Science Fiction Books

"Gulliver's Travels is to early modern philosophy what Aristophanes’ The Clouds was to early ancient philosophy. … Swift objects to Enlightenment because it encourages a hypertrophic development of mathematics, physics and astronomy, thus returning to the pre-Socratic philosophy that Aristophanes had criticized for being unselfconscious or unable to understand man. But, unlike pre-Socratic philosophy, which had no interest in politics at all, this science wished to rule and could rule. The new science had indeed generated sufficient power to rule, but in order to do so had had to lose the human perspective. In other words, Swift denied that modern science had actually established a human or political science. All to the contrary, it had destroyed it."

"Poor Nations are hungry, and rich Nations are proud, and Pride and Hunger will ever be at Variance."

"Three kings … showed with great strength of reason, that the royal throne could not be supported without corruption, because that positive, confident, restive temper, which virtue infused into man, was a perpetual clog to public business."

"He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers."

"It was with extreme difficulty that I could bring my master to understand the meaning of the word opinion, or how a point could be disputable; because reason taught us to affirm or deny only where we are certain; and beyond our knowledge we cannot do either. So that controversies, wranglings, disputes, and positiveness in false or dubious propositions, are evils unknown among the Houyhnhnms. In the like manner when I used to explain to him our several systems of natural philosophy, he would laugh that a creature pretending to reason, should value itself upon the knowledge of other people’s conjectures, and in things, where that knowledge, if it were certain, could be of no use. Wherein he agreed entirely with the sentiments of Socrates, as Plato delivers them."

"For if you throw among five Yahoos as much food as would be sufficient for fifty, they will, instead of eating peaceably, fall together by the ears, each single one impatient to have all to itself."

"The many virtues of those excellent quadrupeds placed in opposite view to human corruptions, had so far opened my eyes and enlarged my understanding, that I began to view the actions and passions of man in a very different light, and to think the honour of my own kind not worth managing; which, besides, it was impossible for me to do before a person of so acute a judgment as my master, who daily convinced me of a thousand faults in myself, whereof I had not the least perception before, and which with us would never be numbered even among human infirmities. I had likewise learned from his example an utter detestation of all falsehood or disguise; and truth appeared so amiable to me, that I determined upon sacrificing every thing to it."

"I told him...that we ate when we were not hungry, and drank without the provocation of thirst."

"And he gave it for his opinion, that whosoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together."

"If the censure of the Yahoos could any way affect me, I should have great reason to complain, that some of them are so bold as to think my book of travels a mere fiction out of mine own brain, and have gone so far as to drop hints, that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more existence than the inhabitants of Utopia. Indeed I must confess, that as to the people of Lilliput, Brobdingrag (for so the word should have been spelt, and not erroneously Brobdingnag), and Laputa, I have never yet heard of any Yahoo so presumptuous as to dispute their being, or the facts I have related concerning them; because the truth immediately strikes every reader with conviction. And is there less probability in my account of the Houyhnhnms or Yahoos, when it is manifest as to the latter, there are so many thousands even in this country, who only differ from their brother brutes in Houyhnhnmland, because they use a sort of jabber, and do not go naked? I wrote for their amendment, and not their approbation. The united praise of the whole race would be of less consequence to me, than the neighing of those two degenerate Houyhnhnms I keep in my stable; because from these, degenerate as they are, I still improve in some virtues without any mixture of vice."

"Big-endians and small-endians."

"It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown."

"They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man’s goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning."

"Ingratitude is among them a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries: for they reason thus; that whoever makes ill returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of mankind, from whom he has received no obligation, and therefore such a man is not fit to live."

"I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

"It seems to me that we do not know nearly enough about ourselves; that we do not often enough wonder if our lives, or some events and times in our lives, may not be analogues or metaphors or echoes of evolvements and happenings going on in other people? — or animals? — even forests or oceans or rocks? — in this world of ours or, even, in worlds or dimensions elsewhere."

"What lies behind facts like these: that so recently one could not have said Scott was not perfect without earning at least sorrowful disapproval; that a year after the Gang of Four were perfect, they were villains; that in the fifties in the United States a nothing-man called McCarthy was able to intimidate and terrorise sane and sensible people, but that in the sixties young people summoned before similar committees simply laughed."

