"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)
"The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science." (Rachel Carson, [acceptance speech of the National Book Award for Nonfiction] 1952)
"[Science fiction is] that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesised on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin. It is distinguished from pure fantasy by its need to achieve verisimilitude and win the 'willing suspension of disbelief' through scientific plausibility." (Kingsley Amis, "New Maps of Hell", 1960)
"Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts." Brian Aldiss, Penguin Science Fiction, 1961
"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)
"Science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible." (Rod Serling, "The Twilight Zone", "The Fugitive", 1962)
"A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content." (Theodore Sturgeon, "The Issue at Hand: Studies in Contemporary Magazine Science Fiction", 1964)
"A scientist can not be measured quantitatively by the number of degrees or the accumulation of information. A true scientist should have a measure of courage to correct error and seek truth - no matter how painful. The alternative is more painful. To build error upon error is to drift into dogmas, metaphysics, science fiction, and mythology." (Alexander Wilf, "Origin and Destiny of the Moral Species", 1969)
"Metaphysics attempts to discover the ultimate nature of reality, and in this sense, the innerspace of science fiction is metaphysical fiction." (Kate Wilhelm, 1974)
"Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not." (Isaac Asimov, "How Easy to See the Future", Natural History magazine, 1975)
"Science fiction, because it ventures into no man's lands, tends to meet some of the requirements posed by Jung in his explorations of archetypes, myth structures and self-understanding. It may be that the primary attraction of science fiction is that it helps us understand what it means to be human." (Frank Herbert, "Men on other planets", [in "The Craft of Science Fiction"] 1976)
"The idea of making machines that think has an unfailing fascination, not only for science fiction readers, but for all who can see it is a possible way of gaining some understanding of the working of our own minds. Thinking, however, is not an easily defined phenomenon, although it is often considered to be the process of solving problems." (Edward Ihnatowicz, "The Relevance of Manipulation to the Process of Perception", 1977)
"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" [in "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction"], 1978)
"In the face of all this, many of the standard ideas of science fiction seem to me to pale by comparison. I see the relative absence of these things and the distortions of scientific thinking often encountered in science fiction as terrible wasted opportunities. Real science is as amenable to exciting and engrossing fiction as fake science, and I think it is important to exploit every opportunity to convey scientific ideas in a civilization which is both based upon science and does almost nothing to ensure that science is understood." (Carl Sagan, "Broca's Brain", 1979)
"Many scientists deeply involved in the exploration of the solar system (myself among them) were first turned in that direction by science fiction. And the fact that some of that science fiction was not of the highest quality is irrelevant. Ten-year-olds do not read the scientific literature." (Carl Sagan, "Broca's Brain", 1979)
"First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art." (Clive James, "From the Land of Shadows", 1982)
"This is an exercise in fictional science, or science fiction, if you like that better. Not for amusement: science fiction in the service of science. Or just science, if you agree that fiction is a part of it, always was, and always will be as long as our brains are only miniscule fragments of the universe, much too small to hold all the facts of the world but not too idle to speculate about them." (Valentino Braitenberg," Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology", 1984)
"A science fiction writer is - or should be - constrained by what is, or logically might be. That can mean simple fidelity to facts (which, in science, are always more important than theories - though Lord knows the two help shape each other, undermining the convenient, complacent separation of observer and observed). To me it also means heeding the authentic, the actual and concrete. Bad fiction uses the glossy generality; good writing needs the smattering of detail, the unrelenting busy mystery of the real." (Gregory Benford, "Afterword to Exposures", [in Alien Flesh] 1986)
"Science fiction offers its writers chances of embarrassment that no other form of fiction does." (Isaac Asimov, "Robot Dreams" [introduction] 1986)
"General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else." (Marvin Minsky, "The Society of Mind", 1987)
"Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time." (Doris Lessing, The Guardian, 1988)
"If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic." (Ursula K. Le Guin, "Dancing at the Edge of the World", 1989)
"Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story." (Ursula K Le Guin, "Dancing at the Edge of the World", 1989)
"[...] science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be." (Orson Scott Card, "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy", 1990)
"Speculative fiction by definition is geared toward an audience that wants strangeness, an audience that wants to spend time in worlds that absolutely are not like the observable world around them." (Orson Scott Card, "How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy", 1990)
"Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making. The whole process of science is wildly under-represented in science fiction because it's not easy to write about. There are many facets of science that are almost exactly opposite of dramatic narrative. It's slow, tedious, inconclusive, it's hard to tell good guys from bad guys [...]" (Kim S Robinson, [interview] 1997)
"To describe how quantum theory shapes time and space, it is helpful to introduce the idea of imaginary time. Imaginary time sounds like something from science fiction, but it is a well-defined mathematical concept: time measured in what are called imaginary numbers. […] Imaginary numbers can then be represented as corresponding to positions on a vertical line: zero is again in the middle, positive imaginary numbers plotted upward, and negative imaginary numbers plotted downward. Thus imaginary numbers can be thought of as a new kind of number at right angles to ordinary real numbers. Because they are a mathematical construct, they don't need a physical realization […]" (Stephen W Hawking, "The Universe in a Nutshell", 2001)
"Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on." (David Brin, Orbit, [interview] 2002)
"Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem." (Michichio Kaku, Wired Magazine, 2003)
"Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel." (Alan Moore, "The Mustard magazine interview", 2005)
"Every so often I come up with a different definition of what science fiction and fantasy do, and I'm always looking for one that describes what they both do, rather than separating them. Currently I'm saying that one of the things they do is look at the effects of large-scale social change on both populations and individuals. Fantasy tends to look to the past, and science fiction to the future, but what is common to many of the stories is change: huge societal upheaval." (Nalo Hopkinson, "Nalo Hopkinson: Multiplicity", LocusMag, 2007)
"Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it’s really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us." (Ray Bradbury, The Paris Review, [interview] 2010)
"Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe." (Paul di Filippo, "How To Write Science Fiction", cca. 2011)
"The other buzzword that epitomizes a bias toward substitution is 'big data'. Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction)." (Peter Thiel & Blake Masters, "Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future", 2014)
"Science fiction these days is only half a step ahead of science. Astrophysicists and scientists are working in the same way as science fiction writers. They’re working things out in their imagination based on the slim scientific facts that they know. Hawking imagines a black hole and then discovers the mathematics that support his theory, and new possibilities come to light. That’s the imaginative flair that scientists have to have. For me as a sci-fi writer, spinning those ideas in your mind brings you to the point where you dream in science fiction. Suddenly you think of something in the middle of the night, and it’s so vivid you don’t need to write it down because you know you’ll remember it in the morning. That’s what these books, Zero G, reflect: a vivid imagination." (William Shatner, "William Shtner on Sci-Fi, Aging and the Environment", Saturday Evening Post, [interview] 2017)
"But if the general opinion of Mankind is optimistic then we're in for a period of extreme popularity for science fiction. If the general opinion is pessimistic, fantasy is going to hold its own." (David Eddings)
"Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor." (China Miéville)
"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 [...] has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all." (Isaac Asimov)
"One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. (Arthur C Clarke)
"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)
"Science fiction encourages us to explore… all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision." (Marion Z Bradley)
"The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different." (Neal Stephenson)
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