos beyond cosmos." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"In the tide of these wild thoughts we checked our fancy, remembering that only on the rare grains called planets can life gain foothold, and that all this wealth of restless jewels was but a waste of fire." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"It was in this world that we found in its most striking form a social disease which is perhaps the commonest of all world-diseases—namely, the splitting of the  population into two mutually unintelligible castes through the influence of economic forces." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"To say that the cosmos was expanding is equally to say that its members were contracting. The ultimate centers of power, each at first coincident with the punctual cosmos, themselves generated the cosmical space by their disengagement from each other." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"The expansion of the whole cosmos was but the shrinkage of all its physical units and of the wavelengths of light." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"The one reasonable goal of social life was affirmed to be the creation of a world of awakened, of sensitive, intelligent, and mutually understanding personalities, banded together for the common purpose of exploring the universe and developing the human spirit's manifold potentialities." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"The universe, or the maker of the universe, must be indifferent to the fate of worlds. That there should be endless struggle and suffering and waste must ofcourse be accepted; and gladly, for these were the very soil in which the spiritgrew. But that all struggle should be finally, absolutely vain, that a wholeworld of sensitive spirits should fail and die, must be sheer evil. In my horrorit seemed to me that Hate must be the Star Maker." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"When the cosmos wakes, if ever she does, she will find herself not the single beloved of her maker, but merely a little bubble adrift on the boundless and bottomless ocean of being." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"Is it credible that our world should have two futures? I have seen them. Two entirely distinct futures lie before mankind, one dark, one bright; one the defeat of all man’s hopes, the betrayal of all his ideals, the other their hardwon triumph." (Olaf Stapledon, "Darkness and the Light", 1942)

"I have seen God creating the cosmos, watching its growth, and finally destroying it." (Olaf Stapledon, "Nebula Maker", 1976)

On Literature: On Physics (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"The mathematicians and physics men have their mythology; they work alongside the truth, never touching it; their equations are false But the things work. Or, when gross error appears, they invent new ones; they drop the theory of waves In universal ether and imagine curved space." (Robinson Jeffers, "The Beginning and the End and Other Poems, The Great Wound", 1963

"Their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do." (Douglas Adams, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish", 1985)

"All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules." (Iain Banks, "The Player of Games", 1988)

"Physics is the basic science. One can easily argue that all other sciences are specialized aspects of physics." (Isaac Asimov, "Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations", 1988)

"It does highlight the irony that everything you go to see is changed by the very action of going to see it, which is the sort of problem which physicists have been wrestling with for most of this century." (Douglas Adams, "Last Chance to See", 1990)

"Almost every credible physicist will tell you there’s nothing in physics that says time travel can’t happen [...]" (Peter Clines, "The End of the Experiment", [in J W Schnarrv (ed), "Timelines"] 2010)

"Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like "optics" or "thermodynamics" are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections." (Ted Chiang, "Arrival: Film tie-in", 2016)

"'Do you really believe in physics?'  'I dont know what that means. Physics tries to draw a numerical picture of the world. I dont know that it actually explains anything. You cant illustrate the unknown. Whatever that might mean.'" (Cormac McCarthy, "Stella Maris", 2022)

On Literature: About Mathematicians (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"The mathematicians and physics men have their mythology; they work alongside the truth, never touching it; their equations are false But the things work. Or, when gross error appears, they invent new ones; they drop the theory of waves In universal ether and imagine curved space." (Robinson Jeffers, "The Beginning and the End and Other Poems, The Great Wound", 1963)

"The natural world is full of irregularity and random alteration, but in the antiseptic, dust-free, shadowless, brightly lit, abstract realm of the mathematicians they like their cabbages spherical, please". (William A M Boyd, "Brazzaville Beach", 1990)

"History too has an inertia. In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call 'world lines' on graphs. In human affairs, individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curved course. That cable of tangled world lines is history. Seeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going - it is a matter of simple extrapolation." (Kim S Robinson, "Red Mars", 1992)

