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)