"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)
"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)
"There were boundless, unforeseeable realms, planet on planet, universe on universe, to which we might attain, and among whose prodigies and marvels we could dwell or wander indefinitely. In these worlds, our brains would be attuned to the comprehension of vaster and higher scientific laws, and states of entity beyond those of our present dimensional milieu." (Clark A Smith, "Beyond the Singing Flame", 1931)
"All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)
"In the tide of these wild thoughts we checked our fancy, remembering that only on the rare grains called planets can life gain foothold, and that all this wealth of restless jewels was but a waste of fire." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)
"Rest enough for the individual man - too much, and too soon - and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its winds and) ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning." (Stephen V Benét," By the Waters of Babylon", 1937)
"Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)
"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)
"Other memories encroached, cold, fear-etched memories that reached forhim like taloned, withered claws. Memories of alien lands acrawl with loathesomeness and venom. Strange planets that were strange not because they were alien, but because of the abysmal terror in the very souls of them. Memories of shambling things that triumphed over pitiful peoples whose only crime was they could not fight back." (Clifford D Simak, "Shadow of Life", 1943)
"There they go, off to Mars, just for the ride, thinking that they will find a planet like a seer’s crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they’ll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal." (Ray Bradbury," A Few Notes on The Martian Chronicles", 1950)
"To obtain a mental picture of the distance to the nearest star, compared to the nearest planet, you must imagine a world in which the closest object to you is only five feet away - and there is nothing else to see until you have travelled a thousand miles." (Arthur C Clarke, "We'll Never Conquer Space", 1960)
"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)
"The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth." (James G Ballard, "Which Way to Inner Space?", 1962)
"We cannot predict the new forces, powers, and discoveries that will be disclosed to us when we reach the other planets and set up new laboratories in space. They are as much beyond our vision today as fire or electricity would be beyond the imagination of a fish." (Arthur C Clarke, "Space and the Spirit of Man", 1965)
"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)
"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)
"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)
"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)
"The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realized that it was a system at all and that it wasn't something that was just there." (Douglas N Adams, "Last Chance to See", 1990)
"The dreams of people are in the machines, a planet network of active imaginations hooked into their made-up, make-believe worlds. Artificial reality is taking over; it has its own children." (Storm Constantine, "Immaculate", 1991)
"[…] the idea was for humans to colonize all their former worlds, so that humanity’s fate would not be tied to that of a single planet. (Orson Scott Card, "Ender in Exile", 2008)
"Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called "other", which is simply another universe, another planet, another species." (Theodore Sturgeon)
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