Critics From The United States

"Horn cut the thought off. That was a metaphysical blind alley. He had to assume the reality of things outside himself; this existence was self-centered enough, and he had no desire to return to the universe-creator illusion."

"He certainly didn’t feel insane, he reflected—but then did any lunatic, ever?"

"The vampire legend, he might conclude, has served conveniently for many thousand years as a conventional folk expression of unconscious feelings of aggression and guilt."

"And introvert is one of the harmless scientific terms he used to use when he was really writing about witches."

"Accelerating change has become almost the first fact of life."

"“Magic.” He shot photos and shook his head. “Pure magic, till we learn enough to understand it.”"

"“I don’t see the necessity of this mummery—” “Necessity?” Wu said. “Free will is a necessity. And the illusion is more important than the reality.”"

"“Sure, when something moves, somebody has pushed, but that isn’t good or bad in itself. It depends on the situation and the pusher.” “You’re learning wisdom,” Sair said. “Only the circumstances determine good and evil. And only the future can say what the circumstances actually were.” “Then there is no firm basis for acting at all,” Wendre objected. “What you do for the best of motives may be the worst thing to do.” “Exactly,” Sair said dryly. “It is a commonplace that more harm is done by well-intentioned fools then by the most unscrupulous villains. A wise man learns not to judge. He may set himself certain standards, but he recognizes that they are only a personal pattern to guy his own conduct and that other standards have the same validity.”"

"The mystery of it gets me. The builders of the trilithons and the road were high-tech wizards, but their skills didn’t save them. I’ve been wondering how they died. Maybe they got too good at the science of war."

"“Whatever a woman is,” Wendre said, “she’s that second and a woman first.”"

"Power is habit-forming. We grew addicted to it. Few things survive the centuries’ slow decay: senses grow dull; passions grow weak; and ideals die. Only the taste for power lives on as an excuse for survival."

"“There are the troops and their commanders, the technicians, the laborers, and many other classes. All of them have different desires and different ideas about how to gain them. Multiply this by the number of worlds in the Empire and you have a conflict of interests which can never be reconciled.” “But isn’t that inefficient?” Wendre asked. “It is indeed. But inefficiency is one of the penalties of freedom. You can’t be efficient unless you can force people into channels and make them go where they don’t want to go.”"

"“That’s a cynical viewpoint,” Horn said slowly. “I’m an old man. I can afford no longer the luxury of ideals. If I am to achieve results recognizable within my few remaining years, I must be practical.”"

"Creation.… It is its own nemesis. Success is temporary, and idolization will not make the ephemeral permanent. Decay is implicit in the birth of any organism. An empire is an organism."

"“Don’t you get it? The grand enigma of our universe. The joy of science, the power of math, the elation of discovery.” He looked out again, speaking half to himself, yet eager to share what he felt. “That’s the mystery of the natural creation. Galaxies and planets, life and mind grown from the fire and dust of the big bang. That’s the enchantment of science. New vistas of wonder exploding out of every advance.”"

"Horn sat in the near darkness staring at eight floating choices and reflected how inevitability had channeled his actions since he had left the Cluster. Since he had accepted the money from the voice in the darkness, there had been only one step to take, and he had taken it; one path to follow, and he had followed it. Beyond, it had seemed, there would be choice; never now. So it had let him on, step by step, comforted by the self-nurtured illusion of free will, guided subtly, unyieldingly, by the iron tube of determinism. Once it started, he never had a chance to turn back."

"The difficulties were great, the odds were greater, but Horn would conquer them. And, having conquered them, be left unsatisfied. Life holds no kindness for such a man. Any defeat short of death is only a spur; success is empty. With cold self-analysis, Horn recognized this fact, accepted it, and went on unchanged."

"“I go where I wish,” Horn had said, there at the base of the cliff. And the ancient Mr. Wu had replied, “So we think, so we think. In the middle of things we see no pattern. But as we look back and view the picture whole, we realize how men are moved about by forces they do not suspect. The pieces fall into place. The pattern is clear.” In other words, when somebody moves, something has pushed. Choice. Where had there been choice?"

