On Literature: On Planets (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the planet. Its breath is pure and healthful. It’s an immense wilderness where a man never feels lonely, for he feels life astir on every side. The sea fosters a wondrous, supernatural existence." (Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", 1870)

"This planet doesn’t need new continents, it needs new men." (Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", 1870)

"Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of existence. And a violet-coloured gas told him that this part of space was outside what he had called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and organisms before, but identified Kuranes merely as one from the infinity where matter, energy, and gravitation exist." (Howard P Lovecraft, "Celephais", 1922)

"You will subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficial yoke of reason. If they fail to understand that we bring them mathematically infallible happiness, it will be our duty to compel them to be happy." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"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 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)

"Rest enough for the individual man - too much, and too soon - and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its winds and) ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning." (Stephen V Benét," By the Waters of Babylon", 1937)

"Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"He knew where the seesaw would stop. It would end in the very remote past, with the release of the stupendous temporal energy he had been accumulating with each of those monstrous swings. He would not witness, but he would cause the formation of the planets." (Alfred E van Vogt, "The Seesaw", 1941)

"Other memories encroached, cold, fear-etched memories that reached forhim like taloned, withered claws. Memories of alien lands acrawl with loathesomeness and venom. Strange planets that were strange not because they were alien, but because of the abysmal terror in the very souls of them. Memories of shambling things that triumphed over pitiful peoples whose only crime was they could not fight back." (Clifford D Simak, "Shadow of Life", 1943)

"There they go, off to Mars, just for the ride, thinking that they will find a planet like a seer’s crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they’ll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal." (Ray Bradbury," A Few Notes on The Martian Chronicles", 1950)

"To obtain a mental picture of the distance to the nearest star, compared to the nearest planet, you must imagine a world in which the closest object to you is only five feet away - and there is nothing else to see until you have travelled a thousand miles." (Arthur C Clarke, "We'll Never Conquer Space", 1960)

"The silence seemed to carry as much weight as that deep mass of foliage which covered all the land on the day side of the planet. It was a silence built of millions upon millions of years, intensifying as the sun overhead poured forth more and more energy in the first stages of its decline. Not that the silence signified lack of life. Life was everywhere, life on a formidable scale. But the increased solar radiation that had brought the extinction of most of the animal kingdom had spelt the triumph of plant life. Everywhere, in a thousand forms and guises, the plants ruled. And vegetables have no voices." (Brian W Aldiss," Nomansland", 1961)

"The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth." (James G Ballard, "Which Way to Inner Space?", 1962)

"We cannot predict the new forces, powers, and discoveries that will be disclosed to us when we reach the other planets and set up new laboratories in space. They are as much beyond our vision today as fire or electricity would be beyond the imagination of a fish." (Arthur C Clarke, "Space and the Spirit of Man", 1965)

"When they [radio astronomers] grew weary at their electronic listening posts, when their eyes grew dim with looking at unrevealing dials and studying uneventful graphs, they could step outside their concrete cells and renew their dull spirits in communion with the giant mechanism they commanded, the silent, sensing instrument in which the smallest packets of energy, the smallest waves of matter, were detected in their headlong, eternal flight across the universe. It was the stethoscope with which they took the pulse of the all and noted the birth and death of stars, the probe with which, here on an insignificant planet of an undistinguished star on the edge of its galaxy, they explored the infinite." (James Gunn, "The Listeners", 1968)

"Life would be impossible on such a planet. It wouldn't get enough heat and light, and if it rotated there would be total darkness half of every day. There wouldn't be any native inhabitants. You couldn't expect life - which is fundamentally dependent on light - to develop under such extreme conditions of light deprivation. Half of every axial rotation spent in Darkness! No, nothing could exist under conditions like that." (Isaac Asimov, "Nightfall: and other stories", 1969)

"The silence seemed to carry as much weight as that deep mass of foliage which covered all the land on the day side of the planet. It was a silence built of millions upon millions of years, intensifying as the sun overhead poured forth more and more energy in the first stages of its decline. Not that the silence signified lack of life. Life was everywhere, life on a formidable scale. But the increased solar radiation that had brought the extinction of most of the animal kingdom had spelt the triumph of plant life. Everywhere, in a thousand forms and guises, the plants ruled. And vegetables have no voices." (Brian W Aldiss," Nomansland", 1961)

"That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off [...] and still have no good idea why you were really fighting." (Iain Banks, "Consider Phlebas", 1987)

"The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realized that it was a system at all and that it wasn't something that was just there." (Douglas N Adams, "Last Chance to See", 1990)

