Science Fiction Authors

"People sometimes say, “If the world really has a simple explanation, then where did all the randomness and information come from?” We can think of the information as coming in with the passage of time. Each tick of time increases the depth of the world computer’s output."

"My purpose in writing Mind Tools has been to see what follows if one believes that everything is information. I have reached the following (debatable) conclusions."

"Reality is indescribably rich and complex. Sometimes I forget this, and life goes gray. But the world is alive, and we are living parts of it. Thoughts are as real and important as objects. Every object is an endless source of wonder. We don’t know why we’re here — we don’t even know what we are. But we exist, and the world is going on. Our ordinary notions of space and time are just a convenient fiction. Higher dimensions are everywhere. There’s no need to work for enlightenment; enlightenment is here and now, as close as the fourth dimension."

"The fourth dimension is a direction different from all the directions in normal space. Some say that time is the fourth dimension ... And this is, in a sense, true. Others say that the fourth dimension is a hyperspace direction quite different from time ... This is also true. There are, in fact, many higher dimensions. One of these higher dimensions is time, another higher dimension is the direction m which space is curved, and still another higher dimension may lead toward some utterly different universes existing parallel to our own. At the deepest level, our world can be regarded as a pattern in infinite-dimensional space, a space in which we and our minds move like fish in water."

"Starting with no preconceptions at all, what is the most reasonable model of the world that we can build up? Only two things seem really certain: one exists, and one has perceptions. I may be a meat machine, a soul, an eye of God, a collection of ideas, or who knows what — but I am certain that I exist. I am the thing that writes these words. Of course, you may doubt whether I am real — perhaps you are only dreaming that you read this book — but you do know for certain that you yourself exist. The fact that one has experiences is equally certain; to put it more neutrally, one cannot doubt that perceptions occur."

"So what is reality, one more time? An incompressible computation by a fractal CA of inconceivable dimensions. And where is this huge computation taking place? Everywhere; it’s what we’re made of."

"What is reality? Take all your perceptions and all of mine, take everyone’s thoughts and all the visions. In an infinite-dimensional space there is room to fit them all together; each is a piece of the infinite-dimensional One, and this One is reality."

"In more familiar terms, it is not hard to prove that God is infinite ... but what if you don’t believe that God exists? It may seem hard to doubt that the more impersonal Absolutes–such as “everything,” or the Mindscape–exist, but there are those who do doubt this. The issue under consideration is a version of the old philosophical problem of the One and the Many. What is being asked is whether the cosmos exists as an organic One, or merely as a Many with no essential coherence. It is certainly true that the Mindscape, for instance, does not exist as a single rational thought. For if the Mindscape is a One, then it is a member of itself, and thus can only be known through a flash of mystical vision. No rational thought is a member of itself, so no rational thought could tie the Mindscape into a One."

"In one of our conversations I pressed Gödel to explain what he meant by the “other relation to reality” by which he said one could directly see mathematical objects. He made the point that the same possibilities of thought are open to everyone, so that we can take the world of possible forms as objective and absolute. Possibility is observer-independent, and therefore real, because it is not subject to our will."

"Gödel shared with Einstein a certain mystical turn of thought. The word “mystic” is almost pejorative these days. But mysticism does not really have anything to do with incense or encounter groups or demoniac possession. There is a difference between mysticism and occultism. A pure strand of classical mysticism runs from Plato to Plotinus and Eckhart to such great modern thinkers as Aldous Huxley and D. T. Suzuki. The central teaching of mysticism is this: Reality is One. The practice of mysticism consists in finding ways to experience this higher unity directly. The One has variously been called the Good, God, the Cosmos, the Mind, the Void, or (perhaps most neutrally) the Absolute. No door in the labyrinthine castle of science opens directly onto the Absolute. But if one understands the maze well enough, it is possible to jump out of the system and experience the Absolute for oneself."

"Just as a rock is already in the Universe, whether or not someone is handling it, an idea is already in the Mindscape, whether or not someone is thinking it. A person who does mathematical research, writes stories, or meditates is an explorer of the Mindscape in much the same way that Armstrong, Livingstone, or Cousteau are explorers of the physical features of our Universe. The rocks on the Moon were there before the lunar module landed; and all the possible thoughts are already out there in the Mindscape. The mind of an individual would seem to be analogous to the room or to the neighborhood in which that person lives. One is never in touch with the whole Universe through one’s physical perceptions, and it is doubtful whether one’s mind is ever able to fill the entire Mindscape."