"“I’m not a religious man, Mr. Barbee—I reject the supernatural, and my own rational philosophy is founded on proven science. But I still believe in hell.” The dark man smiled. “For every man manufactures his own private hell and peoples it with demons of his own creation, to torment him for his own secret sins, imagined or real. It’s my business to explore those personal hells and expose their demons for what they are. Usually they turn out to be much less terrifying than they seem.”"

"Civilization.… Like everything else, it has a price. The down payment is freedom. For the privilege of living together, men surrender the right to do as they please; they make laws and restrict themselves within them. When civilization is conferred from outside, the price is even steeper: someone else makes the laws."

"“The only real scientific support of extrasensory and psychokinetic phenomena has come from such studies as those at Duke University,” he added. “Some of the published results purporting to show the reality of ESP and the mental manipulation of probability are pretty convincing—but I’m afraid the wish to demonstrate the survival of the soul has blinded the researchers to some grave flaw in their experimental or statistical methods.” He shook his head, with a sober emphasis. “This universe, to me, is strictly mechanistic. Every phenomena that takes place in it—from the birth of suns to the tendency of men to live in fear of gods and devils—was implicit in the primal superatom from whose explosive cosmic energy it was formed. The efforts that some distinguished scientists make to find room for operation of a free human will and the creative function of supernatural divinity in such apparent defects of mechanistic determination as Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty—those futile efforts are as pathetic to me as the crudest attempt of a witch doctor to make it rain by sprinkling water on the ground. All the so-called supernatural, Mr. Barbee, is pure delusion, based on misdirected emotion and inaccurate observation and illogical thinking.” His calm brown face smiled hopefully. “Does that make you feel any better?” “It does, doctor.”"

"You have a right to be curious. And I have a right to refuse to satisfy it. You may credit it to your own charm or an old man’s whim, if you like. You are interesting, you know. Hired killers always are. Not admirable, but interesting."

"Conquerors live by conquest; the first failure is a signal for the conquered to rise against them."

"“What’s wrong with him, Matal?” Wendre said dazedly. “He wants to kill us all.” “Power,” Wu said somberly, stepping back from the car, “is a vision that drives men mad.”"

"Science fiction, as I like to define it, is fiction based on the imagined exploration of scientific possibility. The distinction from fantasy—or from other sorts of fantasy—lies in the word possibility."

"Considering the uses of science fiction, I think it must first of all offer entertainment, before the the futurology or the social comment can matter. For most readers, entertainment means escape. Though a few young writers are scornful of the, creating good escape fiction is a high and admirable art. Even when the writer aims at something more, entertainment is basic. The bored reader is lost."

"“I wonder—?” whispered April Bell, her long eyes narrowed and dark. “I wonder what they really found?” “Whatever it is,” breathed Barbee, “the find doesn’t seem to have made them very happy. A fundamentalist might think they had stumbled into hell.” “No,” the girl said, “men aren’t that much afraid of hell.”"

"He was a strong man in wise enough to realize that beyond power itself is the power of using it wisely."

"Quietly she said: “I know I’m not insane.” So, Barbee understood, did all lunatics."

"Yet there was a pattern, and the fact that Horn could find it was a commentary upon empire. Mass government is government by rule and regulation. Obedience and conformity are overriding virtues; initiative is punished more often than rewarded. There are prescribed procedures for conducting a search, and no man can be punished for choosing rules over reality."

"Getting back at last to our initial question: Will academe kill SF? I don’t think so… I do suspect that the critics are luring a few promising writers into the formless indulgence and the willful obscurity that has destroyed the popularity of modern poetry."

"My sense of self and my identity have been enhanced more than they’ve changed. I’m still Latina-American for the purposes of living here in the States. Sometimes I say I’m Dominican, or Dominican-American, depending on who I’m talking to; the codewords change depending on the community you’re engaging with. But for me, it was a very spiritual journey. It married the logos, the rational, the science, with the mythos, the spiritual."

"Two weeks passed, by the time of the ship—physiological time, that measured by heartbeats and all bodily rhythms, in which the span of life moved relentlessly toward its end, regardless of motion backward or forward along the time dimension."

"Bridge the gap with and extend the olive branch to people from past generations, because you don’t know everything."

