Science Fiction Authors

"I have to say (regretfully) that I've seen very little in my real life to indicate the presence of either the supernatural or the divine. As for apocalypse, I was imprinted at an early age with the idea of The End of the World (this also courtesy of the Catholic Church). I can remember being terrified of thunderstorms — I'd think, Uh oh, THIS IS IT. I was born in 1957, and grew up in the metropolitan New York area with the Cold War as a backdrop. In kindergarten and first and second grade we had constant air raid drills, sirens going off and that whole "Duck 'n Cover" drill when you cower under your desk or else hide in the classroom cloak closet, waiting for the Atomic Bomb to drop. I had nightmares about that well into my twenties. For a while in the 1970s I lived near a fire station in D.C., and when the fire sirens would go off at night I'd wake up terrified — again — that THIS WAS IT. Of course it never was, but it was good practice at being scared and thinking about scary stuff."

"What a crazy place this was. Someone gets sick, and instead of dialing 911 you send for an obese old fortune-teller. The thought made her stomach churn; because of course that’s what her mother had done. Put her faith in fairy dust and crystals instead of physicians and chemo."

"Jason just couldn’t take it. Grief he had always thought of as an emotion, a mood, something that possessed you but that you eventually escaped. Now he knew it was different. Grief was a country, a place you entered hesitantly, or were thrown into without warning. But once you were there, amidst the roiling formless blackness and stench of despair, you could not leave. Even if you wanted to: you could only walk and walk and walk, traveling on through the black reaches with the sound of screaming in your ears, and hope that someday you might glimpse far off another country, another place where you might someday rest."

"“Self-assured?” “I guess. Self-assured and smug, you know? Why is it teenagers are always so fucking smug?” “Because they share a great secret,” Martin said mildly, and took another bite of sprouts. “Oh yeah? What’s that?” “Their parents are all assholes.”"

"I never think about genre when I work. I've written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book."

"I find that many modern fantasies explain things away far too easily, which makes a lot of it overly familiar (to me, anyway). Real myths are often strange and startlingly unfamiliar, and don't always give up their meanings easily; you have to tease them out, and for me, that's one of the pleasures of reading older collections of lore."

"I went to college to study drama where I discovered I had no talent and after a period of dropping out majored in cultural anthropology which of course meant more masks and dancing … I studied what interested me and so I had to become a writer because my education had left me unsuited for a decent well-paying job."

"So much fantasy relies on the author's having read Fraser's The Golden Bough or Robert Graves' The White Goddess and nothing else. The White Goddess is a crank book, a crank book of genius of course, but all the same... Mind you, I found Waking the Moon cited in an article in a pagan magazine as an authority for the idea that there was a patriarchal brotherhood, the Benandanti, that have been running things since antiquity, with no mention of the fact that it is a novel, and a fantasy at that. People want to believe something, and so they swallow anything."

"I always thought of muses as sacrificial lambs, tamping down their own unwieldy creative impulses as they offer themselves for delectation by male geniuses. But Elizabeth Hand suggests in a recent essay that the connection is perilous for both parties: "The threat of one being consumed or obliterated by the other is constant. Yet it is precisely this tension, this tango macabre, that underscores the erotic nature of the relationship between artist and muse, suspended as it is between longing and dread, the yearning to possess and the knowledge that capture is so often destructive of the very object of desire." This tango macabre is the core of Mortal Love, Hand's latest novel. … Calling Mortal Love "an imaginary tree with roots in the real world," Hand laces the novel with real historical figures like Algernon Swinburne and Lady Wilde (Oscar's folktale-spinning mother) and drops in amusing literary allusions and references to artists like Brian Jones and Kurt Cobain, who have themselves been scorched by the muse. … The novel succeeds as both a thriller and a meditation on the mysterious nature of inspiration."

"Elizabeth Hand is one of American literature's finest prose poets of the fantastic. Her novels are powerfully lyrical, suffused with visionary agony and dreamlike eroticism; in her hands, myth reattains the nightmare energy of its origins, staining the present and the future with atavistic hues of blood."

"Karrin Murphy: I'm pretty sure there's no Nobel prize for pornography."

"Life, Tavi reflected, seldom makes a gift of what one expects or plans for."

"Open eyes are of little use when the mind behind them is closed."

"Bridges are a troll's specialty. Whether because of some magic or just because of aptitude, you never get across the bridge without facing the troll. That's life, I guess."

"I'd never seen anyone go truly, old-school berserkergang, but that scream...It was like hearing an echo rolling down through the centuries from an ancient world, a more savage world, now lost to the mists of time. And suddenly I had no trouble at all believing her age."

"Spelunking is dangerous enough without adding in anything that could be described with the word "ravening"."

"The next time you interfere with me, more than smoke will interfere with you."

"Thomas Raith: Harry's a wizard. A genuine, honest-to-good-ness wizard. He's Gandalf on crack and an IV of Red Bull, with a big leather coat and a .44 revolver in his pocket. He'll spit in the eye of gods and demons alike if he thinks it needs to be done, and to hell with the consequences-and yet somehow my little brother manages to remain a decent human being."

"Harry Dresden: Discussing a problem with yourself is almost never a good way to secure a divergent viewpoint."

"Harry Dresden: Death is only frightening from the near side."

