Poets From England

"You ask my love completest, As strong next year as now, The devil take you, sweetest, Ere I make aught such vow. Life is a masque that changes, A fig for constancy! No love at all were better, Than love which is not free."

"Ah, God, that sweet things should decline, And fires fade out which were not cold,  Erewhile."

"The fairest face of all is the face I have not seen."

"O pray the earth enfold Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust."

"Dowson and Johnson most I praise— To troop with those the world's forgot, And copy their proud steady gaze."

"Dowson seemed gentle, affectionate, drifting. His poetry shows how sincerely he felt the fascination of religion, but his religion had certainly no dogmatic outline, being but a desire for a condition of virginal ecstasy. If it is true, as Arthur Symons, his very close friend, has written, that he loved the restaurant-keeper's daughter for her youth, one may be almost certain that he sought from religion some similar quality, something of that which the angels find who move perpetually, as Swedenborg has said, towards "the dayspring of their youth.""

"Aldiss' New Wave masterpiece is Report On Probability A. … The minutiae of all the involved's lives are the only thing; the act of observation is the only plot. The science fiction happens when it becomes apparent that there are Other watchers, and watchers watching those watchers, stretching back to what seems to be citizens of our own reality. Report On Probability A is about the metaphor of circular vision, manifested in the narrative by the round fields of view of the various optical devices and windows through which S, G, and C observe their world, expanding macrocosmically with the vast circle of observers observing the observers. As banality merges with paranoia, drawn only by whatever the reader brings to the narrative, there is no conclusion, no story, only facts. The story returns over and over to the painting The Hireling Shepherd by Holman Hunt, which becomes a recurring unresolved image which has no final meaning, only whatever speculation it's benighted observers bring to bear on it. Every character is searching for a meaning which may, or may not, exist as actual Truth. Behind each level of truth lies another; who is to say how far the chain goes or which part of it is more Actual? … The simplicity of the "story" masks an investigation into uncertainty and the nature of reality itself. The seeming bankruptcy of plot opens the reader to question the act of observation, of reporting, of writing itself. Truth is what Report On Probability A is all about, and Aldiss points out that it is a plastic thing that depends on who is trying to figure it out, and an ambiguous thing that may, at it's root, be unknowable."

"I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth."

"Why do so many people dislike science fiction? The answer goes like this: You have to think of science fiction in contrast to its nearest competitor, heroic fantasy. In heroic fantasy, by and large, things are pretty stable, and then some terrible evil comes along that's going to take over the world. People have to fight it. In the end they win, of course, so the earth is restored to what it was. The status quo comes back. Science fiction's quite different. With science fiction, the world's in some sort of a state, and something awful happens. It may not be evil, it may be good or neutral, just an accident. Whatever they do in the novel, at the end the world is changed forever. That's the difference between the two genres — and it's an almighty difference! And the truth is science fiction, because we all live in a world that's changed forever. It's never going to go back to what it was in the '60s or the '70s or the '30s, or whatever. It's changed."

"If we can see our difficulties, there is a way of resolving them, or the hope of a way."

"Here is what I wrote about SF. If it has a familiar ring, my publishers liked it well enough to make it into a postcard for publicity purposes. 'I love SF for its surrealist verve, its loony non-reality, its piercing truths, its wit, its masked melancholy, its nose for damnation, its bunkum, its contempt for home comforts, its slewed astronomy, its xenophilia, its hip, its classlessness, its mysterious machines, its gaudy backdrops, its tragic insecurity.' Science fiction has always seemed to me such a polyglot, an exotic mistress, a parasite, a kind of new language coined for the purpose of giving tongue to the demented twentieth century."

"Plato would have no actors in his republic, in case pretence devoured what was real. Plato's fears have proved well-grounded. Actors, despised, almost outcast, until last century, have become something more than respectable. They, together with all those imitation actors, pop stars, TV celebrities, people who are famous for being famous, now receive adulation. They are the millionaires, the courtesans of our system. Solzhenitsyn, escaping to a West he had once admired, snarled at the meretricious falsity of what he found. We have built illusions round us and see no way out of the glass forest."

"I'm lucky that SFWA has such a short memory. I was always the Young Turk, the gadfly. Part of the New Wave, although I didn't fit in there either! I spent years, and two histories, putting the so-called Old Guard in their place, and now I'm one of them!"

"Synthetic life-forms were less than ten years old, the old android mechanicals less than sixteen; the faults of their systems were still being ironed out, year by year."

"He let out a yell of joy. They danced round the room. Pressure of population was such that reproduction had to be strict, controlled. Childbirth required government permission. For this moment, they had waited four years. Incoherently they cried their delight."

"That first novel of mine, Non-Stop, is directly attributable to Heinlein. His "Common Sense" seemed to me such a good story, but bereft of any human feelings. I thought long about that story, and then I thought how wonderful it would be to write about a spaceship in which people have been imprisoned for generations and to put in something of the human feeling. So that novel is directly attributable to Heinlein. I thought, in my youthful arrogance, that I could do it better — I didn't! I thought I could do it differently, and I think I did do it differently. And I suppose that on the whole, I've concentrated on doing things differently ever since."

""Teddy — I suppose Mummy and Daddy are real, aren't they?" Teddy said, "You ask such silly questions, David. Nobody knows what 'real' really means. Let's go indoors." "First I'm going to have another rose!" Plucking a bright pink flower, he carried it with him into the house. It could lie on the pillow as he went to sleep. Its beauty and softness reminded him of Mummy."