"Is this all there is? Struggle, loneliness, disease, and death ... Is this all there is? Life can seem so chaotic, so dreary, so grindingly hard. Who among us has not dreamt of some higher reality, some transcendent level of meaning and peace? There actually is such a higher reality ... And it is not so very hard to reach. For many, the fourth dimension has served as a gateway into it. But what is the fourth dimension? No one can point to the fourth dimension, yet it is all around us. Philosophers and mystics meditate upon it; physicists and mathematicians calculate with it. The fourth dimension is part and parcel of many respected scientific theories, yet it is also of great use in such disreputable fields as spiritualism and science fiction."

"“Security always soars along with unemployment,” said Pullen, nodding his head at his own wisdom. “We are in a major downturn. I’ve seen this before, so I know the drill. Locks, bolts, Dobermans, they’re all market leaders this quarter. That’s Capitalism 301, girls.”"

"I think of consciousness as a point, an "eye," that moves about in a sort of mental space. All thoughts are already there in this multi-dimensional space, which we might as well call the Mindscape. Our bodies move about in the physical space called the Universe; our consciousnesses move about in the mental space called the Mindscape."

"I'm not a brave man. My self-image is of a very small and weak person. In point of fact, I'm almost six feet, and solidly built. But I was a late bloomer. I spent those formative early high-school years as a pudgy little science whimp. I'm still scared of big men with deep voices."

"He’ll be back. Men always come back when they see you making money."

"Kelso had the kind of slit-eyed street smarts that came only from Berkeley law classes."

"The public revealed its single most predictable trait: fickleness."

"Thanks to environmental decline, kids of Janna’s age had never seen authentic wildlife. So they flipped for the Goob menagerie: marmosets with butterfly wings, starfish that scuttled like earwigs, long, furry frankfurter cat-snakes."

"It was good to be outside, away from the TV and the computer. The natural world had such high bandwidth."

"But Charles was the one who finally realized it was nuts to be walking around inside a sewer with a tweaker leading the way. The fact that Charles figured this out before me makes me wonder about myself. I think I’m spending too much time on my computer."

"“Relax, Wag.” “Relaxing makes me tense!” I scream."

"Janna knew full well that the classic dot-com move was to grab that golden parachute and bail like crazy before the investors and employees caught on."

"It was funny. I knew I didn't want the bomb to be a success. But yet I'd spent so many years working around physics labs that I couldn't stand not to do it right."

"It would take a supercomputer to simulate this puddle in real time—maybe even all the computers in the world. Especially if you included the air currents pushing the raindrops this way and that. Computable or not, it kept happening."

"Mother Nature doesn’t want power-tripping greedheads looking up her skirts."

"Tug was fascinated, and not by the money involved. Like many mathematicians, Mesoglea considered money to be one boring, merely bookkeeping subset of the vast mental universe of general computation."

"My real speciality is the mathematical analysis of Hilbert Space operators. But this was no time to come on like an ivory-tower idealist."

"Just as we all share the same Universe, we all share the same Mindscape. For just as you can physically occupy the same position in the Universe that anyone else does, you can, in principle, mentally occupy the same state of mind or position in the Mindscape that anyone else does."

"I think computronium is a spurious concept. Matter, just as it is, conducts outlandishly complex chaotic quantum computations by dint of sitting around. Matter isn't dumb. Every particle everywhere and every when computes at the maximum possible flop. I think we tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality. Turning an inhabited planet into a computronium Dyson shell is comparable to filling in wetlands to make a mall, clear-cutting a rain forest to make a destination golf resort, or killing a whale to whittle its teeth into religious icons of a whale god."

"But, come on, if you want to smoothly transmogrify a blade of grass into some nanomachines simulating a blade of grass, then why bother grinding up the blade of grass at all? After all, any object at all can be viewed as a quantum computation! The blade of grass already is an assemblage of nanomachines emulating a blade of grass. Nature embodies superhuman intelligence just as she is."

"In short, a gnarly process is complex and unpredictable without being random. If a story hews to some very familiar pattern, it feels stale. But if absolutely anything can happen, a story becomes as unengaging as someone else’s dream. The gnarly zone lies at the interface between logic and fantasy."

"Will molecular manufacture give all of us the luxuries we want? No. Skewed inverse power-law distribution of valued qualities is an intrinsic property of the natural world. That is, roughly speaking, if there are a thousand people at the bottom of the heap, and a hundred immediately above them, there will only be ten farther up, and just one perched on the top in possession of a large proportion of the goodies. Even if we become glowing clouds of ectoplasm, there's going to be something that we’re competing for—and most of us will feel as though we're getting screwed."

"My sense is that, in the long run, Mother Nature always wins. Cautionary note: Mother Nature's win may not include the survival of the pesky human race!"

