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

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will." (William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", 1601)

"There's such divinity doth hedge a king,

That treason can but peep to what it would." (William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", 1601)

"A divinity must have stirred within them before the crystals did thus shoot and set. Wheels of storm-chariots. The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow-stars. A s surely as the petals of a flower are fixed, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth, pronouncing thus, with emphasis, the number six..." (Henry D Thoreau, "The Journal Of Thoreau" Vol. 2, 1856) 

"In One Dimensions, did not a moving Point produce a Line with two terminal points? In two Dimensions, did not a moving Line produce a Square wit four terminal points? In Three Dimensions, did not a moving Square produce - did not the eyes of mine behold it - that blessed being, a Cube, with eight terminal points? And in Four Dimensions, shall not a moving Cube - alas, for Analogy, and alas for the Progress of Truth if it be not so - shall not, I say the motion of a divine Cube result in a still more divine organization with sixteen terminal points?" (Edwin A Abbott, "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions", 1884)

"Oh, great, divinely bounding wisdom of walls and barriers! They are, perhaps, the greatest of man’s inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"The function of man’s highest faculty, his reason, consists precisely of the continuous limitation of infinity, the breaking up of infinity into convenient, easily digestible portions - differentials. This is precisely what lends my field, mathematics, its divine beauty." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known." (Clifford D Simak, "City", 1952)

"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)

"The infinite fullness of time brings about everything, he thought: even intelligent lobsters, even a divine octopus." (Robert Silverberg, "Homefaring", 1983)

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

"All evils are equal when they are extreme." (Pierre Corneille, "Horace", 1639)

"It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another." (Jonathan Swift, "A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions Between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome,", 1701)

"The extreme limit of wisdom — that's what the public calls madness." (Jean Cocteau, "Le Coq et l'Arlequin", 1918)

"Of course she believed the blessed lie, for in times of extreme peril it is human to be optimistic." (Roman F Starzl, "The Planet of Despair", 1931)

"It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars." (Arthur C Clarke, "The Exploration of Space", 1951)

"The mind can go either direction under stress - toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)

"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) 

"'It bedevils me sometimes why I am the only one to notice the analogy between historical geology and depth psychology', Terrence Burdock mused as they grew lightly profound around the campfire. 'The isostatic principle applies to the mind and the under-mind as well as it does to the surface and? undersurface of the earth. The mind has its erosions and weatherings going on along with its deposits and accumulations. It also has its upthrusts and its stresses. It floats on a similar magma. In extreme cases it has its volcanic eruptions and its mountain building.'" (Raphael A Lafferty, "Continued on Next Rock", 1970)

"Extremes of any sort are a liability, in terms of evolution. Extreme intellect may be as bad for us as extreme physical size was for the dinosaurs." (Joan Slonczewski, "The Wall around Eden", 1989)

"We are all assumed, these days, to reside at one extreme of the opinion spectrum, or another. We are pro-abortion or anti-abortion. We are free traders or protectionist. We are pro-private sector or pro-big government. We are feminists or chauvinists. But in the real world, few of us holds these extreme views. There is instead a spectrum of opinion." (Michael Crichton, "Mediasaurus: The decline of conventional media", [Speech at the National Press Club] 1993) 

"Averages might mean something to bureaucrats and engineers, but the sea had no struck with statistics: it was a succession of unpredictable circumstances and extremes." (Frank Schätzing, "The Swarm", 2004)

Robert Silverberg - Collected Quotes

"It was beyond him how someone could voluntarily let himself get involved in this game of dimension-shifting and mutant-battling. But it takes all sorts to make a continuum." (Robert Silverberg, "MUgwump 4" 1959)

"He swung dizzily along the line of time, as he had done so often before. He saw himself, here and here, and saw others, shadow-figures, dream-figures, lurking behind the curtains of time." (Robert Silverberg, "Open the Sky", 1966)

"Forget it. No, don't forget it. Don't forget anything. Take a lesson from it: collect all the data before shouting nonsense." (Robert Silverberg, "The Man in the Maze", 1969)

"The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant." (Robert Silverberg, "The Man in the Maze", 1969)

"You can make no meaningful evaluations of the universe without the confidence that you are seeing it clearly." (Robert Silverberg, "The Man in the Maze", 1969)

 "You have come to the place where all times are one, where all errors can be unmade, where past and future are fluid and subject to redefinition." (Robert Silverberg, "Breckenridge and the Continuum", 1973)

"He didn't have to observe the niceties of etiquette when talking to a computer." (Robert Silverberg, "Born with the Dead", 1974)

"To a dead the whole universe is plastic, nothing’s real, nothing matters a hell of a lot, it’s all only a joke." (Robert Silverberg, "Born with the Dead", 1974)

"In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can't perceive the greater structures, it's because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn't need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we'd be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing." (Robert Silverberg, "The Stochastic Man", 1975)

"We are born by accident into a purely random universe." (Robert Silverberg, "The Stochastic Man", 1975)

"The only workable time machine ever invented is the science-fiction story." (Robert Silverberg, [introduction] "Trips in Time", 1977)