"Harry Dresden: Boobs are near the center of the universe, until you turn twenty-five or so. Which is also when young men’s auto insurance rates go down. This is not a coincidence."

"Sanya, Knight of the Cross: Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka."

"Sanya, Knight of the Cross: There is, I think, humor here which does not translate well from English into sanity."

"Harry Dresden: Paranoia is a survival trait when you run in my circles. It gives you something to do in your spare time, coming up with solutions to ridiculous problems that aren't ever going to happen. Except when one of them does, at which point you feel way too vindicated."

"Queen Mab: For love men will mutilate themselves and murder rivals. For love will even a peaceful man go to war. For Love, man will destroy himself, and do so willingly."

"Harry Dresden: But there were some things I believed in. Some things I had faith in. And faith isn’t about perfect attendance to services, or how much money you put on the little plate. It isn’t about going skyclad to the Holy Rites, or meditating each day upon the divine. Faith is about what you do. It’s about aspiring to be better and nobler and kinder than you are. It’s about making sacrifices for the good of others—even when there’s not going to be anyone telling you what a hero you are."

"Harry Dresden: As a whole, people suck, but a person can be extraordinary."

"Warden Chandler: PS--Why, yes, I can in fact capitalize any words I desire. The language is English. I am English. Therefore mine is the opinion which matters, colonial heathen."

"Susan Rodriguez: Harry, have you ever heard of the paperless office? Harry Dresden: Yeah. It's like Bigfoot. Someone says he knows someone who saw him, but you don't ever actually see him yourself."

"Harry Dresden: Pretty sure that Roman Catholic priests don't have peeps. Too trendy and ephemeral. Like automobiles. And the printing press."

"Harry Dresden: The freaking Council never does anything quickly, and I had a bad feeling that tempus was fugiting furiously."

"Harry Dresden: Susan smiled at me, giving Molly the Female Once-Over--a process by which one woman creates a detailed profile of another woman based upon about a million subtle details of clothing, jewelry, makeup, and body type, and then decides how much of a social threat she might be. Men have a parallel process, but it's binary: Does he have beer? If yes, will he share with me?"

"Harry Dresden: Hers was a beauty so pure that it was nearly painful to behold--Athena heading out on a Friday night."

"Molly Carpenter: Wrote the Laws of Magic, founded the White Council, was custodian of one of the Swords and established a stronghold for the Council, too. He must have been something else. Harry Dresden: He must have been a real bastard. Guys who get their name splashed all over history and folklore don't tend to be Boy Scout troop leaders. Molly Carpenter: You're such a cynic. Harry Dresden: I think cynics are playful and cute."

"Harry Dresden: You don't explain to the janitorial staff how your company is a part of a sinister organization with goals of global infiltration and control. You just tell them to clean the floor."

"Listens-To-Wind "Injun Joe": There is world that should be, and the world that is. We live in one. Ebenezer: And must create the other, if it is ever to be."

"Listens-To-Wind "Injun Joe": Not gonna bind ya or break ya, old spirit. Just gonna kick your ass up between your ears."

"Harry Dresden: This is Waldo Butters, and his geek penis is longer and harder than all of ours put together."

"Harry Dresden: Even a broken clock gets it right occasionally."

"Harry Dresden: There’s power in the night. There’s terror in the darkness. Despite all our accumulated history, learning, and experience, we remember. We remember times when we were too small to reach the light switch on the wall, and when the darkness itself was enough to make us cry out in fear. Get a good ways out from civilization-say, miles and miles away on a lightless lake-and the darkness is there, waiting. Twilight means more than just time to call the children in from playing outside. Fading light means more than just the end of another day. Night is when terrible things emerge from their sleep and seek soft flesh and hot blood. Night is when unseen beings with no regard for what our people have built and no place in what we have deemed the natural order look in at our world from outside, and think dark and alien thoughts. And sometimes, just sometimes, they do things."

"Harry Dresden: The U.S. isn’t a perfect place, but it’s better than most people have managed to come up with. And all my stuff is there."

"Harry Dresden: You’re in America now. Our idea of diplomacy is showing up with a gun in one hand and a sandwich in the other and asking which you’d prefer. Anastasia Luccio: Did you bring a sandwich? Harry Dresden: What do I look like, Kissinger?"

"Harry Dresden: I can't believe I'm about to say this. So think real careful about where this is coming from: Have you people ever considered talking when you've got a problem?"

"Harry Dresden: That's Doctor Smart-ass. I didn't spend eight years in insult college to be called Mister."

"Harry Dresden: You rush a miracle worker, you get lousy miracles!"

"Marcone: In my judgment, my buildings are less likely to burn to the ground during one of your visits if you are disoriented from being treated like a sultan."

"Harry Dresden: Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it's a big part, and sometimes it isn't, but either way, it's part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: It teaches you, tells you that you're alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it in one degree or another."

"Harry Dresden: Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it."

"Harry Dresden: We still hadn't learned, though, that growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you're just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something. Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There's the little empty pain of leaving something behind-graduating, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There's the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expectations. There's the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn't give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life as they grow and learn. There's the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens."

"Harry Dresden: Tonight you will be visited by three spirits, the ghosts of indictment past, present and future. They will teach you the true meaning of "you are still a scumbag criminal.""