Science Fiction Books

"You must understand — and every year it becomes increasingly difficult to understand — how entirely different the world was then from what it is now. It was a dark world; it was full of preventable disorder, preventable diseases, and preventable pain of harshness and stupid unpremeditated cruelties; but yet, it may be even by virtue of the general darkness, there were moments of a rare and evanescent beauty that seems no longer possible in my experience. The Great Change has come for ever more, happiness and beauty are our atmosphere, there is peace on earth and good will to all men. None would dare to dream of returning to the sorrows of the former time, and yet that misery was pierced, ever and again its grey curtain was stabbed through and through by joys of an intensity, by perceptions of a keenness that it seems to me are now altogether gone out of life."

"Already we begin to forget how modern an invention is personal cleanliness. It is a fact that Parload had never stripped for a swim in his life; never had a simultaneous bath all over his body since his childhood. No one in fifty of us did in the days of which I am telling you."

"We live now in these days, when the Great Change has been in most things accomplished, in a time when everyone is being educated to a sort of intellectual gentleness, a gentleness that abates nothing from our vigour, and it is hard to understand the stifled and struggling manner to which my generation of common young men did its thinking. To think at all about certain questions was an act of rebellion that set one oscillating between the furtive and the defiant. People begin to find Shelley — for all his melody — noisy and ill-conditioned now because his Anarchs have vanished, yet there was a time when novel thought had to go to that tune of breaking glass."

"This is the story that happy, active-looking old man in the pleasant place had written."

"I have set myself to write the story of the Great Change, so far as it has affected my own life and the lives of one or two people closely connected with me, primarily to please myself."

"He put down his pen and sighed the half-resentful sigh — "ah! you work, you! how you gratify and tire me!" — of a man who has been writing to his satisfaction."

"The old life seems so cut off from the new, so alien and so unreasonable, that at times I find it bordering upon the incredible. The data have gone, the buildings and places. I stopped dead the other afternoon in my walk across the moor, where once the dismal outskirts of Swathinglea straggled towards Leet, and asked, "Was it here indeed that I crouched among the weeds and refuse and broken crockery and loaded my revolver ready for murder? Did ever such a thing happen in my life? Was such a mood and thought and intention ever possible to me? Rather, has not some queer nightmare spirit out of dreamland slipped a pseudo-memory into the records of my vanished life? There must be many alive still who have the same perplexities. And I think too that those who are now growing up to take our places in the great enterprise of mankind, will need many such narratives as mine for even the most partial conception of the old world shadows that came before our day. It chances too that my case is fairly typical of the Change; I was caught midway in a gust of passion; and a curious accident put me for a time in the very nucleus of the new order. . . ."

"I saw a grey-haired man, a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing. He seemed to be in a room in a tower, very high, so that through the tall window on his left one perceived only distances, a remote horizon of sea, a headland, and that vague haze and glitter in the sunset that many miles away marks a city. All the appointments of this room were orderly and beautiful, and in some subtle quality, in this small difference and that, new to me and strange. They were in no fashion I could name, and the simple costume the man wore suggested neither period nor country. It might, I thought, be the Happy Future, or Utopia; an errant mote of memory, Henry James's phrase and story of "The Great Good Place" twinkled across my mind, and passed and left no light."

"One thing that I said I can remember. "I wish at times," said I, with a gesture at the heavens, "that comet of yours or some such thing would indeed strike this world — and wipe us all away, strikes, wars, tumults, loves, jealousies, and all the wretchedness of life!""

"We saw everything simple, as young men will. We had our angry, confident solutions, and whosoever would criticise them was a friend of the robbers. It was a clear case of robbery, we held, visibly so; there in those great houses lurked the Landlord and the Capitalist, with his scoundrel the Lawyer, with his cheat the Priest, and we others were all the victims of their deliberate villainies. No doubt they winked and chuckled over their rare wines, amidst their dazzling, wickedly-dressed women, and plotted further grinding for the faces of the poor. And amidst all the squalor on the other hand, amidst brutalities, ignorance, and drunkenness, suffered multitudinously their blameless victim, the Working Man. And we, almost at the first glance, had found all this out, it had merely to be asserted now with sufficient rhetoric and vehemence to change the face of the whole world. The Working Man would arise — in the form of a Labour Party, and with young men like Parload and myself to represent them — and come to his own, and then — ? Then the robbers would get it hot, and everything would be extremely satisfactory. Unless my memory plays me strange tricks, that does no injustice to the creed of through and action that Parload and I held as the final result of human wisdom. We believed it with heat, and rejected with heat the most obvious qualifications of its harshness. At times in our great talks we were full of heady hopes for the near triumph of our doctrine, more often our mood was hot resentment at the wickedness and stupidity that delayed so plain and simple a reconstruction of the order of the world. Then we grew malignant, and thought of barricades and significant violence."