"The way we construct race in the States is so different from the way people construct race all across Latin America and the Caribbean. All of a sudden you come to the States and race is foisted upon you. Then my generation’s like, “Wait a minute, where do my ancestors come from?..."

"Human knowledge is never entirely consistent or complete, because the human brain is only a crude and transient mass of watery cells, error-prone and glacier-slow."

"Sometimes I’ll bring that up and people will say, “Well, you can’t find a true Indian on the Dominican Republic,” and I’m like, “You can’t find a true anything.” What is it about us suppressing this part of ourselves and highlighting this other part of ourselves? I think all that leads to bad self-esteem, which has a ripple effect on society."

"The criticism of SF has tapped rich new vines for researchers, and I can think of writers who seem to be trying harder to impress the critics than to please their readers. I’m afraid the critical tail has begun to wag the creative dog."

"SF still appeals to the young, as always, because so much of it is set in the futures in which they will be living."

"Human belief is seldom related to truth."

"Gangs have always existed—they are primarily a community a young men trying to find intensity, meaning, a path to the outer world (outside of home) that most tribal groupings addressed with rituals, rites of passage, initiation ceremonies. We’ve lost this knowledge as a culture. Gangs also exist when there are lots of empties in a person, in family, in community. It points out how we need to do more to bring real art, passions, teachings, caring, and resources into the emptiness of young peoples’ lives…"

"…The root cause of poverty and crime is capitalism itself. We need a society based on cooperation, caring and creativity – not profits, war and social control. For troubled men and women, we need to give people a “chance to live,” as Clarence Darrow once said. To start, we need a government that works for us – not the 1%."

"I do more non-fiction writing. I have two memoirs, another nonfiction book, and I do lots of essays, journalism, poetry, and reporting. But I love the fiction. As you know I have a novel, a short story collection, and two children’s books. It’s more challenging to write fiction, but I’d like to do more of these. I don’t really prefer one over the other."

"I don’t believe in identity politics in literature—or in life much, either. Indeed the current scholarly enchantment with identity politics strikes me as a more intellectual version of the warning oft heard around Sunnyside when I was growing up: “Stick with your own kind.” Family and cultural origins are crucial to self-definition, but they’re not the end of the story. I certainly don’t think that we readers only or even chiefly enjoy or understand books whose main characters mirror us. In fact, the opportunity to become who we are decidedly not—whether it’s Amis’s Dixon or Philip Roth’s Portnoy or Ellison’s Invisible Man or Kafka’s beetle—is one of the greatest gifts reading offers. Women readers get to serve on that floating boy’s club, the Pequod; male readers get to step into Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes and teach Mr. Darcy the dance of humility; readers of either gender who are not African American get to crawl toward freedom alongside Toni Morrison’s Sethe. One of the most magical and liberating things about literature is that it can transport us readers into worlds totally unlike our own."

"As Richard Rodriguez points out in his beautiful and incisive memoir Hunger of Memory, when academics now talk on about race, class, and gender, what they’re usually talking about is race and gender."

"The thing that mattered most in this elite new world of mine was brainpower—or, at least, the projection of brainpower. Being a decent, truthful, charitable person—none of those traditional Judeo-Christian virtues counted. Wit, verbal adroitness, a substantive intellectual background (or at least the illusion of one), and condescension toward one’s mental inferiors were the marks of distinction here. Theory, with its bizarre vocabulary of literary encryption, was just beginning to take root at Penn and other top graduate schools across the land."

"The best Dorothy Parker-like riposte to nosy questions about adoption was uttered by a friend of a friend of mine on a New York City bus. This white mother and her Chinese baby daughter were riding up Madison Avenue when an older woman got on, sat down across from them, and barked out: “Is her father Chinese?” “I don’t know,” the mother replied. “It was dark.”"

"Books just don’t register with this crowd. They think I lack common sense; I think they lack a part of their souls."

"As someone from our adoption agency said to us before we left, “You may have been waiting for your daughter for a long time, but she has not been waiting for you.”"

"It’s weird to make oneself one’s “field,” but lots of academics these days are doing it—industriously promoting their own race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and/or religion as their intellectual specialty. Once of the many drawbacks of this “I teach what I am” approach is that it stifles classroom discussion. Any disagreement with the professor’s expertise comes off as an ad hominem attack."