"What will not be forgotten, and what will and should continue to obsess our imaginations, is this revelation of the possibilities of the universe, this destruction of our ignorant self-complacency, and this demonstration of how narrow is the path of our material existence, and what abysses may lie upon either side of it. Solemnity and humility are at the base of all our emotions to-day. May they be the foundations upon which a more earnest and reverent race may build a more worthy temple." (Arthur C Doyle, "The Poison Belt", 1913)
"In such a universe as this what significance could there be in our fortuitous, our frail, our evanescent community?" (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)
"At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art." (Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus", 1942)
"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)
"The exploration of alien worlds was just a monotonous and exhausting game." (Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky, "Prisoners of Power", 1969)
"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)
"Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic." (Frank Herbert, "Dune: The Prophet", 1965)
"There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)
"There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers." (Frank Herbert, "Dune Messiah", 1969)
"In a smoke-congested back room of the universe the God of my agnostic imagination oversees this crooked card game." (Robert Thurston, "Good-Bye, Shelley, Shirley, Charlotte, Charlene", 1972)
"To the paranoid, nothing is a surprise; everything happens exactly as he expected, and sometimes even more so. It all fits into his system. For us, though, there can be no system; maybe all systems - that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc. formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about - are manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving." (Philip K Dick, "The Android and the Human", [speech] 1972)
"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)
"The universe is full of matter and force. Yet in all that force, amongst all the bulks and gravities, the rains of cosmic light, the bombardment of energy - how little spirit, how small the decimal points of intelligence." (Ray Bradbury et al, "Mars and the Mind of Man", 1973)
"The catastrophe story, whoever may tell it, represents a constructive and positive act by the imagination rather than a negative one, an attempt to confront the terrifying void of a patently meaningless universe by challenging it at its own game. [. . .] Each one of these fantasies represents an arraignment of the finite, an attempt to dismantle the formal structure of time and space which the universe wraps around us at the moment we first achieve consciousness." (James G Ballard, "Cataclysms and Dooms" 1977)
"A continuity exists between inert matter, through the grand design of the early universe, and intelligent life today. Now accepted by all, this cosmic perspective may be seen as a culmination of all the ancient religions." (Gregory Benford, "Starswarmer", 1978)
"Over most of the universe, God was spread in fossil radiation, too old, too thin." (Brian W. Aldiss, "Non-Isotropic", 1978)
"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)
"We see the universe as it is, Father Damien, and these naked truths are cruel ones. We who believe in life, and treasure it, will die. Afterward there will be nothing, eternal emptiness, blackness, nonexistence. In our living there has been no purpose, no poetry, no meaning. Nor do our deaths possess these qualities. When we are gone, the universe will not long remember us, and shortly it will be as if we had never lived at all. Our worlds and our universe will not long outlive us. Ultimately entropy will consume all, and our puny efforts cannot stay that awful end." (George R R Martin, "The Way of Cross and Dragon", 1979)
"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)
"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)
"The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest." (Marc S Zicree, "Survivors" [episode of Babylon 5], 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)
"If mathematical objects exist independently of human thought what else are they independent of? The universe, I suppose." (Cormac McCarthy, "Stella Maris", 2022)
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