"People reach their peak ability as military commanders much earlier than we thought. Most of them in their late teens. The same age when poets do their most passionate and revolutionary work. And mathematicians. They peak, and then it falls off. They coast on what they learned back when they were still young enough to learn." (Orson Scott Card, "First Meetings in Ender's Universe", 2002)

"How do you know you shouldnt? The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it. How is it that it’s demonstrably better at it than you are? You work on a problem and then you put it away for a while. But it doesnt go away. It reappears at lunch. Or while you’re taking a shower. It says: Take a look at this. What do you think? Then you wonderwhy the shower is cold. Or the soup. Is this doing math? I’m afraid it is. How is it doing it? We dont know. I’ve posed the question to some pretty good mathematicians. How does the unconscious do math? Some who’d thought about it and some who hadnt. For the most part they seemed to think it unlikely that the unconscious went about it the same way we did. What was surprising to me was the insouciance with which they greeted this news. As if the very nature of mathematics had not just been hauled into the dock. A few thought that if it had a better way of doing mathematics it ought to tell us about it. Well, maybe. Or maybe it thinks we’re not smart enough to understand it." (Cormac McCarthy, "Stella Maris", 2022)

Brian W Aldiss - Collected Quotes

"If a machine had broken down, it would have been quickly replaced. But who can replace a man?" (Brian W Aldiss, "Who Can Replace a Man?", 1958)

"Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts." (Brian Aldiss, Penguin Science Fiction, 1961)

"What was that epigram that he had trotted forth too often, about civilization being the distance man placed between himself and his excreta? But it was nearer the truth to say that civilization was the distance man had placed between himself and everything else." (Brian W Aldiss, "The Dark Light Years", 1964)

"The waking brain is perpetually lapped by the unconscious." (Brian W Aldiss, "Man in His Time", 1966)

"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." (Brian W Aldiss, "Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction", 1973)

"Over most of the universe, God was spread in fossil radiation, too old, too thin." (Brian W. Aldiss, "Non-Isotropic", 1978)

"We take foul medicines to improve our health; so we must entertain foul thoughts on occasion, to strengthen wisdom." (Brian W Aldiss, "The Small Stones of Tu Fu", 1978)

On Literature: On Mathematics (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"Consequently, these laws of nature need only be discovered, and then man will no longer be answerable for his actions, and his life will become extremely easy. Needless to say, all human actions will then be calculated according to these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, up to 108,000, and entered into a calendar; or, better still, some well-meaning publications will appear, like the present-day encyclopedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so precisely calculated and designated that there will no longer be any actions or adventures in the world." (Fyodor Dostoevsky, "Notes from Underground", 1864)

"A modern branch of mathematics, having achieved the art of dealing with the infinitely small, can now yield solutions in other more complex problems of motion, which used to appear insoluble. This modern branch of mathematics, unknown to the ancients, when dealing with problems of motion, admits the conception of the infinitely small, and so conforms to the chief condition of motion (absolute continuity) and thereby corrects the inevitable error which the human mind cannot avoid when dealing with separate elements of motion instead of examining continuous motion. In seeking the laws of historical movement just the same thing happens. The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable human wills, is continuous. To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of history." (Lev N Tolstoy, "War and Peace", 1867)

"Arriving at infinitesimals, mathematics, the most exact of sciences, abandons the process of analysis and enters on the new process of the integration of unknown, infinitely small, quantities." (Lev N Tolstoy, "War and Peace", 1867)

"What logarithms are to mathematics that mathematics are to the other sciences." (Friederich von Hardenberg [Novalis], "Schriften", 1901)

"The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world-wide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write." (Herbert G Wells, "Mankind in the Making", 1903)

"The new mathematics is a sort of supplement to language, affording a means of thought about form and quantity and a means of expression, more exact, compact, and ready than ordinary language." (Herbert G Wells, "Mankind in the Making", 1903)