"You will consider those notions of my youth poor silly violent stuff; particularly if you are of the younger generation born since the Change you will be of that opinion. Nowadays the whole world thinks clearly, thinks with deliberation, pellucid certainties; you find it impossible to imagine how any other thinking could have been possible. Let me tell you then how you can bring yourself to something like the condition of our former state. In the first place you must get yourself out of health by unwise drinking and eating, and out of condition by neglecting your exercise; then you must contrive to be worried very much and made very anxious and uncomfortable, and then you must work very hard for four or five days and for long hours every day at something too petty to be interesting, too complex to be mechanical, and without any personal significance to you whatever. This done, get straightway into a room that is not ventilated at all, and that is already full of foul air, and there set yourself to think out some very complicated problem. In a little while you will find yourself in a state of intellectual muddle, annoyed, impatient, snatching at the obvious, presently choosing and rejecting conclusions haphazard. Try to play chess under such conditions and you will play stupidly and lose your temper. Try to do anything that taxes the brain or temper and you will fail. Now the whole world before the Change was as sick and feverish as that; it was worried and over-worked and perplexed by problems that would not get stated simply, that changed and evaded solution, it was in an atmosphere that had corrupted and thickened past breathing; there was no thorough cool thinking in the world at all. There was nothing in the mind of the world anywhere but half-truths, hasty assumptions, hallucinations, and emotions. Nothing..."

"I know it seems incredible, that already some of the younger men are beginning to doubt the greatness of the Change our world has undergone, but read — read the newspapers of that time. Every age becomes mitigated and a little ennobled in our minds as it recedes into the past. It is the part of those who like myself have stories of that time as well, to supply, by a scrupulous spiritual realism, some antidote to that glamour."

"True, thank you, brother."

"True, I lie, I do! I was on the ship, hidden in the cargo hold. After I escaped the mining platform, there were those who wanted to bring me back to work in the mines. But I longed for Phindar. So here I am!"

"But why did you hide? And since you are native Phindians, why didn't you just land?"

"Fear. It is everywhere."

"What, Jedi? You send a child to fight me? Is this some insult?"

"So I know him? I am expected to know every Phindian in the galaxy?"

"Jedi, you think yourself to be a fair man. But when Hutts and Humans argue, even the fairest of men take sides against my kind."

"Good question, very smart, Obawan."

"I don't mean to sound greedy, but may I have your meat?"

"We are to do."

"You weren't going to say goodbye? You were just going to leave?"

"Yes, we were talking about you, O Great Jemba. Come in... if you can."

"We are not to know."

"Not a thief, brother! A freedom fighter who steals!"

"Space and Time! Two minor omissions that no one is likely to notice."

"Most men, standing knee-deep in gold, would talk about that."

"“That’s why I was careful to say whenever some great prince sees fit to build it. If not the Tsar, then someone else who will come along after my death.” ”Or after mine, or my son’s or my grandson’s,” Johann says. “Human nature being what it is, I fear that this will only happen when the things that the Logic Mill is good at become important to a war.”"

"The mechanical world decays. Counterpoised against this tendency to decline must be some creative principle: the active seed--the Subtile Spirit."

"Though you, and most other Fellows of the Royal Society, are true Christians, and believers in Free Will, the very doctrines and methods that the Royal Society has promulgated have caused many to question the existence of God. ... As so much of civilization is rooted in those beliefs, this strikes me as one way in which our System of the World might be set up wrongly and thus self-doomed."

"But I'd have you know that my Stupidity and my Skepticism are two sides of the same coin, and are of a very particular kind, which is carefully thought out. ... The imbalance between the grand mysteries of the Universe as opposed to our own feeble faculties, leads us to set very modest expectations as to what we shall and shan't be able to understand--and makes us passing suspicious of anyone who propounds dogma or seems to phant'sy he has got it all figured out. "Pray explain how it is that there may be such a thing as free will, and a spirit that may do as it pleases, unbound by the Mathematick laws of our Mechanical Philosophy."

"We are at a fork in the road just now. One way takes us to a wholly new way of managing human affairs. It is a system I have helped, in my small way, to develop: the Royal Society, the Bank of England, Recoinage, the Whigs, and the Hanoverian Succession are all elements of it. The other way leads us to Versailles, and the rather different scheme that the King of France has got going there."

"“I spied ‘em again this morning, Tomba! …I looked to the West and saw ‘em, all lit up by the red sun shining in off the sea. A line of hills, or mountains if you please. Laid out, waiting for us, like baked apples in a pan.”"

"The sorts who found a market a congenial and rewarding place to be, were those who thought quickly on their feet, and adapted to unlooked-for happenings with facility; they were, in a word, mercurial."

"During lulls they engaged in Solomon Kohan’s idea of small talk: ”This is an interesting place.” “I am pleased you find it interesting.” “It puts me in mind of an operation I used to have in Jerusalem a long time ago.” “Now that you mention it, the full name of the Templars was the Knights of the Temple of Solomon. So if you are that Solomon—” “Do not play word games with me. I refer, not to this hole in the ground, which is but an indifferent crypt for long-forgotten knights, but to what lies over.” “The Court of Technologickal Arts?” “If that is what you call it.” “What would you call it?” “A temple.”"