"The dreams of people are in the machines, a planet network of active imaginations hooked into their made-up, make-believe worlds. Artificial reality is taking over; it has its own children." (Storm Constantine, "Immaculate", 1991)

"[…] the idea was for humans to colonize all their former worlds, so that humanity’s fate would not be tied to that of a single planet. (Orson Scott Card, "Ender in Exile", 2008)

"Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called "other", which is simply another universe, another planet, another species." (Theodore Sturgeon)

Walter M Miller Jr. - Collected Quotes

"There is some wisdom, and some foolishness in every people’s way." (Walter M Miller Jr., "The Soul-Empty Ones", 1951)

"Space is my harp, and I touch it lightly with fingers of steel. Space sings." (Walter M. Miller, Jr, "The Big Hunger", 1952)

"A lot of human thinking occurred beneath the level of consciousness, downin the darker regions of the mind where it was not allowed to become conscious lest it bring shame to the thinker. And perhaps he had reasoned it all out in that mental half-world where thoughts are inner ghosts, haunting the possessed man with vague stirrings of uneasiness, leading him into inexplicable behavior." (Walter M Miller Jr, "Way of a Rebel", 1954)

"The machinery of civilization was a living body, with organismic Man as its brain." (Walter M Miller Jr., "Way of a Rebel", 1954)

"The 'romance' of space - drivel written in the old days. When you’re not blasting, you float in a cramped hotbox, crawl through dirty mazes of greasy pipe and cable to tighten a lug, scratch your arms and bark your shins, get sick and choked up because no gravity helps your gullet get the food down." (Walter M Miller Jr., "Death of a Spaceman", 1954)

"A man could change his politics, his friends, his religion, his country, but Men’s tools were a part of his body. Having used a high-powered rifle, the man subsumed the weapon, made it a part of himself. Trading it for a stone axe would be like cutting off his arm. Man was a user of tools, a shaper of environments." (Walter M Miller Jr, "Way of a Rebel", 1954)

"Earth - it was a place where you could stop being afraid, a place where fear of suffocation was not, where fear of blowout was not, where nobody went berserk with the chokers or dreamed of poisoned air or worried about shorthorn cancer or burn blindness or meteorite dust or low-gravity muscular atrophy. A place where there was wind to blow your sweat away." (Walter M Miller Jr, "The Lineman", 1957)

"There were still some meteorites coming in, making bright little winks of fire where they bit into the plain. Deadly stingers out of nowhere, heading nowhere, impartially orbiting, random as rain, random as death. The debris of creation." (Walter M Miller Jr, "The Lineman", 1957)

"Apparently the expectation of humor was enough to produce the illusion of humor, and the comedian could elicit laughter with gesture and expression, regardless of what he said." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)

"During the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible - that ideas were deathless and truth immortal." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)

"Insofar as thought could be governed at all, it could only be commanded to follow what reason affirmed anyhow; command it otherwise and it would not obey." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)

"It was a species which often considered itself to be, basically, a race of divinely inspired toolmakers; any intelligent entity from Arcturus would instantly have perceived them to be, basically, a race of impassioned after-dinner speech-makers." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)

"Men must fumble awhile with error to separate it from truth, I think - as long as they don’t seize the error hungrily because it has a pleasanter taste." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)

"Objective evidence is the ultimate authority. Recorders may lie, but Nature is incapable of it." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)

"The laws of society are what makes something a crime or not a crime." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)

On Literature: On Tools (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"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)

"A man could change his politics, his friends, his religion, his country, but Men’s tools were a part of his body. Having used a high-powered rifle, the man subsumed the weapon, made it a part of himself. Trading it for a stone axe would be like cutting off his arm. Man was a user of tools, a shaper of environments." (Walter M Miller Jr, "Way of a Rebel", 1954)

"It was a species which often considered itself to be, basically, a race of divinely inspired toolmakers; any intelligent entity from Arcturus would instantly have perceived them to be, basically, a race of impassioned after-dinner speech-makers." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)

"We’ve been slaves to our tools since the first caveman made the first knife to help him get his supper. After that there was no going back, and we built till our machines were ten million times more powerful than ourselves. We gave ourselves cars when we might have learned to run; we made airplanes when we might have grown wings; and then the inevitable. We made a machine our God." (John Brunner, "Judas", 1967)

"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)

"Technology is both a tool for helping humans and for destroying them. This is the paradox of our times which we're compelled to face." (Frank Herbert, [interview with Tim O'Reilly], 1983)