"The infinite fullness of time brings about everything, he thought: even intelligent lobsters, even a divine octopus." (Robert Silverberg, "Homefaring", 1983)

"Time devours everything. Entire histories vanish. What matters is endurance. The spirit survives and goes onward when the palaces crumble and the kings are forgotten." (Robert Silverberg, "Letters from Atlantis", 1990)

Clive S Lewis - Collected Quotes

"This is called the inductive method. Hypothesis, my dear young friend, establishes itself by a cumulative process: or, to use popular language, if you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact." (Clive S Lewis, "The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism", 1933)

"If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant - but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error." (Clive S Lewis, "Bulverism", 1941)

"The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the 'present state of the question'. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge - to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior - this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that 'history is bunk." (C. S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters", 1942)

"A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on." (Clive S Lewis, "The Great Divorce", 1945)

"A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating." (Clive S Lewis, "Mere Christianity", 1952)

"It is not impossible that our own Model will die a violent death, ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts […]." (Clive S Lewis, “The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature”, 1964)

"The laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time." (Clive S Lewis, "Christian Reflections", 1967)

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” (Clive S Lewis)

"Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them." (Clive S Lewis)

On Experiments (1825-1829)

"[Precision] is the very soul of science; and its attainment afford the only criterion, or at least the best, of the truth of theories, and the correctness of experiments." (John F W Herschel, "A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy", 1830)

"The domain of physics is no proper field for mathematical pastimes. The best security would be in giving a geometrical training to physicists, who need not then have recourse to mathematicians, whose tendency is to despise experimental science. By this method will that union between the abstract and the concrete be effected which will perfect the uses of mathematical, while extending the positive value of physical science. Meantime, the uses of analysis in physics is clear enough. Without it we should have no precision, and no co-ordination; and what account could we give of our study of heat, weight, light, etc.? We should have merely series of unconnected facts, in which we could foresee nothing but by constant recourse to experiment; whereas, they now have a character of rationality which fits them for purposes of prevision." (Auguste Comte, "The Positive Philosophy", 1830)

"The extreme accuracy required in some of our modern inquiries has, in some respects, had an unfortunate influence, by favouring the opinion, that no experiments are valuable, unless the measures are most minute, and the accordance amongst them most perfect." (Charles Babbage, "Reflections on the Decline of Science in England", 1830)

"The loveliest theories are being overthrown by these damned experiments; it's no fun being a chemist anymore." (Justus von Liebig, [letter to Berzelius] 1834)

"Experimental science hardly ever affords us more than approximations to truth; and whenever many agents are concerned we are in great danger of being mistaken." (Sir Humphry Davy, cca. 1836)

"[…] in order that the facts obtained by observation and experiment may be capable of being used in furtherance of our exact and solid knowledge, they must be apprehended and analysed according to some Conception which, applied for this purpose, gives distinct and definite results, such as can be steadily taken hold of and reasoned from […]" (William Whewell, "The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded Upon their History" Vol. 2, 1840)

"Every theorem in geometry is a law of external nature, and might have been ascertained by generalizing from observation and experiment, which in this case resolve themselves into comparisons and measurements. But it was found practicable, and being practicable was desirable, to deduce these truths by ratiocination from a small number of general laws of nature, the certainty and universality of which was obvious to the most careless observer, and which compose the first principles and ultimate premises of the science." (John S Mill, "System of Logic", 1843)

"The hypothesis, by suggesting observations and experiments, puts us upon the road to that independent evidence if it be really attainable; and till it be attained, the hypothesis ought not to count for more than a suspicion." (John S Mill, "A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive", 1843)

"The framing of hypotheses is, for the enquirer after truth, not the end, but the beginning of his work. Each of his systems is invented, not that he may admire it and follow it into all its consistent consequences, but that he may make it the occasion of a course of active experiment and observation. And if the results of this process contradict his fundamental assumptions, however ingenious, however symmetrical, however elegant his system may be, he rejects it without hesitation. He allows no natural yearning for the offspring of his own mind to draw him aside from the higher duty of loyalty to his sovereign, Truth, to her he not only gives his affections and his wishes, but strenuous labour and scrupulous minuteness of attention." (William Whewell, "Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences" Vol. 2, 1847)

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

"Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth." (Jules Verne, "A Journey to the Centre of the Earth", 1864)

"A modern branch of mathematics, having achieved the art of dealing with the infinitely small, can now yield solutions in other more complex problems of motion, which used to appear insoluble. This modern branch of mathematics, unknown to the ancients, when dealing with problems of motion, admits the conception of the infinitely small, and so conforms to the chief condition of motion (absolute continuity) and thereby corrects the inevitable error which the human mind cannot avoid when dealing with separate elements of motion instead of examining continuous motion. In seeking the laws of historical movement just the same thing happens. The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable human wills, is continuous. To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of history." (Lev N Tolstoy, "War and Peace", 1867)