"The demonstration must be against learning-science. But not every science will do. The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy. Since bombs are your means of expression, it would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics. But that is impossible... What do you think of having a go at Astronomy?" (Joseph Conrad, "The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale", 1907) 

"The function of man’s highest faculty, his reason, consists precisely of the continuous limitation of infinity, the breaking up of infinity into convenient, easily digestible portions - differentials. This is precisely what lends my field, mathematics, its divine beauty." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Words are a pretty fuzzy substitute for mathematical equations." (Isaac Asimov, "Foundation and Empire", 1952)

*He was well on the way to inventing differential calculus when his mother called him down to breakfast." (Poul Anderson, "Brain Wave", 1954)

"First his math interest seemed to evaporate after the special calculus course, although he never blew an exam. Then he switched to the pre-college anthropology panel the school was trying. Here he made good grades and acted very motivated, until the semester when the visiting research team began pounding on sampling techniques and statistical significance. Hobie had no trouble with things like Chi square, of course. But after making his A in the final he gave them his sweet, unbelieving smile and faded." (James Tiptree Jr, "Beam Uds Home", 1969)

"If everything, everything were known, statistical estimates would be unnecessary. The science of probability gives mathematical expression to our ignorance, not to our wisdom." (Samuel R Delany, "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones", 1969)

"The temporal engineers shrugged, and so did the mathematicians. They told her that paradoxes were accumulating elsewhere in the society by that time, too, even though only a few supra-legal heavy persons owned jumpers. Alternate time-tracks, perhaps? Time-independent hysteresis maybe? Paradoxes of course were wrong. They shouldn’t happen." (James Tiptree Jr, "Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket", Fantastic, 1972)

"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house." (Robert A Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love", 1973)

"Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single fact took the scientific world by storm." (Douglas N Adams, "Life, the Universe and Everything", 1982)

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. [...] A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data." (William Gibson, "Neuromancer", 1984)

"In every language, from Arabic to Zulu to calligraphy to shorthand to math to music to art to wrought stone, everything from the Unified Field Theory to a curse to a sixpenny nail to an orbiting satellite, anything expressed is a net around some idea." (Richard Bach, "One", 1988)

"If we envision the entire System of Mathematics as a great Engine for proving theorems, then we must say, through the agency of the Modus, that such an Engine lives, and could indeed prove its own life, should it develop the capacity to look upon itself." (William Gibson & Bruce Sterling, "The Difference Engine", 1991)

"How do you know you shouldnt? The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it. How is it that it’s demonstrably better at it than you are? You work on a problem and then you put it away for a while. But it doesnt go away. It reappears at lunch. Or while you’re taking a shower. It says: Take a look at this. What do you think? Then you wonderwhy the shower is cold. Or the soup. Is this doing math? I’m afraid it is. How is it doing it? We dont know. I’ve posed the question to some pretty good mathematicians. How does the unconscious do math? Some who’d thought about it and some who hadnt. For the most part they seemed to think it unlikely that the unconscious went about it the same way we did. What was surprising to me was the insouciance with which they greeted this news. As if the very nature of mathematics had not just been hauled into the dock. A few thought that if it had a better way of doing mathematics it ought to tell us about it. Well, maybe. Or maybe it thinks we’re not smart enough to understand it." (Cormac McCarthy, "Stella Maris", 2022)

"In mathematics, we say 'suppose' all the time and see if we can end up with something patently untrue or self-contradictory [...]" (Isaac Asimov, "Prelude to Foundation" 1988)

"If mathematical objects exist independently of human thought what else are they independent of? The universe, I suppose." (Cormac McCarthy, "Stella Maris", 2022)

"You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions." (Herbert G Wells)

