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)