"“Which means you have ways of knowing things that we erudite fellows don’t. We have to be satisfied with practicing our religion.” “You make it sound unsatisfactory. Change your mind about this. It is better to know why you know things than simply to have things revealed to you.”"

"I'm keen to know whether the next English King is going to be German or French."

"“Charles White was asking me a lot of odd questions…. He is planning something—“ ”Oh, he planned it ages ago. Presently he is doing it. It is I who am planning something.” “A war?” “Much nastier: a Parliamentary inquiry.”"

"Sergeant Shaftoe was not the sort who would admit to being startled or impressed by anything, but at least he did not look bored or contemptuous — a signal achievement for Roger Comstock."

"Though this was not the most noble person who had ever set foot in the establishment (an honor that would have to go to Peter, or — who knows? — Solomon), he was unquestionable the best-dressed, and identifiable, from a thousand yards, as a courtier… “Frightfully sorry to intrude,” said the courtier, “but word has reached the Household that an important Man has come to London incognito. … From Muscovy, ‘tis said … The Lady of said Household is deathly ill. On her behalf, I have come to greet the said Gentleman, and to observe the requisite formalities.” Daniel nodded out the window toward the melee. “As we say in Boston: get in line.”"

"A quarter of a mile south of the dogleg in the road….the frontier of London could be discerned by the Wise in the Ways of Real Estate. The most infallible sign of which was that, here, the track leading to Black Mary’s Hole had been improved with a name, Coppice Row, devised to conjure forth, from the fevered brains of would-be buyers, phant’sies of a cozy and bucolic character, be they never so removed from Truth."

"“...why, you just tell him that it was done by the Red-Neck Ronin, and that we went that-away!” And he thrusts his wakizashi into the untamed West…. “Let’s head for the hills, boys.”"

"“Sir, my admiration for your work is mingled with wonder that a man of your age and dignity is out doing things like this.” Daniel turned to look him in the eye; and his creased face was grave and calm in the morning light. He looked nothing like the daft codger who had come to dinner yesterday evening and embarrassed the other English by dribbling wine down his shirt-front. “Listen to me. I did not wish to be summoned by your Princess. Summoned, I did not wish to come. But having been summoned, and having come, I mean to give a good account of myself. That’s how I was taught by my father, and the men of his age who slew Kings and swept away not merely Governments but whole Systems of Thought, like Khans of the Mind. I would have my son in Boston know of my doings, and be proud of them, and carry my ways forward to another generation on another continent. Any opponent who does not know this about me, stands at a grave disadvantage; a disadvantage I am not above profiting from.”"

"“When you smoke your pipe, you feel an initial rush of stimulation, followed by a calmness, a steadying of the nerves. This is but a trace, a shadow, of nicotine poisoning. If you were cut with this dagger, that relaxation of the nerves would advance to the point where you would simply forget to breathe, and drown in air … every time you smoke tobacco, you are prefiguring your own death.” “Horrid … it makes me want to smoke something just to calm down.” “Mr. Hooke experimented with an herb called bhang that would cure what ails you — alas, it is harder to get.”"

"“Because though I have not done violence I have seen rather a lot of it. Not all of the men who employ it are stupid, or evil. Only most of them. The rest use it reluctantly, as a way, when all else has failed, of seizing the main chance. Thus you tonight. Your mother will understand this and get her equilibrium back. But like a man who imbibes tobacco-smoke, you have died a little death tonight. I do not recommend that you become addicted to it.”"

""Why does the tide rush out to the sea?" "The influence of the sun and the moon." "Yet you and I cannot see the sun or the moon. The water does not have senses to see, or a will to follow them. How then do the sun and moon, so far away, affect the water?" "Gravity", responded Colonel Barnes, lowering his voice like a priest intoning the name of God, and glancing about to see whether Sir Isaac Newton were in earshot. "That's what everyone says now. 'Twas not so when I was a lad. We used to parrot Aristotle and say it was in the nature of water to be drawn up by the moon. Now, thanks to our fellow-passenger, we say 'gravity'. It seems a great improvement. But is it really? Do you understand the tides, Colonel Barnes, simply because you know to say 'gravity'?"."

"There is nothing quite so civilized as to be recognized in public places as the author of books no one has read."

"“Thank you, guv’nor,” the brewer said to the old man... “But I couldn’t possibly.” And he tossed the coin back… “If it was some other bloke in there, I’d take your money, guv. But this one’s on the house.” “You are a credit to your profession, sir.” Returned the old man, “as if it needed any.”"

"Condemn an Englishman to hell, and he'd plant a bed of petunias and roll out a nice bowling-green on the brimstone."