"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" (Arthur C Doyle, "The Sign of Four" , 1890)
"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet, across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us." (Herbert G Wells, "The War of the Worlds", 1898)
"He built up impossible situations, devised great travels and adventures, accepted shaky premises and theories, dallied with metaphysical speculation. He wandered to improbable dimensions, conversed with strange beings that lived on unknown worlds, battled with vicious entities that spawned outside the pale of time and space, rescued civilizations tottering on the brink of horrible destruction." (Clifford D Simak, "Earth for Inspiration", 1941)
"It had just dawned on him, with the dazzling glow of revelation, that the whole course of anybody’s life was determined by improbable accidents." (Damon Knight, "You’re Another", 1955)
"The capacity of humans to believe in what seems to me highly improbable - from table tapping to the superiority of their children - has never beenplumbed. Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness." (Robert A Heinlein, "Stranger in a Strange Land", 1961)
"It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable." (Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone, "The Fugitive", 1962)
"Phrased rather too simply, science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities." (Miriam Allen deFord, "Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow", 1971)
"In the wastes of nonbeing it is born, flickers out, is born again and holds together, swells and spreads. In lifelessness it lives, against the gray tide of entropy it strives, improbably persists, gathering itself into ever richer complexities until it grows as a swelling wave. (James Tiptree Jr., "She Waits for All Men Born", 1976)
"The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit." (Douglas Adams, "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul", 1988)
"The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks." (Douglas Adams, "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul", 1988)
No comments:
Post a Comment