"Even with omnividence and telepathy, I expect that, day in and day out, people won't actually change that much—not even in a million years. That's a lesson history teaches us. Yes, we've utterly changed our tech since the end of the Middle Ages, but the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or Peter Bruegel show that people back then were much like us, perennially entangled with the seven deadly sins."

"Wit involves describing the world as it actually is. You experience a release of tension when you notice a glitch. Something was off-kilter, and now you see what it was. The elephant in the room has been named. The evil spirit has been incanted. Perceiving an incongruity in our supposedly smooth-running society provokes a shock of recognition and a concomitant burst of laughter. Wit is a critical-satirical process that can be more serious than the “humorous” label suggests."

"Old age is all about killing time."

"“That’s the problem with immortality,” mused Jack. “You never live long enough to get there.”"

"“How do you remember these things?” “Mathematicians don’t get senile,” he said. “They just go nuts,” I muttered."

"As he mentions this last sin, he looks down my nightgown, which I’m just loving. I press his hand against my warm thigh. “Don’t worry, sweetie. I don’t live in Hell. I live in San Jose.”"

"Because he was a reader, a writer, and a thinker, van Vogt regarded himself as an intellectual. But if he was an intellectual, it was not of the usual sort. He wasn't silver-tongued or swift-witted. He had very little ability to remember a precise fact or an exact niggle, and no talent at all for linear thought and logical analysis. He was not a conventional man of reason. Rather, van Vogt's usual method was to fix on some question or subject in a highly single-minded way — to surround it and dwell upon it and absorb it. He might get nowhere with a problem for the longest time, but then at last the penny would drop and some insight would pop into his mind. When van Vogt had enough insights accumulated on a topic, they would assemble themselves into what he would come to think of as a system — a methodology or mode of approach that had its own consistency, if only in the manner in which it was applied by him. In later days, van Vogt would even take pride in describing himself as "Mr. System.""

"Alfred E. van Vogt, since the appearance of his first two stories — "Black Destroyer" and "Discord in Scarlet" (Astounding Science Fiction, July and December 1939) the most memorable debut in the long history of the genre — has been a giant. The words seminal and germinal leap to mind. Sadly, at this juncture. the words tragedy and farewell also insinuate themselves. … Van is still with us, as I write this, in June of 1999, slightly less than fifty years since I first encountered van Vogt prose in a January 1950 issue of Startling Stories, but Van is gone. He is no longer with us. … Because the great and fecund mind of A.E. van Vogt has fallen into the clutches of that pulp thriller demon, Alzheimer's. Van is gone. … Anyone's demise or vanishment is in some small way tragic but the word "tragedy" requires greater measure for its use. … Van' s great mind now gone. Tragedy. The ultimate tragic impropriety visited on as good a man as ever lived. A gentle. soft spoken man who was filled with ideas and humor and courtesy and kindness. Not even those who were not aficionados of Van's writing could muster a harsh word about him as a human being. He was as he remains now, quietly and purposefully, a gentleman. But make no mistake about this: the last few decades for him were marred by the perfidious and even mean spirited and sometimes criminal acts of poltroons and self-aggrandizing mountebanks and piss-ants into whose clutches he fell just before the thug Alzheimer got him. … I came late to the friendship with Van and Lydia. Perhaps only twenty-five or so years. But the friendship continues, and at least I was able to make enough noise to get Van the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Award, which was presented to him in full ceremony during on of the last moments when he was cogent and clearheaded enough understand that finally, as last, dragged kicking and screaming to honor him, the generation that learned from what he did and what he had created had, at last, fessed up to his importance. Naturally, others took credit for his getting the award. They postured and spewed all the right platitudes. Some of them were the same ones who had said to me — during the five years it took to get them to act honorably — "we'd have given it to him sooner if you hadn't made such a fuss." Yeah. Sure. And pandas'll fly out of my ass."

"One night, in a fever dream, I sit up and say to the walls, "Hey, how about A. E. Van Vogt?" When I heard myself say it, I realized I was feverish, and I lay back down again quickly. I'm malaise that can cause symptoms like that should not be fooled with. But the next day, the thought persisted. I argued with myself. I said, first of all, Van is in the middle of a bunch of new novels and won't have the time. Yeah, but what a weird story you two could turn out, I answered. Sure, sure I agreed, but why in the world would the man who wrote "Slan" and "The Weapon Shops of Isher" and "The World of Null-A" and books that were classics before I could hold a pencil properly, want to link up with me, ya snotnose. Yeah, but what a weird story you two would turn out, I answered. But we don't write anything alike, I argued. Van thinks in these blocks of concepts, and he's hip to all kinds of technology and stuff what I don't know a spanner from a toilet plunger; what are you trying to do, make me look like some kind of nitwit, approaching a man like Van Vogt? Yeah, but want a weird — So I called Van and suggested it, thinking he would drop me down an airshaft somewhere but damned if he didn't dig the idea."