George Zebrowski - Collected Quotes

"An infinity of universes swim in superspace, all passing through their own cycles of birth and death; some are novel, others repetitious; some produce macrolife, others do not; still others are lifeless. In time, macrolife will attempt to reach out from its cycles to other space-time bubbles, perhaps even to past cycles, which leave their echoes in superspace, and might be reached. In all these ambitions, only the ultimate pattern of development is unknown, drawing macrolife toward some future transformation still beyond its view. There are times when the oldest macrolife senses that vaster intelligences are peering in at it from some great beyond [...]" (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia", 1979)

"Apocalypse is the eye of a needle, through which we pass into a different world." (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia", 1979)

"Part of human life is the need to reassure ourselves about the future that we may never live to see, rather than fool ourselves, as many did in the last century, that there won’t be any future and they might as well lie down and die." (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia", 1979)

"Picture this: a mobile space colony, supporting more than a million people. No, not a colony, but an organism which can move and grow as long as it can obtain resources and maintain a food supply within its ecology. It’s a living organism because it can respond to stimuli through its optical and sensory nervous system. It thinks with the intellects of its human and cybernetic intelligences. And it can reproduce, which is what we expect from a living organism." (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia", 1979)

"Progress is a tension between the notion of perfection and the notion that striving, not finding, is important." (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia", 1979)

"She reached out across the cathedral of space-time to those hopelessly distant candle-furnaces, where all the material elements had been forged again and again inside the generation of suns, where alien sunspaces were certain to contain other humanities, however different, and she wondered if someone there might be her friend." (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia", 1979)

"In a perfectly rational universe, infinities turn back on themselves [...]" (George Zebrowski, "Is Science Rational?", OMNI Magazine, 1994)

"The rationality of our universe is best suggested by the fact that we can discover more about it from any starting point, as if it were a fabric that will unravel from any thread." (George Zebrowski, "Is Science Rational?", OMNI Magazine, 1994)

"Time is a relationship that we have with the rest of the universe; or more accurately, we are one of the clocks, measuring one kind of time." (George Zebrowski, OMNI Magazine, 1994)

"Science, when it runs up against infinities, seeks to eliminate them, because a proliferation of entities is the enemy of explanation." (George Zebrowski, "Time Is Nothing But A Clock" , OMNI Magazine Vol. 17 (1), 1994)

On Literature: On Time Travel (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on, waiting for The Time Traveler; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveler vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine: An Invention", 1895)

"'Upon that machine',said the Time Traveller, holding the lamp aloft, 'I intend to explore time'." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine: An Invention", 1895)

"If you don’t stop this senseless theorizing upon something that’s an obvious impossibility, you’ll find yourself working alone! Your ridiculous ideas sound like the ravings of a madman. Anyone with average intelligence realizes that the mere thought of traveling through time is absurd." (L Arthur Eshbach, "Out of the Past", Tales of Wonder, 1938)

'Of all the fantastic ideas that belong to science fiction, the most remarkable - and, perhaps, the most fascinating - is that of time travel [...] Indeed, so fantastic a notion does it seem, and so many apparently obvious absurdities and bewildering paradoxes does it present, that some of the most imaginative students of science refuse to consider it as a practical proposition." (Idrisyn O Evans, "Can We Conquer Time?", Tales of Wonder, 1940) 

"To my way of thinking it is precisely because time travel involves such fascinating paradoxes that we can conclude, even in the absence of other evidence, that time travel is impossible." (Isaac Asimov, 1954)

"Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem." (Michichio Kaku, Wired Magazine, 2003)

"A simple proof. If time travel is - or ever will be - possible, where are the time travelers? Every moment of history should be mobbed with them, so where are they?" (Peter Clines, "The End of the Experiment", [in J W Schnarrv (ed), "Timelines"] 2010)

"A whole new branch of science started. It’s called paradoxology. Paradoxologists study the implications of time travel. The main question they try to answer is what happened to the reality Saul Baron came from. Did it cease to exist or does it still exist parallel to this reality?" (Daliso Chaponda, "By His Sacrifice", [in J W Schnarrv (ed), "Timelines"] 2010)

