"If [...] you are restless and anxious about the future, study astronomy at once. Your troubles will be reduced amazingly. But your study will reduce them in a singular way, by reducing the importance of everything." (Thomas Hardy, "Two on a Tower", 1882)
"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)
"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)
"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)
"We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable." (Herbert G Wells, "Mind at the End of Its Tether", 1946)
"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
"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)
"Thanks to technology, the reasons for many of the old social problems have passed, and along with them went many of the reasons for psychic distress. But between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today, filled with nostalgia and fear of the future, which cannot be expressed on a purely material plane, is now being represented by a willful seeking after historical anxiety-modes [...] " (Roger Zelazny," He Who Shapes", 1965)
"What are the facts? Again and again and again - what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what ‘the stars foretell,’ avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable ‘verdict of history', - what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your only clue. Get the facts!" (Robert A Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love", 1973)
"If the passage of time is a feature of human consciousness, past and future are functions of the mind." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia" 1974)
"All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life - science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness", [introduction] 1976)
"Her dance spoke of nothing more and nothing less than the tragedy of being alive, and being human. It spoke, most eloquently, of pain. It spoke, most knowingly, of despair. It spoke of the cruel humor of limitless ambition yoked to limited ability, of eternal hope invested in an ephemeral lifetime, of the driving need to try and create an inexorably predetermined future. It spoke of fear, and of hunger, and, most clearly, of the basic loneliness and alienation of the human animal. It described the universe through the eyes of man: a hostile environment, the embodiment of entropy, into which we are all thrown alone, forbidden by our nature to touch another mind save secondhand, by proxy. It spoke of the blind perversity which forces man to strive hugely for a peace which, once attained, becomes boredom. And it spoke of folly, of the terrible paradox by which man is simultaneously capable of reason and unreason, forever unable to cooperate even with himself." (Spider Robinson & Jeanne Robinson, "Stardance", 1977)
"Time is no longer a line along which history, past or future, lies neatly arranged, but a field of great mystery and complexity, in the contemplation of which the mind perceives an immense terror, and an indestructible hope." (Ursula K Le Guin, 1977)
"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)
"So together they left the office and walked into the uncertainty of the rest of their lives.
"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)"Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger." (James Gunn, "Road to Science Fiction" Vol. 2, 1979)
"Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger." (James Gunn, "Road to Science Fiction" Vol. 2, 1979)
"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again [...] the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul." (James G Ballard, Re/Search 8–9, [interview with Andrea Juno and V. Vale], 1984)
"Human brains back then had become such copious and irresponsible generators of suggestions as to what might be done with life, that they made acting for the benefit of future generations seem one of many arbitrary games which might be played by narrow enthusiasts - like poker or polo or the bond market, or the writing of science-fiction novels." (Kurt Vonnegut Jr, "Galapagos" 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)
"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)
"Overfitting is like attending a concert of your favorite band. Depending on the acoustics of the concert venue you will hear both music and noise from the screams of the crowd to reverberations off walls and so on. Overfitting happens when your model perfectly fits both the music and the noise when the intent is to fit the structure (the music). It is generally a result of the predictor being too complex (recall Occams Razor) so that it fits the underlying structure as well as the noise. The consequence is a small or zero test set classification error. Alas, this super low error rate will fail to materialize on future unseen samples. One consequence of overfitting is poor generalization (prediction) on future data." (N D Lewis, "Deep Learning Made Easy with R: A Gentle Introduction for Data Science", 2016)
"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)
