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)