"What is called science today consists of a haphazard heap of information, united by nothing, often utterly unnecessary, and not only failing to present one unquestionable truth, but as often as not containing the grossest errors, today put forward as truths, and tomorrow overthrown." (Leo Tolstoy, "What Is Art?", 1897)

"All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today’s truths become errors tomorrow." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the 'present state of the question'. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge - to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior - this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that 'history is bunk." (C. S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters", 1942)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"Man, as such, is a biological error, possibly a too-large brain joined with a full set of primitive instincts that are no longer appropriate, but an error anyway, and [...] he will eventually destroy himself, or be destroyed by his environment, just as all non-appropriate forms of life seem to thrive for a while then die off." (John T. Phillifent, "That Moon Plaque: Comments by Science Fiction Writers’", 1969)

"The machines didn’t tire and the medi-techs never made computational errors but both lacked an essential something. Something only one human being, no matter how inadequate, could give to another." (Leo P. Kelley, "The Handyman", 1965)

"There were times, he said, when human effort appeared to generate nothing but suffering, error, confusion - but maybe even these times add a little to the sum of human understanding." (Edgar Pangborn, "The World Is a Sphere", 1973)

"You have come to the place where all times are one, where all errors can be unmade, where past and future are fluid and subject to redefinition." (Robert Silverberg, "Breckenridge and the Continuum", 1973)

"Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." (Frank Herbert, "Children of Dune", 1976)

"A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value." (Isaac Asimov, "Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations", 1988)

"Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply." (Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark", 1995)

John W Campbell Jr. - Collected Quotes

"Can you appreciate the crushing hopelessness it brought to me? I, who love science, who see in it, or have seen in it, the salvation, the raising of mankind - to see those wondrous machines, of man’s triumphant maturity, forgotten and misunderstood. The wondrous, perfect machines that tended, protected, and cared for those gentle, kindly people who had - forgotten." (John W Campbell Jr, "Twilight", 1934)

"No average mind can either understand or enjoy science-fiction; it takes an amount of imagination beyond the average man." (John W. Campbell Jr, "Science-Fiction", 1938)

"Too darned good a machine can be a menace, not a help." (John W. Campbell Jr, [introduction] "Cloak of Aesir", 1951)

"Science fiction is the literature of the Technological Era. It, unlike other literatures, assumes that change is the natural order of things, that there are goals ahead larger than those we know." (John W Campbell Jr, [introduction to "The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology"] 1952)

"Science is not a sacred cow - but there are a large number of would-be sacred cowherds busily devoting quantities of time, energy and effort to the task of making it one, so they can be sacred cowherds." (John W Campbell Jr, "Prologue to Analog", [introduction] 1962)

"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)

"That group of writings which is usually referred to as 'mainstream literature' is, actually, a special subgroup of the field of science fiction - for science fiction deals with all places in the Universe, and all times in Eternity, so theliterature of here-and-now is, truly, a subset of science fiction." (John W Campbell Jr, [introduction] Analog I, 1963)

Howard P Lovecraft - Collected Quotes

 "I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. [...] We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon." (Howard P Lovecraft, "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", 1919)

"Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time." (Howard P Lovecraft, "The White Ship", 1919)

"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)

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." (Howard P Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", 1926)

"Non- Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension." (Howard P Lovecraft, "The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories", 1933)

"Scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy. In this case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from numerous authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of certain forces of great power and, so far as the human point of view is concerned, exceptional malignancy." (Howard P Lovecraft, "The Shunned House", 1937)

"Men of broader intellect know that there is no clear distinction between the real and the unreal, that things appear as they seem only by virtue of the delicate physical and mental instruments through which we perceive them." (Howard P Lovecraft)

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

"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)

"I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. [...] We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon." (Howard P Lovecraft, "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", 1919)

"The mind of man is not adjusted for a close observation of phenomena that belong to the cosmos." (Edwin Balmer & Philip Wylie, "When Worlds Collide", 1932)

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

"There are no enemies in science, professor, only phenomena to study." (Charles Lederer, "The Thing (from Another World)", 1951)

"Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it." (Arthur C Clarke, Voices from the Sky", 1965)

"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)

"Time itself, as a phenomenon, is utterly linear and unidirectional." (Orson Scott Card, "PASTWATCH", 1996) 

"Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion." (Iain Banks, "The Algebraist", 2004

"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)

"What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters." (Charles Baudelaire) 

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

"A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance." (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "Flight to Arras", 1942)

"It is the normal lot of people who must live this life [in space] to be - by terrestrial standards - insane. Insanity under such conditions is a useful and logical defense mechanism, an invaluable and salutary retreat from reality." (Charles L Harness, "The Paradox Men", 1949)

"Insanity, gentlemen, is not a catchall for every human action that involves motives we don’t understand. Insanity has its own structure, its own internal logic." (Stanislaw Lem, "The Investigation", 1959)

"The paranoid seemed rational. The formal pattern of logical reasoning appeared undisturbed. Underneath, however, the paranoid suffered from the greatest mental disfigurement possible for a human being. He was incapable of empathy, unable to imagine himself in another person’s role. Hence for him others did not actually exist - except as objects in motion that did or did not affect his well-being." (Philip K Dick, "Clans of the Alphane Moon", 1964)