"‘The aliens [...] are still a mystery to us. We exchange facts, descriptions, recipes for tools, but the important questions do not lend themselves to our clumsy mathematical codes. Do they know of love? Do they appreciate beauty? Do they believe in God, hey?" (Michael Swanwick," Ginungagap", 1980)

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." (Philip K Dick, "How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later", 1985)

"Somewhere in its history, every technological species will make the tools to become godlike. Immortal citizens will be capable of building worlds, or obliterating them. How a species responds to the challenge... well, that’s what determines its fate, more often than not." (Robert Reed, ‘‘Sister Alice’’ (1993)

On Literature: On Progress (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"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)

"At least half of mankind [...] still makes an unconscious equation in its thinking, and assumes that change - any sort of change - is identical with progress. It is not so; and any student of the course of evolutionary history on Terra could tell you of change which has been regressive, change which has led to an ultimately fatal specialization, change which has been overadaptation to an ecological niche which no longer existed, or did not yet exist." (Margaret St Clair, "Agent of the Unknown", 1952)

"You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb." (Frederik Pohl, "Day Million", 1966)

"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)

"You could probably prove, by judicious use of logarithms and congruent triangles, that real life is a lot more like soap opera than most people will admit." (Molly Ivins, "The Progressive", 1988)

"Her grandparents, believers in progress, had always told her things were better now. Human minds had been darker when people couldn’t read late at night, their prejudices greater when they had lacked television’s images of other places, their work harder without the appliances many took for granted. Nina was not so sure; technical civilization had isolated people from the basics of life, and had fooled them into believing that they controlled the world." (Pamela Sargent, "The Old Darkness", 1983)

"We are only the beginning of humanity, the larval stage, the species preparing for its discovery of what intelligence is for. We will survive and develop, each crest a little higher than the one before." (George Turner, "Drowning Towers", 1987)

"An ordinary mistake is one that leads to a dead end, while a profound mistake is one that leads to progress. Anyone can make an ordinary mistake, but it takes a genius to make a profound mistake." (Frank Wilczek,"The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces", 2008)

On Literature: On Society (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time." (Charles Fort, "Lo!", 1931)

"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)

"At least half of mankind [...] still makes an unconscious equation in its thinking, and assumes that change - any sort of change - is identical with progress. It is not so; and any student of the course of evolutionary history on Terra could tell you of change which has been regressive, change which has led to an ultimately fatal specialization, change which has been overadaptation to an ecological niche which no longer existed, or did not yet exist." (Margaret St Clair, "Agent of the Unknown", 1952)

"You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb." (Frederik Pohl, "Day Million", 1966)

"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)

"Her grandparents, believers in progress, had always told her things were better now. Human minds had been darker when people couldn’t read late at night, their prejudices greater when they had lacked television’s images of other places, their work harder without the appliances many took for granted. Nina was not so sure; technical civilization had isolated people from the basics of life, and had fooled them into believing that they controlled the world." (Pamela Sargent, "The Old Darkness", 1983)

"An ordinary mistake is one that leads to a dead end, while a profound mistake is one that leads to progress. Anyone can make an ordinary mistake, but it takes a genius to make a profound mistake." (Frank Wilczek,"The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces", 2008)

On Literature: On Curves (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"No revolution, no heresy is comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain. But the wound is necessary; most of mankind suffers from hereditary sleeping sickness, and victims of this sickness (entropy) must not be allowed to sleep, or it will be their final sleep, death."  (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"[...] the time stream is curved helically in some higher dimension. In your case, a still further distortion brought two points of the coil into contact, and a sort of short circuit threw you into the higher curve." (Robert H Wilson, "A Flight Into Time", Wonder Stories, 1931)

"The waves of the sea, the little ripples on the shore, the sweeping curve of the sandy bay between the headlands, the outline of the hills, the shape of the clouds, all these are so many riddles of form, so many problems of morphology." (Sir D’Arcy W Thompson, "On Growth and Form", 1951)

"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)

"You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb." (Frederik Pohl, "Day Million", 1966)

"Well it's a matter of continuity. Most people's lives have ups and downs that are gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They're the ones who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a singular point. a discontinuity in the curve of life - do you know what the time rate of change is at a cusp? Infinity, that's what! A-and right across the point, it's minus infinity! How's that for sudden change, eh?" (Thomas Pynehon, "Gravity's Rainbow", 1973)

"The whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent." (Douglas Adams, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", 1980)