"In fact, it is no longer possible for them to think of war except in terms of uniforms. This mental set now infects every aspect of their lives. There is a certain type of covering for the lower limbs, in thick, unyielding cloth, always of the same color, and very tight, emphasizing the buttocks and the genitals. It is not only worn in every corner of the "Empire," but has spread to the near planets of Sirius as well. A young person who for some reason or another does not own this garment will regard himself or herself as an outcast, and will be so regarded by others."

"We looked down at a glassy glittering icy place many days walking across and very deep, between enormous icy black peaks. All we looked at had a glassy awfulness that hurt into our dying eyes; and as we peered down over the edge of the miniature valley we were stranded in at the top of the mountain peak, we knew we would never leave it. How could we, weak as we were, descend the ghastly precipices of that peak? And so, for the last time with our old eyes, we sat close and looked into each other's faces, until, one after another, our faces shuttered themselves in death, and our bundles of bones settled inside the heaps of our shag-skin coats, so that, as we slid away from that scene, and saw it with eyes we had not known we possessed, all we could see was what looked like a herd of beasts crouched in sleep or in death high up there on a mountaintop."

"In a universe that is all gradations of matter, from gross to fine to finer, so that we end up with everything we are composed of in a lattice, a grid, a mesh, a mist, where particles or movements so small we cannot observe them are held in a strict and accurate web, that is nevertheless nonexistent to the eyes we use for ordinary living — in this system of fine and finer, where then is the substance of a thought?"

"But what these had been, our peoples, our selves — were with us then, were us, had become us — could not be anything but us, their representatives — and we, together, the Representative, at last found the pole that was the extremity of our old planet, the dark cold pole that had been built, once, to guide in the space-fleets of Canopus, when they visited us. There we left that planet, and came to where we are now. We, the Representative, many and one, came here, where Canopus tends and guards and instructs."

"It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda."

"Mechanistic science is concerned above all with order. Despite changing conceptions of the domain and scope of scientific investigation, one constant for scientists throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth was their common ambition to articulate the laws (preferably expressed in mathematical equations) behind various material phenomena. A corollary assumption — perhaps the most distinctively nineteenth-century contribution to the mechanistic tradition — is the belief that all phenomena possess such regularities. … Mechanistic science's legacy for the late twentieth century consists not only in a handful of methodological practices that have endured with the scientific community, but also in an array of widely disseminated assumptions about knowledge, strategies for organization, and conceptions of an ideal order. … the Canopus novels incorporate a drive for factual plenitude, which may or may not yield an underlying meaning or order, and an assumption of cosmic regularity, which may or may not be empirically accessible … the Canopus novels operate on the principle of defamiliarization. By amalgamating the history of the earth into the fictional cosmos of Canopus, Sirius, and Shammat, the novels critique current modes of thought and ways of doing things while at the same time offering alternatives. Yet the "otherness" of the alternative perspective does not really rest on radical novelty of vision. It derives rather from a thoroughly mechanistic assumption of uniform space-time and an observer independent of the events he/she observes. The defamiliarization is due to the narrator's distance from the events described and from his/her relative freedom from the subjective distortion that plagues Lessing's earthbound characters."

"Anyone could clutch at a child and mark its features: "This nose is mine, and that his, and that my mother's, and that his father's ..." Anybody, even a horse or a dog, could calculate streams of inheritance in that way. And all that was pleasant enough, and of course no one would refuse the delights of watching for the appearance of this or that trait in a child. But that was not even the half of it ... one might not, most definitely could not, say of a child, "mine, mine," or "ours, ours," — meaning, only, parenthood. For what was real and fine and precious in this new being was in relation only with ... somewhere else ..."

"What are all these guises, aspects, presentations? Only manifestations of what we all are at different times, according to how these needs are pulled out of us. I write in these bald words the deepest lessons of my life, the truest substance of what I have learned. I am not only a Chronicler of Zone Three, or only partially, for I also share in Al*Ith's condition of being ruler insofar as I can write of her, describe her. I am woman with her (though I am a man) as I write of her femaleness — and Dabeeb's. I am Ben Ata when I summon him into my mind and try to make him real. I am ... what I am at the moment I am that."