"Teddy, you know what I was thinking? How do you tell what are real things from what aren't real things?" The bear shuffled its alternatives. "Real things are good." "I wonder if time is good. I don't think Mummy likes time very much. The other day, lots of days ago, she said that time went by her. Is time real, Teddy?"

""You and I are real, Teddy, aren't we?" The bear's eyes regarded the boy unflinchingly. "You and I are real, David." It specialized in comfort."

"There have been mechanicals on the market with mini-computers for brains — plastic things without life, super-toys — but we have at last found a way to link computer circuitry with synthetic flesh."

"Amid all the triumphs of our civilization — yes, and amid the crushing problems of overpopulation too — it is sad to reflect how many millions of people suffer from increasing loneliness and isolation. Our serving-man will be a boon to them; he will always answer, and the most vapid conversation cannot bore him. For the future, we plan more models, male and female — some of them without the limitations of this first one, I promise you! — of more advanced design, true bio-electronic beings. Not only will they possess their own computer, capable of individual programming; they will be linked to the World Data Network. Thus everyone will be able to enjoy the equivalent of an Einstein in their own homes. Personal isolation will then be banished forever!"

"I'm no good, Teddy. Let's run away!" "You're a very good boy. Your Mummy loves you." Slowly, he shook his head. "If she loved me, then why can't I talk to her?" "You're being silly, David. Mummy's lonely. That's why she had you." "She's got Daddy. I've got nobody 'cept you, and I'm lonely."

"My wife Margaret and I sold our house to Sir Roger Penrose and his wife... Talking to Roger, I found we both agreed that AI, as they call it, is not going to be achieved by present-day machines."Artificial Intelligence" — that makes it sound simple, but what you're really talking about is artificial consciousness, AC. And I don't think there's any way we can achieve artificial consciousness, at least until we've understood the sources of our own consciousness. I believe consciousness is a mind/body creation, literally interwoven with the body and the body's support systems. Well, you don't get that sort of thing with a robot."

"The directors of Synthank were eating an enormous luncheon to celebrate the launching of their new product. Some of them wore the plastic face-masks popular at the time. All were elegantly slender, despite the rich food and drink they were putting away. Their wives were elegantly slender, despite the food and drink they too were putting away. An earlier and less sophisticated generation would have regarded them as beautiful people, apart from their eyes."

"If more people had put their fellow human beings before abstractions last century, we shouldn’t be where we are now."

"However you envisage your role in life, all you can do is perform it as best you can."

"All of which pointed to a moral that they should have learned long before, Arthur thought: Never trust a bunch of lousy politicians to do your thinking for you."

"In Mrs. Swinton's garden, it was always summer. The lovely almond trees stood about it in perpetual leaf. Monica Swinton plucked a saffron-colored rose and showed it to David."

"As Flitch dryly remarked when Greybeard commented on the graveyard, “Ah, they keep a-planting of ’em, but there ain’t any more of ’em growing up.”"

"“Are you a religious man, Joe?” Flitch pulled a face. “I leaves that sort of thing to women.”"

"She had tried to love him."

"The shuffle only demonstrated people’s fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition."

"“Sounds to me as if you want journalists,” Timberlane said. “No, sir, we require steady men with integrity. This is not a scoop, it’s a way of life.”"

"Relax, enjoy yourself. Have another drink. It’s patriotic to overconsume."

"That’s one thing about these religious boys—they reckon that if they are on God’s side, then the enemy must be on the devil’s, and so they have no qualms about giving it to ’em hot and strong."

"I’ve no objection to morality, except that it’s obsolete."

"What were several fewer species of animals compared with a hundred-mile advance and another medal on another general?"

"All over the world there must be far-reaching changes in animal behavior and habitat; if only one could have another life in which to chart it all....Ah, well, that’s not a fruitful thing to wish, is it?"

"Monica Swinton, twenty-nine, of graceful shape and lambent eye, went and sat in her living room, arranging her limbs with taste. She began by sitting and thinking; soon she was just sitting. Time waited on her shoulder with the maniac slowth it reserves for children, the insane, and wives whose husbands are away improving the world."

"Let’s have a toast—to the future generation of consumers, however many heads or assholes they have!"

"In the extraordinary ancestral compost heap of your unconscious mind, I have burrowed too long."

"One of the characteristics of age was that all avenues of talk led backward in time."

"It [i.e., his look] held the fatal mixture of stupidity and cunning that lurks at the bottom of all evil."

"It’s a national failing to think of politics as something that goes on in Parliament. It isn’t; it’s something that goes on inside us."

"Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, growing riotous and strange in their impulse for growth."

"To be a standard shape is not all in life. To know is also important."

"The hardship of it was a pleasure. Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames. Objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterward, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch: Cogito ergo sum. For him that had not been true; his truth had been: Sentio ergo sum. I feel, so I exist. He enjoyed this fearful, miserable, confused life, and not only because it made more sense than nonlife. He could never explain that to anyone."

"Man was an accident on this world or it would have been made better for him!"

"Many Franks of the sixteenth generation were killed in the muck of the trenches, he died not once but many times, developing an obsessive dread of war which never left him. By the time the Americans entered the war, he was turning his many thoughts to politics."

"Frank's chromosome was now breeding as true as ever. Blood group, creed, colour of skin — nothing was proof against it. The numbers with shared consciousness, procreating for all they were worth, trebled every generation."