"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)

"That’s the trouble with computers [...]. Too logical." (Frank Herbert, "Escape Felicity", 1966)

"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)

"Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival." (Frank Herbert, "Chapterhouse: Dune", 1985)

"Where is the world whose people don't prefer a comfortable, warm, and well-worn belief, however illogical, to the chilly winds of uncertainty?" (Isaac Asimov, "Foundation and Earth", 1986)

"Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn’t always beat actual thought." (Terry Pratchett, "The Last Continent", 1998)

"All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others." (Douglas N Adams, "The Salmon of Doubt", 2002)

Alfred E van Vogt - Collected Quotes

"There is nothing more futile than arguing with someone who has no basis for his opinions but a vague backlash of emotions." (Alfred E van Vogt, "The Gryb", 1940)

"What system do men follow if not that of logic?" (Algfred E van Vogt, "Vault of the Beast", 1940)

"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)

"Of all the energies in the universe, time is the most potent." (Alfred E van Vogt, "The Seesaw", 1941)

"Amnesia is the best method of escaping from reality." (Alfred E van Vogt, "The Players of Null-A", 1948)

"And the more technically developed a nation or race is, the more cruel, ruthless, predatory, and commercialized its systems tend to become [...]" (Alfred E van Vogt, "The World of Null-A", 1948)

"Words were subtle, and frequently had little connection with the facts they were supposed to represent." (Alfred E van Vogt, "The Players of Null-A", 1948)

"Space was vast, the journeys through it long and lonely, landing always a stimulating experience, with its prospect of new life forms to be seen and studied." (Alfred E van Vogt, "The Monster", 1948)

"It must be that robots predated all other life. It’s the only logical conclusion." (Alfred E van Vogt, "Final Command", 1949)

"When a people lose the courage to resist encroachment on their rights, then they can't be saved by an outside force. Our belief is that people always have the kind of government they want and that individuals must bear the risks of freedom, even to the extent of giving their lives." (Alfred E van Vogt," The Weapon Shops of Isher", 1951)

"Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: 'There is change. Look, today's fantastic story is tomorrow's fact.'" (Alfred E van Vogt)

George Orwell - Collected Quotes

"The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action." (George Orwell, 1941)

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." (George Orwell, "Animal Farm: A Fairy Story", 1945)

"The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." (George Orwell, "In Front of Your Nose", Tribune, 1946)

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." (George Orwell, "1984", 1949)

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows" (George Orwell, "1984", 1949)

"How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless." (George Orwell, "1984", 1949)

"If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself." (George Orwell, "1984", 1949)

"In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane." (George Orwell, "1984", 1949)

"In the long run, a hierarchal society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance." (George Orwell, "1984", 1949)

"It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure." (George Orwell, "1984", 1949)

"The best books [...] are those that tell you what you know already." (George Orwell, "1984", 1949)

"Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude toward one another, have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other." (George Orwell, "1984", 1949)

"We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness." (George Orwell, "1984", 1949)

"Who controls the past [...] controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." (George Orwell, "1984", 1949)

On Literature: On Calculations (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)

"Either my calculation is correct, or there is no truth in figures." (Jules Verne, "A Journey to the Center of the Earth", 1864)

"Thanks to the courage and devotion of three men, this project of sending a bullet to the moon, once seen as a futile enterprise, had already produced concrete results, with incalculable consequences. The voyagers, imprisoned in their new satellite, had not reached their destination, but at least they had become part of the lunar world; they were in orbit around the celebrity of the night, and, for the first time, the human eye could penetrate all her mysteries." (Jules Verne, "From the Earth to the Moon", 1865)

"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)

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

"Magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten." (Terry Pratchett, "Mort", 1987)

"Adam and Eve are like imaginary number, like the square root of minus one… If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it." (Philip Pullman, "The Golden Compass", 1995)

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

"We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series." (Robert L Stevenson, "Memories and Portraits", 1887)

"Perhaps they have been living there inside the Sun since the Universe was born, and have climbed to peaks of wisdom which we shall never scale. [...]One day they may discover us, by whatever strange senses they possess, as we circle round their mighty, ancient home, proud of our knowledge and thinking ourselves lords of creation. They may not like what they find, for to them we should be no more than maggots, crawling upon worlds too cold to cleanse themselves from the corruption of organic life." (Arthur C Clarke," Out of the Sun", 1958)

"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)

‘"A single human brain can perceive pattern on the scale of stars and galaxie [...] and interpret it as Love.’" (Ursula K Le Guin, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow", 1971)

"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)

"How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scale of it? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty has no moral dimension?" (Kim S Robinson, "Red Mars", 1992)

"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) 

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

"A writer must make up his mind to the possible rough treatment of the critics, who swarm like bacteria whenever there is any literary material on which they can feed." (Oliver W Holmes, "Over the Teacups", 1891)

"It is more than possible; it is probable." (Arthur C Doyle, "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes", 1893)