"This is certainly not the place for a discourse about what festivals are for. Discussions on this theme were plentiful during that phase of preparation and on the whole were fruitless. My experience is that discussion is fruitless. What sets forth and demonstrates is the sight of events in action, is living through these events and understanding them."

"When the festival was over, that was the end of it all. And I do not think I am being fanciful when I say that this was at least partly because it had already taken place — but elsewhere. After all, this story of Al*Ith has taught us all that what goes on in one Zone affects the others, even when we believe we are hostile, or forget everything that goes on outside our own borders. We share and exchange our times of sluggishness, insularity, self-applause. When those women stove and struggled to lift their poor heads up so they could see our mountain towering over them it was as if they were secretly pouring energy and effort into springs that fed us all."

"Yet there is a mystery here and it is not one that I understand: without the sting of otherness, of — even — the vicious, without the terrible energies of the underside of health, sanity, sense, then nothing works or can work. I tell you that goodness — what we in our ordinary daylight selves call goodness: the ordinary, the decent — these are nothing without the hidden powers that pour forth continually from their shadow sides. Their hidden aspects contained and tempered."

"All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins."

"This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to sudden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes."

"So that this beautiful realm of hers was held in her mind extended, or lengthened: it had been finite, bounded, known utterly and in every detail, self-enclosed ... but now it lapped and rippled out and upwards beyond there into hinterlands that were like unknown possibilities in her own mind."

"War. Fighting. Men ... every man in the whole realm is in the army.... Every man in uniform ... An economy entirely geared to war ... but there is not much war ... hardly any fighting ... yet every man a soldier from birth till death ... Men ... all men for fighting ... but no war, no wars to fight ... what is it, what does it mean?""

"What a phenomenon it has been — science fiction, space fiction — exploding out of nowhere, unexpectedly of course, as always happens when the human mind is being forced to expand; this time starwards, galaxy-wise, and who knows where next."

"There was a continuous movement now, from Zone Five to Zone Four. And from Zone Four to Zone Three, and from us, up the pass. There was a lightness, a freshness, and an enquiry and a remaking and an inspiration where there had been only stagnation. And closed frontiers. For this is how we all see it now."

"Why is it that writers, who by definition operate by the use of their imaginations, are given so little credit for it: we "make things up." This is our trade. I remember, before I myself attempted this genre of space fiction, reading an agreeable tale about a species of highly intelligent giraffes who travelled by spaceship from their solar system to ours, to ask if our sun was behaving cruelly to us as theirs had recently taken to doing to them. I remember saying to myself: Well, at least the writer of this tale is not likely to get industrious letters asking what it is like to be a giraffe in a spaceship."

"For my father, who used to sit, hour after hour, night after night, outside our house in Africa, watching the stars "Well," he would say, "if we blow ourselves up, there's plenty more where we came from!""

"What of course I would like to be writing is the story of the Red and White Dwarves and their Remembering Mirror, their space rocket (powered by anti-gravity), their attendant entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, and Muon, and the Charmed Quarks and the Coloured Quarks. But we can't all be physicists."

"I did not lose my Sirian perspectives, the Sirian scope of time and space. But I was inside, too, this civilisation's view of itself as all there was of the known world — for on its edges were, to the north, the threatening horsemen, to the northwest, very far away, dark forests full of barbarians whom these people scarcely accounted as human at all, believing them not much more than beasts — and from their point of view, accurately — ... The world as understood by this great and powerful Queen was, though it stretched from one end of the main landmass to the other, circumscribed indeed, and the stars that roofed it were understood only — and to a limited extend — by their influences on their movements ... on our movements ... an odd, a startling, a disturbing, clash of focusses and perspectives encompassed me; and as for the historical aspect, this queen knew the story of her own civilisation and some legends, mostly inaccurate, of a "distant" past, which to me, and my mind, was virtually contemporary with her."