"The Golden Age of SF is universally dated from the July 1939, issue of Astounding because that's when "Black Destroyer," A. E. van Vogt's first SF story, appeared. Isaac Asimov's first story also appeared in the same month but nobody — as Asimov himself admits — noticed it. People noticed "Black Destroyer," though, and they continued to notice the many other stories that van Vogt wrote over the following decade. … What as much as anything set van Vogt off from other SF writers (of his day and later) was the ability to suggest vastness beyond comprehension. He worked with not only in space and time, but with the mind. Van Vogt knew that to describe the indescribable would have been to make it ludicrous, and that at best description turns the inconceivable into the pedestrian. More than any other SF writer, van Vogt succeeded in creating a sense of wonder in his readers by hinting at the shadowed immensities beyond the walls of human perception."

"Even the brightest star shines dimly when observed-from too far away. And human memory is notoriously unreliable. And we live in ugly times when all respect for that which has gone before suffers crib death beneath the weight of youthful arrogance and ignorance. But a great nobility has at last, been recognized and lauded. Someone less charitable than I might suggest the honor could have been better appreciated had it not been so tardy, naming its race with a foe that blots joy and destroys short-term memory. But I sing the Talent Electric, and like aft the dark smudges of history, everything but the honor and die achievement remains for the myth-makers. Alfred E. van Vogt has been awarded the Grand Master trophy of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He is not the to first person to receive this singular accolade…given only to those whose right to possess it is beyond argument or mitigation. Were we in 1946 or even 1956, van Vogt would have already been able to hold the award aloft. Had SFWA existed then and had the greatest living sf authors been polled as to who was the most fecund, the most intriguing, the mast innovative the most influential of their number, Isaac and Arthur and Cyril and Hank Kuttner and Ron Hubbard would all have pointed to the same man, and Bob Heinlein would've given him a thumbs-up. Van Vogt was the pinnacle, the source of power and ideas; the writer to beat. Because he embodied in his astonishing novels and assorted stories what we always say is of prime importance to us in this genre-the much vaunted Sense of Wonder. Van Vogt was the wellspring of wonder. … That's how important he was. … And then came the dark years during which the man was shamefully agented and overlooked; and even the brightest star loses its piercing light if observed through the thickening mists of time and flawed memory. Now it is lifetimes later, and the great award has, at last, been presented. To some, less charitable than I, something could be said about a day late and a dollar short, but not I. I am here to sing the Talent Electric, and it is better now than never. He is the Grand Master, A.E. can Vogt, weaver of a thousand ideas per plot-line, creator of alien thoughts and impossible dreams that rival the best ever built by our kind. This dear, gentlemanly writer whose stories can still kill you with a concept or warm you with a character, now joins the special pantheon."

"He originated many of the themes we now take for granted: how many monsters have infested spaceships — since "The Black Destroyer"? And although "Slan" — that wish-fulfillment dream of all S.F. fans (interesting resonance there!) was not the first superman story, it Is the one which has had the greatest impact."

"The truth of the matter seems to be that van Vogt's withdrawal into himself took place over a considerable period of time. The beginning of it may lie in the fact that young Alfred was a highly idealistic small town boy with a number of wide-eyed notions about right and truth and justice in his head. When the world failed to conform to his expectations, he found that a substantial shock. Beyond this, it was also true that Alfred was a boy who had something a little strange and left-footed about him. He didn't think or talk exactly like everyone else, and reaction to this may have had its effect on his developing personality."

"I started reading SF when I was about twelve and I read all I could, so any author who was writing about that time, I read. But there's no doubt who got me off originally and that was A.E. van Vogt. There was in van Vogt's writing a mysterious quality, and this was especially true in The World of Null A. All the parts of that book did not add up; all the ingredients did not make a coherency. Now some people are put off by that. They think that's sloppy and wrong, but the thing that fascinated me so much was that this resembled reality more than anybody else's writing inside or outside science fiction. … Damon feels that it's bad artistry when you build those funky universes where people fall through the floor. It's like he's viewing a story the way a building inspector would when he's building your house. But reality really is a mess, and yet it's exciting. The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared."

"Thank the goddess! What a monstrous obscenity. Thank the goddess! Vile, lecherous, lascivious witch! Wretched debauched, wanton, bloody, devil woman!"

"But the possible extent of the disaster couldn’t make any difference. Way back in 1944 people had learned that lesson. Horror must be ignored, unflinchingly faced; and patient preparation made for the hour when evil could be ended in one devastating and overwhelming blow."