"Almost every credible physicist will tell you there’s nothing in physics that says time travel can’t happen [...]" (Peter Clines, "The End of the Experiment", [in J W Schnarrv (ed), "Timelines"] 2010)

"Beneath the cylindrical brass shield was an emerald, nearly fifteen centimeters in length and precision-cut into an orthorhombic dipyramidal crystal. It was this shape, combined with the high-energy potentiality of this particular variant of beryl that made time travel possible. It had taken him ten years and most of his inheritance to find and modify the emerald." (Mark Onspaugh, "Time’s Cruel Geometry", [in J W Schnarrv (ed), "Timelines"] 2010)

"Project Boomerang was a time travel experiment, headed by Howard, which had achieved some great success. They had managed to travel only backwards in time and the traveling worked on a pre-existing displacement principle. What this meant, Howard explained, was that the traveler could only jump to a time and place where they had previously existed. The traveling version of the person would take the place in the world of the old version, with all the knowledge they had gained since that time kept intact. That is, until the boomerang effect kicked in and the traveler was pulled back to the present, whereupon the original version of the person would resume back in the past. [...] it was the first step towards full time travel, and a massive achievement. He also pointed out that the boomerang effect could be, effectively, switched off and travelers could remain in the past reliving their lives any way they wanted to." (Harper Hull," Perpetual Motion Blues", [in J W Schnarrv (ed), "Timelines"] 2010)

"Time travel’s possible, but it’s only possible in that air-turning-into-gold way." (Peter Clines, "The End of the Experiment", [in J W Schnarrv (ed), "Timelines"] 2010)

"Time travel was quite notable in its own right, and as the world turned one way, opinions turned the other." (Jacob Edwards, "Professor Figwort Comes to an Understanding", [in J W Schnarrv (ed), "Timelines"] 2010)

On Literature: On Computers (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." (Robert A Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love", 1973)

"Don’t dismiss the computer as a new type of fetters. Think of it rationally, as the most liberating device ever invented, the only tool capable of serving the multifarious needs of modern man." (John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider", 1975)

"If arithmetical skill is the measure of intelligence, then computers have been more intelligent than all human beings all along. If the ability to play chess is the measure, then there are computers now in existence that are more intelligent than any but a very few human beings. However, if insight, intuition, creativity, the ability to view a problem as a whole and guess the answer by the 'feel' of the situation, is a measure of intelligence, computers are very unintelligent indeed. Nor can we see right now how this deficiency in computers can be easily remedied, since human beings cannot program a computer to be intuitive or creative for the very good reason that we do not know what we ourselves do when we exercise these qualities." (Isaac Asimov, "Machines that Think", 1983)

"Computers are better than we are at arithmetic, not because computers are so good at it, but because we are so bad at it."  (Isaac Asimov, "Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations", 1988)

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. [...] A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data." (William Gibson, "Neuromancer", 1984)

"In cyberspace, she noted, there are no shadows." (William Gibson, "Mona Lisa Overdrive", 1988)

"Donna can feel computers dreaming, or so she says. She collects the dreams of machines, or so she thinks. The dreams of people are in the machines, a planet network of active imaginations hooked into their made-up, makebelieve worlds. Artificial reality is taking over; it has its own children. Donna feels the dreams of people. There are others like her. She is not unique." (Storm Constantine, ‘‘Immaculate’’ (1991)

"Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith." (Peter Watts, "Blindsight", 2006)

Clifford D Simak - Collected Quotes

"The chain of life runs smoothly from one generation to the next and none of the links stand out except here and there a link one sees by accident." (Clifford D Simak, "Time and Again", 1951)

"To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known." (Clifford D Simak, "City", 1952)

"We thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren’t, when we never have. We’ve just been moving along with time. We said, there’s another second gone, there’s another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it." (Clifford D Simak, "City", 1952)