"When a generation watches the young ones, their future, their responsibility, grow up, and when what they are to inherit is pitiful and so reduced, then the shame of it goes too deep for reasoning. No, it was not our fault that our children had to learn such hardship, had to forego so much that we, the older ones, had inherited. Our fault it was not; but we felt that it was. We were learning, we old ones, that in times when a species, a race, is under threat, drives and necessities built into the very substance of our flesh speak out in ways that we need never have known about if extremities had not come to squeeze these truths out of us. An older, a passing, generation needs to hand on goodness, something fine and high — even if it is only in potential — to their children. And if there isn't this bequest to put into their hands, then there is a bitterness and a pain that makes it hard to look into young eyes, young faces."

"A fool is strong so that others will see. A wise person is strong for himself."

"Get pushed, push back. Toby had already seen it. She knew that the Hork-Bajir would need to be strong to defend themselves against humans once the Yeerks were defeated. Get pushed, push back. The only way. No, not the only way. There was another way. Don't push to begin with. It's the aggressors who start the cycle. It's the guy who wakes up in the morning and decides he can't get through the day without finding someone to attack, to insult, to hurt. But where does that leave you? Letting jerks dictate your reactions? Always sinking to the level of whatever creep comes along?"

"They pulled back reluctantly from the slaughter. But they obeyed. Obeyed. Me. Hork-Bajir who had never known the word "obedience" now obeyed me. Why? Because I was the seer? Because I was wiser than they? No. Because I had destroyed their past and now they had no choice but to follow me into a future they could not imagine. The monsters in our valley were destroyed that day. Only a very few survived. But that was all right, because we didn't need monsters anymore. We had become them."

"You almighty Andalites. There is no limit to your arrogance, is there? Well, let me tell you something: We may be simple people. But we don't use biology to invent monsters. And we don't enslave other species. And we don't unleash a plague of parasites on the galaxy, endangering every other free species, and then go swaggering around like the lords of the universe. No, we're too simple for all that. We're too stupid to lie and manipulate. We're too stupid to be ruthless. We're too stupid to know how to build powerful weapons designed to annihilate our enemies. Until you came, Andalite, we were too stupid to know how to kill."

"Great. I have a nut for a father and a fake for a cousin." I turned my back on them and walked away. "Tobias," Aria said. I turned back to face her. "What?" "I…I knew your father. We were, shall we say, on the opposite sides of certain issues. But he was no fool." Suddenly Aria/Visser Three smiled. It was a faraway smile, like she/he was remembering something from long ago. "Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul was no fool. And the galaxy will not soon see his like again." I threw up my hands. "Good grief, you're just as crazy as he was."

"I have a picture of my mom next to my bed. I look at it every night before I go to bed. I can never decide what I want to see when I look at it. I don't know if I see the mother I lost, or the mother I want to rescue somehow. I don't know anymore."

"I realized I had grown very serious. I don't know why, but I wanted Jake to agree with me. It was important to me. We flapped side-by-side back to the others. Jake said wearily. <Yeah. Well, I'm me, no matter what,> I said defiantly."

"my father cried. Alloran quoted from the regulations. my father demanded.> Alloran said harshly."

"Have you fought in many battles, Aldrea?" I was surprised by the question. "Have you ever killed a fellow Andalite?" "You ask me to kill my own people today and to lead my people in killing their brothers," Dak said. "You say they are not Hork-Bajir, but Yeerks. But when the dead have given up their souls to Mother Sky, there will be Hork-Bajir bodies lying dead." I exploded. "Be quiet, Aldrea," Dak said. He didn't shout. He said it calmly, in a low voice. "These are my people who will die today. Be quiet, Andalite. Be quiet."

"Erek didn't mean anything bad. You know that," Jake said. "He just meant —" "I know what he meant," I snapped. "He meant if it came to crunch time, would I destroy my own mother to protect the mission? That's what he meant." Jake grabbed my shoulder and turned him around. "And?" I was still mad. But I knew why I was mad. It wasn't that Erek had insulted me somehow. It was that Erek was right. "I don't know, Jake," I said. "I don't know."

"Am I really an Ellimist?" the man asked, mocking. "Let's see. I know that Arbron still lives in the tunnels of the Living Hive. I know that you made a universe once, you and the human and the Yeerk called Visser Three."