"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)

"Your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an. infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time." (Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths", 1941)

"Except under controlled conditions, or in circumstances where it is possible to ignore individuals and consider only large numbers and the law of averages, any kind of accurate foresight is impossible." (Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop", 1944)

"The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." (George Orwell, "In Front of Your Nose", Tribune, 1946)

"It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion." (Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects", 1957)

"Science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible." (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)

"People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be." (Isaac Asimov, "The Planet That Wasn't", 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)

"Men have an extraordinary, and perhaps fortunate, ability to tune out of their consciousness the most awesome future possibilities." (Arthur C Clarke, "The Fountains of Paradise", 1979)

"Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself." (Orson Scott Card, "Ender’s Game", 1985)

"I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not 'true' because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself." (Orson Scott Card, "Ender’s Game", [introduction] 1985)

"Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary." (Frank Herbert, "Chapterhouse: Dune", 1985)

"Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth." (Orson Scott Card, "The Tales of Alvin Maker: Seventh Son", 1987)

"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)

"This possibility of sudden change is at the center of the idea of the Tipping Point and might well be the hardest of all to accept. [...] The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." (Malcolm T Gladwell, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", 2000)

"Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change. [...] If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual’s circumstances - and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse - then you don’t have life after death; you just have death." (Iain M Banks, "Look to Windward", 2000)

"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)

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

"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)

"The books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe. They’re about nonexistent people, figments of imagination, if they’re fiction. And if they’re nonfiction, it’s worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one philosopher screaming down another’s gullet." (Ray Bradbury, "Fahrenheit 451", 1953)

"The role of the writer today has totally changed - he is now merely one of a huge army of people filling the environment with fictions of every kind. To survive, he must become far more analytic, approaching his subject matter like a scientist or engineer. If he is to produce fiction at all, he must outimagine everyone else, scream louder, whisper more quietly. For the first time in the history of narrative fiction, it will require more than talent to become a writer." (James G Ballard, "Fictions of Every Kind", 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)

"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)

"To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations." (Aldous Huxley, "Moksha", 1977)

"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)

"Myths are not fiction, but history seen with a poet’s eyes and recounted in a poet’s terms." (Frank Herbert & Bill Ransom, "The Jesus Incident", 1979)

"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)

"I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not 'true' because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself." (Orson Scott Card, "Ender’s Game", [introduction] 1985)

"Science fiction offers its writers chances of embarrassment that no other form of fiction does." (Isaac Asimov, "Robot Dreams" [introduction] 1986)

"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)

"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)

"Although fiction is not fact, paradoxically we need some fictions, particularly mathematical ideas and highly idealized models, to describe, explain, and predict facts.  This is not because the universe is mathematical, but because our brains invent or use refined and law-abiding fictions, not only for intellectual pleasure but also to construct conceptual models of reality." (Mario Bunge, "Chasing Reality: Strife over Realism", 2006)

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

"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)

"Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution, no final number. The social revolution is only one of an infinite number of numbers; the law of revolution is not a social law, but an immeasurably  greater one. It is a cosmic, universal law - like the laws of the conservation of energy and of the dissipation of energy (entropy)." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"Scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy. In this case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from numerous authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of certain forces of great power and, so far as the human point of view is concerned, exceptional malignancy." (Howard P Lovecraft, "The Shunned House", 1937)

"Science is not a sacred cow - but there are a large number of would-be sacred cowherds busily devoting quantities of time, energy and effort to the task of making it one, so they can be sacred cowherds." (John W Campbell Jr, "Prologue to Analog", [introduction] 1962)

"By squandering nuclear energy, polluting asteroids and planets, ravaging the Preserve, and leaving litter everywhere we go, we shall ruin outer space and turn it into one big dump. It is high time we came to our senses and enforced the laws. Convinced that every minute of delay is dangerous, I sound the alarm: Let us save the Universe." (Stanislaw Lem, "Let Us Save the Universe (An Open Letter from Ijon Tichy, Space Traveller", 1966)

"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)

"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)

"Webriding. Flowing through stars, points of flame running through hands that aren’t hands, the psychic You bound up in the physical You that’s just a pattern sliding along the web, held together and existing only by the strength of will of the webrider. Sailing on evanescent wings of mind through the energy/matter currents of space." (Jayge Carr, "Webrider", 1985)

"The law of conservation of energy tells us we can't get something for nothing, but we refuse to believe it." (Isaac Asimov, "Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations", 1988)

"The second law of thermodynamics!: energy is indestructible in quantity but continually changes in form. And it always runs down like water." (Ernesto Cardenal, "Cosmic Canticle", 1993)

"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)

"The universe is full of energy, but much of it is at equilibrium. At equilibrium no energy can flow, and therefore it cannot be used for work, any more than the level waters of a pond can be used to drive a water-wheel. It is on the flow of energy out of equilibrium - the small fraction of 'useful' energy, 'exergy' - that life depends." (Arthur C Clarke, "Firstborn", 2007)