"It is now known to science that there are many more dimensions than the classical four. Scientists say that these don’t normally impinge on the world because the extra dimensions are very small and curve in on themselves, and that since reality is fractal most of it is tucked inside itself. This means either that the universe is more full of wonders than we can hope to understand or, more probably, that scientists make things up as they go along." (Terry Pratchett, "Pyramids", 1989)

"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 0 it is a matter of simple extrapolation." (Kim S Robinson, "Red Mars", 1992)

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

"Some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time. There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine: An Invention", 1895)

"Life is perpetually creative because it contains in itself that surplus which ever overflows the boundaries of the immediate time and space, restlessly pursuing its adventure of expression in the varied forms of self-realization." (Rabindranath Tagore, "The Meaning of Art", 1926)

"[...] the time stream is curved helically in some higher dimension. In your case, a still further distortion brought two points of the coil into contact, and a sort of short circuit threw you into the higher curve." (Robert H Wilson, "A Flight Into Time", Wonder Stories, 1931)

"Rest enough for the individual man - too much, and too soon - and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its winds and) ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning." (Stephen V Benét," By the Waters of Babylon", 1937)

"The very basis of human civilization was leisure [...] spare time in which to indulge curiosity and experiment." (Edmond Hamilton, "The Ephemerae", 1938)

"Man has natural three-dimensional limits, and he also has four-dimensional ones, considering time as an extension. When he reaches those limits, he ceases to grow and mature, and forms rigidly within the mold of those limiting walls. It is stasis, which is retrogression unless all else stands still as well. A man who reaches his limits is tending toward subhumanity. Only when he becomes superhuman in time and space can immortality become practical." (Henry Kuttner & Catherine L Moore [aka Lewis Padgett], "Time Enough", 1946)

"Space and Time aren’t real, apart. And they aren’t really different. They fade one into the other all around us." (Jack Williamson, "The Legion of Space", 1947)

"There are and have been worlds and cultures without end, each nursing the proud illusion that it is unique in space and time. There have been men without number suffering from the same megalomania; men who imagined themselves unique, irreplaceable, irreproducible. There will be more [...] more plus infinity." (Alfred Bester, "The Demolished Man", 1953)

"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to Man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call ... The Twilight Zone." (Rod Serling, "The Twilight Zone" [TV series] 1959)

"You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb." (Frederik Pohl, "Day Million", 1966)

"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", 1979)

"Time and space were themselves players, vast lands engulfing the figures, a weave of future and past. There was no riverrun of years. The abiding loops of causality ran both forward and back. The timescape rippled with waves, roiled and flexed, a great beast in the dark sea." (Gregory Benford, "Timescape", 1980)

"The dimension of the imagination is much more complex than those of time and space, which are very junior dimensions indeed." (Terry Pratchett, "The Colour of Magic", 1983)

"Nothing in those years matched the impact of the equable, incontrovertible statement that I did not matter, that my life was of no moment to anyone but myself. We accept that only one person in a million has real importance to the race but each of us remains the centre of his universe, the pivot of energy and mind. That man told me in a single sentence that the world would not flicker if I ceased to exist, that it would have affected nothing if I had never existed and that my continued existence would affect nothing in the stream of time." (George Turner, "Drowning Towers", 1987)

"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)

"There is a way of looking far into the distant past and seeing everything that happened there. The same method can be used to observe distant events while they are actually happening - and also, of course, events that took place both long ago and far away. It is even possible to spy upon what is occurring in the alternative universes - those parts of the polycosmos which, unreified in our own time-line, exist for us only as the sites of dreams." (John Grant, "The World", 1992)

"We live forever, we transform ourselves, we transform worlds, solar systems, we ship across interstellar space, we defy time and deny death, but the one thing we cannot recreate is memory [...]" (Ian MacDonald, "The Days of Solomon Gursky", 1998)

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

"I wanted to see what no one had yet observed, even if I had to pay for this curiosity with my life." (Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea", 1870)

"Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will." (James Stephens, "The Crock of Gold", 1912)

"The humans have a curious force they call ambition. It drives them, and, through them, it drives us. This force which keeps them active, we lack. Perhaps, in time, we machines will acquire it." (John Wyndham, "The Lost Machine", 1932)

"The very basis of human civilization was leisure [...] spare time in which to indulge curiosity and experiment." (Edmond Hamilton, "The Ephemerae", 1938)

"Earth hung in the after port behind and below him, a soft emerald crescent in its first thin quarter. A warm green sickle that was home, a hustling verdant young world impatient to push its way across black empty space and satisfy its lusty curiosity about its cosmic neighbors." (Roger Dee," Unwelcome Tenant", 1950)

