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

"In the cause of science men are expected to suffer." (Jules Verne, "A Journey to the Center of the Earth", 1864)

"This planet doesn’t need new continents, it needs new men." (Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", 1870)

"Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes." (Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray", 1891)

"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet, across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us." (Herbert G Wells, "The War of the Worlds", 1898)

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

"There’s an affinity between men and the machines they make. They make them out of their own brains, really, a sort of mental conception and gestation, and the result responds to the mind that created them, and to all human minds that understand and manipulate them." (Catherine L Moore, "NoWoman Born", 1944)

"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

"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)

"There are and have been worlds and cultures without end, each nursing the proud illusion that it is unique in space and time. There have been men without number suffering from the same megalomania; men who imagined themselves unique, irreplaceable, irreproducible. There will be more [...] more plus infinity." (Alfred Bester, "The Demolished Man", 1953)

"The men of the frontier knew - but how was a girl from Earth to fully understand? H amount of fuel will not power an EDS with a mass of m plus x safely to its destination. To himself and her brother and parents she was a sweet-faced girl in her teens; to the laws of nature she was x, the unwanted factor in a cold equation." (Tom Godwin, "The Cold Equations" 1954)

"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 mysteries of the universe and the questions that scientists strive to answer never come to an end. For that we should be grateful. A universe in which their were no mysteries for curious men to ponder would be a very dull universe indeed."(Isaac Asimov, "The Search for the Elements", 1962)

"I might well retort that many men on Earth have had the presentiment of a! superior being who may one day succeed them but that no scientist, philosopher, or poet  has ever imagined this superhuman in the guise of an ape." (Pierre Boulle, "Planet of the Apes", 1963)

"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)

"[...] the orchard of science is a vast globe-encircling monster, without a map, and known to no one man; indeed, to no group of men fewer than the whole international mass of creative scientists. Within it, each observer clings to his own well-known and well-loved clump of trees. If he looks beyond, it is usually with a guilty sigh." (Isaac Asimov, "View from a Height", 1963)

"[…] it took men about five thousand years, counting from the beginning of number symbols, to think of a symbol for nothing." (Isaac Asimov, "Of Time and Space and Other Things", 1965)

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)

"Someday, the real masters of space would be machines, not men - and he was neither. Already conscious of his destiny, he took a somber pride in his unique loneliness - the first immortal midway between two orders of creation.

He would, after all, be an ambassador; between the old and the new - between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of metal who must one day supersede them.

Both would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead." (Arthur C Clarke, "A Meeting with Medusa", 1971)

"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)