"Beneath the cylindrical brass shield was an emerald, nearly fifteen centimeters in length and precision-cut into an orthorhombic dipyramidal crystal. It was this shape, combined with the high-energy potentiality of this particular variant of beryl that made time travel possible. It had taken him ten years and most of his inheritance to find and modify the emerald." (Mark Onspaugh, "Time’s Cruel Geometry", [in J W Schnarrv (ed), "Timelines"] 2010)

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

"The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans." (Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot", 1950)

"The three fundamental Rules of Robotics […] One, a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm […] Two…a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law […] three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws." (Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot", 1950)

"You just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans." (Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot", 1950)

"That perfected machines may one day succeed us is, I remember, an extremely commonplace notion on Earth. It prevails not only among poets and romantics but in all classes of society. Perhaps it is because it is so widespread, born spontaneously in popular imagination, that it irritates scientific minds. Perhaps it is also for this very reason that it contains a germ of truth. Only a germ: Machines will always be machines; the most perfected robot, always a robot." (Pierre Boulle, "Planet of the Apes", 1963)

"A humanoid robot is like any other machine; it can fluctuate between being a benefit and a hazard very rapidly." (Philip K Dick, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", 1968)

"Do androids dream? Rick asked himself. Evidently; that’s why they occasionally kill their employers and flee here." (Philip K Dick, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", 1968)

"The dark fire waned; the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism - with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it - could never have reconciled itself to." (Philip K Dick, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", 1968)

"Becoming what I call, for lack of a better term, an android, means as I said, to allow oneself to become a means, or to be pounded down, manipulated, made into a means without one’s knowledge or consent - the results are the same. But you cannot turn a human into an android if that human is going to break laws every chance he gets. Androidization requires obedience. And, most of all, predictability. It is precisely when a given person’s response to any given situation can be predicted with scientific accuracy that the gates are open for the wholesale production of the android life form." (Philip K Dick, "The Android and the Human", 1972)

"The robots are not technologically minded. They were not built to be. They were built to bolster human vanity and pride, to meet a strange longing that seems to be built into the human ego - the need to have other humans (or a reasonable facsimile of other humans) to minister to our wants and needs, human slaves to be dominated, human beings over which a man or woman (or a child) can assert authority, thus building up a false feeling of superiority." (Clifford D Simak, "A Choice of Gods", 1972)

"A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island', but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man." (Philip K. Dick, "Man, Androids and Machine", 1975)

"Even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody." (Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", 1979)

"If you were to insist I was a robot, you might not consider me capable of love in some mystic human sense, but you would not be able to distinguish my reactions from that which you would call love - so what difference would it make?" (Isaac Asimov, "Foundation's Edge, 1982)

"Robots may gradually attain a degree of 'self-awareness' and consciousness of their own." (Michio Kaku, "Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century", 2011) 

"The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die - it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives." (Annie Dillard, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek", 2011) 

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

"What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever." (Arthur C Doyle, "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box", 1893)

"The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world-wide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write." (Herbert G Wells, "Mankind in the Making", 1903)

"We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be appreciated by the statistician or the poet." (Edward M Forster, "Howards End", 1910)

"Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance." (John Updike, "Seven Stanzas at Easter", 1960)

"Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development." (Lewis Mumford, "The Conduct Of Life", 1951)

"The peace of being, of unthinking. The peace that comes from a universe ordered in a manner that men could never order it." (Thomas N Scortia, "The Armageddon Tapes - Tape 1", 1974)

"Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody's thought it." (Robert Silverberg, "Born with the Dead", 1974)

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. [...] A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data." (William Gibson, "Neuromancer", 1984)

"He’d used decks in school, toys that shuttled you through the infinite reaches of that space that wasn’t space, mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline." (William Gibson, "Count Zero", 1986)

"Let us leave this festering hellhole. Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all." (Douglas Adams, "Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency", 1987)

"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)

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

"Chance, if such a thing exists, is far-seeing." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1866)

"What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever." (Arthur C Doyle, "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box", 1893)

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes." (Arthur C Doyle, "The Hound of the Baskervilles", 1902)

"What if the world isn’t scattered around us like a jigsaw puzzle - what if it’s like a soup with all kinds of things floating around in it, and from time to time some of them get stuck together by chance to make some kind of whole? What if everything that exists is fragmentary, incomplete, aborted, events with ends but no beginnings, events that only have middles, things that have fronts or rears but not both, with us constantly making categories, seeking out, and reconstructing, until we think we can see total love, total betrayal and defeat, although in reality we are all no more than haphazard fractions. [...] Using religion and philosophy as the cement, we perpetually collect and assemble all the garbage comprised by statistics in order to make sense out of things, to make everything respond in one unified voice like a bell chiming to our glory. But it’s only soup..." (Stanislaw Lem, "The Investigation", 1959)

"You could not predict what would happen in a single instance, a single throw of the dice, a single pitch in the seventh inning, a single toss of the coin. But you could predict three out of five, four out of ten, seven out of sixteen, and to that extent chance governed everyone, all the time. Just as surely as two equals two." (Michael Crichton,"Odds On", 1966)