"The mysteries of the universe and the questions that scientists strive to answer never come to an end. For that we should be grateful. A universe in which their were no mysteries for curious men to ponder would be a very dull universe indeed."(Isaac Asimov, "The Search for the Elements", 1962)

"Every intelligent creature was curious - and curiosity prompted it to act when something incomprehensible took place."(Stanislaw Lem, "The Hunt", 1968)

"If space people didn’t have curiosity, they probably wouldn’t be space people." (Stephen Tall, "The Bear with the Knot on His Tail", 1971)

"It surprises me how our culture can destroy curiosity in the most curious of all animals - human beings." (Paul Maclean)

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

"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)

"Science fiction is, very strictly and literally, analogous to science facts. It is a convenient analog system for thinking about new scientific, social, and economic ideas - and for re-examining old ideas." (John W Campbell Jr., "Prologue to Analog", 1962)

"Politics is the enemy of a sound economic entity." (Philip K. Dick, "The Crack in Space", 1965)

"When a country’s economy was in rotten shape, the easiest dodge was to start a war as a pretext for gagging everyone immediately." (Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky, "Prisoners of Power", 1969)

"He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia", 1974)

"Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result." (John K Galbraith, "Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went", 1975)

"It’s a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result - collapse, ruin and famine." (Douglas Adams, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", 1980)

"That’s a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful." (Kim S Robinson, "Red Mars", 1992)

"History, as every mature Aten knew, was simply the evolution of economics." (Ralph A Sperry, "On Vacation", 1998)

On Literature: On Nature (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)

"Phenomena may well be suspected of anything, are capable of anything. Hypothesis proclaims the infinite; that is what gives hypothesis its greatness. Beneath the surface fact it seeks the real fact. It asks creation for her thoughts, and then for her second thoughts. The great scientific discoverers are those who hold nature suspect." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1866)

"From a caprice of nature, not from the ignorance of man. Not a mistake has been made in the working. But we cannot prevent equilibrium from producing its effects. We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones." (Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", 1870)

"Nature eludes calculation. Number is a grim pullulation. Nature is the thing that cannot be numbered." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1874)

"When we think how narrow and how devious this path of nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom ever shadowly  upwards, it is a bold and confident man who will put a limit to the strangeby-paths into which the human spirit may wander." (Arthur C Doyle," Lot No. 249’", 1892)

"It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine", 1895)

"Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine", 1895)

"Absurd, irreducible; nothing - not even a profound and secret delirium of nature - could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it." (Jean-Paul Sartre, "Nausea", 1938)

"Natural phenomena are less often produced by nature and most often produced by man." (Alfred Bester, "The Devil’s Invention", 1950)

"Is there anything more contemptible than Nature? The scientists, the philosophers have always tried to understand Nature, while the thing to do is to destroy it!" (Stanislaw Lem, "The Sanitorium of Dr. Vliperdius", 1971)

"Metaphysics attempts to discover the ultimate nature of reality, and in this sense, the innerspace of science fiction is metaphysical fiction." (Kate Wilhelm, 1974) 

"The force of gravity-though it is the first force with which we are acquainted, and though it is always with us, and though it is the one with a strength we most thoroughly appreciate-is by far the weakest known force in nature. It is first and rearmost." (Isaac Asimov, 1976)

"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)

"One reason nature pleases us is its endless use of a few simple principles: the cube-square law; fractals; spirals; the way that waves, wheels, trig functions, and harmonic oscillators are alike; the importance of ratios between small primes; bilateral symmetry; Fibonacci series, golden sections, quantization, strange attractors, path-dependency, all the things that show up in places where you don’t expect them [...] these rules work with and against each other ceaselessly at all levels, so that out of their intrinsic simplicity comes the rich complexity of the world around us. That tension - between the simple rules that describe the world and the complex world we see - is itself both simple in execution and immensely complex in effect. Thus exactly the levels, mixtures, and relations of complexity that seem to be hardwired into the pleasure centers of the human brain - or are they, perhaps, intrinsic to intelligence and perception, pleasant to anything that can see, think, create? - are the ones found in the world around us." (John Barnes, "Mother of Storms", 1994)

 "Nothing up there tonight but entropy, and the same imaginary shapes that people had been imposing on nature since they’d first thought to wonder at the heavens." (Peter Watts, "Echopraxia", 2014)

"One of the elementary rules of nature is that, in the absence of a law prohibiting an event or phenomenon, it is bound to occur with some degree of probability. To put it simply and crudely: Anything that can happen does happen." (Kenneth W Ford)