"And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past - except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe." (Clifford D Simak,"Ring Around the Sun", 1954)

"Once again the universe was spread far out before him and it was a different and in some ways a better universe, a more diagrammatic universe, and in time, he knew, if there were such a thing as time, he'd gain some completer understanding and acceptance of it." (Clifford D Simak, "All the Traps of Earth", 1960)

"It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened - an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark: there was nothing here but emptiness. There had never been anything in this place, nor was anything ever intended to occupy this place [...]" (Clifford D Simak, "Time is the Simplest Thing", 1961)

"There was so much knowledge in the galaxy and he knew so little of it, understood so little of the little that he knew. [...] Out among the stars lay a massive body of knowledge, some of it an extension of what mankind knew, some of it concerning matters which Man had not yet suspected, and used in ways and for purposes that Man had not as yet imagined. And never might imagine, if left on his own." (Clifford D Simak, "Way Station", 1963)

"It's not the machine itself that does the trick. The machine merely acts as an intermediary between the sensitive and the spiritual force. It is an extension of the sensitive. It magnifies the capability of the sensitive and acts as a link of some sort. It enables the sensitive to perform his function." (Clifford D Simak, "Way Station", 1963)

"There was a comfort in the thought, a strange sort of personal comfort in being able to believe that some intelligence might have solved the riddle of that mysterious equation of the universe. And how, perhaps, that mysterious equation might tie in with the spiritual force that was idealistic brother to time and space and all those other elemental factors that held the universe together." (Clifford D Simak, "Way Station", 1963)

"The robots are not technologically minded. They were not built to be. They were built to bolster human vanity and pride, to meet a strange longing that seems to be built into the human ego—the need to have other humans (or a reasonable facsimile of other humans) to minister to our wants and needs, human slaves to be dominated, human beings over which a man or woman (or a child) can assert authority, thus building up a false feeling of superiority." (Clifford D Simak, "A Choice of Gods", 1972)

"These kind never change. The machine does something to a man. It brutalizes him. It serves as a buffer between himself and his environment and he is the worst for it. It arouses an opportunistic instinct and makes possible a greed that makes a man inhuman." (Clifford D Simak, "A Choice of Gods", 1972)

"If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology. Space is an illusion, and time as well. There is no such factor as either time or space. We have been blinded by our own cleverness, blinded by false perceptions of those qualities that we term eternity and infinity. There is another factor that explains it all, and once this universal factor is recognized, everything grows simple. There is no longer any mystery, no longer any wonder, no longer any doubt; for the simplicity of it all lies before us [...]" (Clifford D Simak,"A Heritage of Stars", 1977)

On Literature: On Data (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” (Sir Arthur C Doyle, “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”, 1892)

"The machine is only a tool after all, which can help humanity progress faster by taking some of the burdens of calculations and interpretations off its back. The task of the human brain remains what it has always been; that of discovering new data to be analyzed, and of devising new concepts to be tested." (Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot", 1950)

"In a way, science might be described as paranoid thinking applied to Nature: we are looking for natural conspiracies, for connections among apparently disparate data." (Carl Sagan, "The Dragons of Eden", 1977)

"Data in isolation are meaningless, a collection of numbers. Only in context of a theory do they assume significance […]" (George Greenstein, "Frozen Star", 1983)

"Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary." (Frank Herbert, "Chapterhouse: Dune", 1985)

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. [...] A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data." (William Gibson, "Neuromancer", 1984)

"Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity. Where we are ignorant, we withhold belief. Whatever annoyance the uncertainty engenders serves a higher purpose: It drives us to accumulate better data. This attitude is the difference between science and so much else. Science offers little in the way of cheap thrills. The standards of evidence are strict. But when followed they allow us to see far, illuminating even a great darkness." (Carl Sagan, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space", 1994)

"Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply." (Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark", 1995)