"Becoming what I call, for lack of a better term, an android, means as I said, to allow oneself to become a means, or to be pounded down, manipulated, made into a means without one’s knowledge or consent - the results are the same. But you cannot turn a human into an android if that human is going to break laws every chance he gets. Androidization requires obedience. And, most of all, predictability. It is precisely when a given person’s response to any given situation can be predicted with scientific accuracy that the gates are open for the wholesale production of the android life form." (Philip K Dick, "The Android and the Human", 1972)

"The chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied."  (Douglas Adams, "The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy", [radio series episode] 1978)

"Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary." (Frank Herbert, "Chapterhouse: Dune", 1985)

"Science fiction offers its writers chances of embarrassment that no other form of fiction does." (Isaac Asimov, "Robot Dreams" [introduction] 1986)

"Magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten." (Terry Pratchett, "Mort", 1987)

"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 the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose." (Paul Auster, "The Locked Room", 1988)

"The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck." (Iain Banks, "The Player of Games", 1988)

"That would be true […] and indeed is true in the main, except that there are only a few types of human communities that actually survive long enough to improve the chances of individual survival." (Orson Scott Card, "First Meetings in Ender's Universe", 2002)

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

"The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language." (Anton Chekhov, [letter to A.S. Suvorin] 1892)

"The function of man’s highest faculty, his reason, consists precisely of the continuous limitation of infinity, the breaking up of infinity into convenient, easily digestible portions - differentials. This is precisely what lends my field, mathematics, its divine beauty." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"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)

"More often than not, nothingness is reluctantly and despairingly taken to be the only hypothesis possible when all the others have failed, since by definition it cannot be disproven and is beyond the scope of reason." (Georges Bernanos, "L'imposture" ["The Impostor"], 1927)

"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)

"That perfected machines may one day succeed us is, I remember, an extremely commonplace notion on Earth. It prevails not only among poets and romantics but in all classes of society. Perhaps it is because it is so widespread, born spontaneously in popular imagination, that it irritates scientific minds. Perhaps it is also for this very reason that it contains a germ of truth. Only a germ: Machines will always be machines; the most perfected robot, always a robot." (Pierre Boulle, "Planet of the Apes", 1963)

"These dwarfs amass knowledge as others do treasure; for this reason they are called Hoarders of the Absolute. Their wisdom lies in the fact that they collect knowledge but never use it." (Stanislaw Lem, "How Erg the Self-Inducing Slew a Paleface", 1965)

"For years astrophysicists have been racking their brains over the reason for the great difference in the amounts of cosmic dust in various galaxies. The answer, I think, is quite simple: the higher a civilization is, the more dust and refuse it produces. This is a problem more for janitors than for astrophysicists." (Stanislaw Lem, "Let Us Save the Universe (An Open Letter from Ijon Tichy, Space Traveller", 1966)

"There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence -  or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them […]" (Arthur C Clarke, "The Lost Worlds of 2001", 1972)

"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)

"The main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did." (Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy", 1979)

"If we knew exactly what to expect throughout the Solar System, we would have no reason to explore it." (Poul Anderson, "The Saturn Game, 1981)

"How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers." (Isaac Asimov, "The Roving Mind", 1983)

"If arithmetical skill is the measure of intelligence, then computers have been more intelligent than all human beings all along. If the ability to play chess is the measure, then there are computers now in existence that are more intelligent than any but a very few human beings. However, if insight, intuition, creativity, the ability to view a problem as a whole and guess the answer by the 'feel' of the situation, is a measure of intelligence, computers are very unintelligent indeed. Nor can we see right now how this deficiency in computers can be easily remedied, since human beings cannot program a computer to be intuitive or creative for the very good reason that we do not know what we ourselves do when we exercise these qualities." (Isaac Asimov, "Machines that Think", 1983)

"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)

"To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time." (Umberto Eco, "Six Walks in the Fictional Woods", 1994)

"Things rarely happen for a single reason. Even the cleverest and most skilled manipulators recognize that their real art lies in making use of that which they cannot predict." (Tom Clancy, "Debt of Honor", 1994)

"The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense." (Ursula K Le Guin," "A Man of the People", 1995)

"Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself." (Erin Morgenstern, "The Night Circus", 2011)

"Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and Universe there is a reason." (Douglas N Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Scripts" Vol. 2, 2012)

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

"Conscience is your magnetic needle. Reason is your chart." (Joseph Cook, "Conscience", 1879)

"What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever." (Arthur C Doyle, "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box", 1893)

"The function of man’s highest faculty, his reason, consists precisely of the continuous limitation of infinity, the breaking up of infinity into convenient, easily digestible portions - differentials. This is precisely what lends my field, mathematics, its divine beauty." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young." (Isaac Asimov, "Pebble in the Sky", 1950)

"There is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reason on the unforeseen." (Gilbert K Chesterton, "The Father Brown omnibus", 1951)

