Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction
Quotations
Here are some famous quotations about what is science fiction.
“Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe …”
- Brian Aldiss
SF is “… a form of literature that argues through its intuitive force that the individual can shape and change and influence and triumph; that man can eliminate both war and poverty; that miracles are possible …”
- Dick Allen
“… a fiction of things-to-come based on things-on-hand.”
- Benjamin Appel
“… that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings.”
- Isaac Asimov
“Modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us, the possible consequences, and the possible solutions.”
- Isaac Asimov
“Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.”
- Isaac Asimov
“Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all”
- Isaac Asimov
“Science fiction is escape - into reality.”
- Isaac Asimov
“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind--mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.”
- J.G. Ballard
“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”
- J.G. Ballard
“A piece of scientific fiction is a narrative of an imaginary invention or discovery in the natural sciences and consequent adventures and experiences ... It must be a scientific discovery -- something that the author at least rationalizes as possible to science.”
- J.O. Bailey
“SF is a controlled way to think and dream about the future.”
- Gregory Benford
“The science-fiction writer is dangerous because his mind knows no barriers. His imagination is not curbed by normal rules.”
- Robert Bloch
“Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together.”
- Ray Bradbury
“… it is par excellence the literature of the open mind.”
- John Brunner
A genre where “thinking about possibilities” is a way of life …
- Jeffrey Carver
“… science and science fiction writing are two sides of the same coin. Science fiction writing can only be valuable to us if it is written by someone who has some knowledge of science.”
- Arthur C. Clarke
“The majority of science fiction stories are not plausible extrapolations upon our current situation, using available information; rather they are Escheresque impossible objects which use principles of science in much the same way that Escher used rules of geometric symmetry – the rules give form to the impossible imaginative content.”
- Graham P. Collins
Science fiction “is the myth-making principle of human nature today.”
- Lester Del Rey
“Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.”
- Philip K. Dick
“By its nature, science fiction is a literature of planned obsolescence: its themes are constantly morphing and reshaping in response to the reality it always ... (tries) to stay one step of, and its landmark works are fated to become historical artifacts, some more quickly than others. The stories that endure have something more going for them than mindbending extrapolations of science or visionary forecasting.”
- Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
“It's the kind of story where, if you remove the science, it just doesn't work.”
- Bob Eggleton
“Science fiction frequently tries to imagine what life would be like on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery; its setting is often of a kind that appears to us technologically miraculous.”
- Northrup Frye
“By ‘scientification’ I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Allen Poe type of story – a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.”
- Hugo Gernsback
“It concerns itself with the critique, extension, revision, and conspiracy of revolution, all directed against static scientific paradigms. Its goal is to prompt a paradigm shift to a new view that will be more responsive and true to nature.”
- Amit Goswami
“…it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger.”
- James E. Gunn
“Science fiction … can create a new contemporary tension-of-choice, new moral decisions, and so indicate how they may be faced or flunked.”
- Gerald Heard
“…realistic speculation about … events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.”
- Robert Heinlein
“Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in bigger ones of space and time.”
- Damon Knight
“Science fiction means what we point to when we say it.”
- Damon Knight
“Speculative fiction: stories whose objective is to explore, to discover, to learn, by means of projection, extrapolation, analogue, hypothesis-and-paper-experimentation, something about the nature of the universe, of man, or ‘reality’.”
- Judith Merril
“Science fiction is the very literature of change.”
- Frederik Pohl
“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”
- Fredrik Pohl
“At its best, science fiction has no peer in creating another universe of experience, in showing us what we look like in the mirror of technological society or through the eyes of a non-human.”
- Dick Riley
"Science fiction, like medieval painting, addresses itself to the mind, not the eye."
- Joanna Russ
“The literature of ideas”
- Pamela Sargent
“Science fiction is the mainstream literature of a plausible alternative reality.”
- Robert Sawyer
Science fiction is fiction in which “At least one speculative idea is integral to the plot” and when “Whatever science the story uses is plausible in the light of known science.”
- Stanley Schmidt
“Science fiction is essentially a kind of fiction in which people learn about how to live in the real world, visiting imaginary worlds unlike our own, in order to investigate by way of pleasurable thought-experiments how things might be done differently.”
- Brian Stableford
“A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.”
- Theodore Sturgeon
“By challenging the anthropocentrism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.”
- Alvin Toffler