"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 paranoid seemed rational. The formal pattern of logical reasoning appeared undisturbed. Underneath, however, the paranoid suffered from the greatest mental disfigurement possible for a human being. He was incapable of empathy, unable to imagine himself in another person’s role. Hence for him others did not actually exist - except as objects in motion that did or did not affect his well-being." (Philip K Dick, "Clans of the Alphane Moon", 1964)

"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)

"Analogic reasoning works when you have the right reference frame. We need a new one."(James Tiptree Jr, "Mamma Come Home" ["The Mother Ship"], The Worlds of IF Science Fiction, 1968)

"I find it more difficult, but also much more fun, to get the right answer by indirect reasoning and before all the evidence is in. It’s what a theoretician does in science. But the conclusions drawn in this way are obviously more risky than those drawn by direct measurement, and most scientists withhold judgment until there is more direct evidence available. The principal function of such detective work - apart from entertaining the theoretician - is probably to so annoy and enrage the observationalists that they are forced, in a fury of disbelief, to perform the critical measurements." (Carl Sagan, "The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective", 1975)

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

"Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action. We cannot learn men from books." (Benjamin Disraeli, "Vivian Grey", 1826)

"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)

"This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer." (Lev N Tolstoy, "War and Peace", 1867)

"The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world-wide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write." (Herbert G Wells, "Mankind in the Making", 1903)

"The new mathematics is a sort of supplement to language, affording a means of thought about form and quantity and a means of expression, more exact, compact, and ready than ordinary language." (Herbert G Wells, "Mankind in the Making", 1903)

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." (George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-Four", 1949

"Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young." (Isaac Asimov, "Pebble in the Sky", 1950)

"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)

"To my way of thinking it is precisely because time travel involves such fascinating paradoxes that we can conclude, even in the absence of other evidence, that time travel is impossible." (Isaac Asimov, 1954)

"We’re free out here, really free for the first time. We’re floating, literally. Gravity can’t bow our backs or break our arches or tame our ideas. You know, it’s only out here that stupid people like us can really think. The weightlessness gets our thoughts and we can sort them. Ideas grow out here like nowhere else - it’s the right environment for them. Anyone can get into space, if he wants to hard enough. The ticket is a dream." (Fritz Leiber," The Beat Cluster", 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 offers a sounder basis on which to formulate systems of thought and ethics." (Michael Moorcock, "Behold the Man", 1967)

"Thought itself is a disease of the brain, a degenerative condition of matter. [...] The mind defends itself against the disintegrative process of creativity. It begins to jell, notions solidify into inalterable systems, which simply refuse to be broken down and reformed." (Thomas M Disch, "Camp Concentration", 1968)

"Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and has powers of reality." (Frank Herbert, "Dune Messiah", 1969)

"You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia", 1974)

"Intellectualism tends to foster negative thinking and may lead to psychosis, and those suffering from it should ideally be treated, as Professor Arca was treated, and released if still competent." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Diary of the Rose", 1976)

"It is amazing how banal most people’s minds are. [...] I used to think how wonderful other people’s minds would be, how wonderful it was going to be to share in all the different worlds, the different colors of their passions and ideas. How naïve I was!" (Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘"The Diary of the Rose", 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)

"It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be - and naturally this means that there must be an accurate perception of the world as it will be. This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking, whether he likes it or not, or even whether he knows it or not. Only so can the deadly problems of today be solved." (Isaac Asimov, [foreword to Robert Holdstock (Ed.), "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction] 1978)

"There're two kinds of people - those who think there are two kinds of people and those who have more sense." (James Tiptree Jr, "Up the Walls of the World", 1978)

"We take foul medicines to improve our health; so we must entertain foul thoughts on occasion, to strengthen wisdom." (Brian W Aldiss, "The Small Stones of Tu Fu", 1978)

"Thought is a matrix which engenders its own reality. The ideas, concepts, belief-systems that your ancestors trapped have become your trap." (Alfred A Attanasio, "Radix", 1981)

"A stray thought, wandering through the dimensions in search of a mind to harbour it, slid into his brain." (Terry Pratchett, "The Colour of Magic", 1983)

"Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization, not just download data into student skulls, and the values of the academic community are strongly at odds with those of all would-be information empires. Teachers at all levels, from kindergarten up, have proven to be shameless and persistent software and data pirates. Universities do not merely ‘'leak information' but vigorously broadcast free thought." (Bruce Sterling, "The Hacker Crackdown", 1992)

"We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless." (Cormac McCarthy, "The Crossing", 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)

"And don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that things you didn’t intend or plan don’t matter. It’s a big, disorganised multiverse out there - an accident of stars. Almost nothing ever works out like we want it to, and when it does, there’s guaranteed to be unexpected consequences. Randomness is what separates life from entropy, but it’s also what makes it fun." (Foz Meadows, "An Accident of Stars", 2016)

"The process of thinking itself requires us to view the universe in the direction of entropy, since an abstraction always involves information loss, since symbols 'abstract' complexity from observed objects." (John C Wright, "Awake in the Night Land", 2014)

"If mathematical objects exist independently of human thought what else are they independent of? The universe, I suppose." (Cormac McCarthy, "Stella Maris", 2022)