Novelists From The United States

"Your life is yours alone, rise up and live it!- Richard, Faith of the Fallen"

"Never let a beautiful woman pick your path for you when there is a man in her line of sight. -Adie, Wizard's First Rule*"

"No one ever goes into battle thinking God is on the other side. -Zedd, Wizard's First Rule"

"reality is nothing, perception is everything. -Zedd, Wizard's First Rule"

"No one is as fanatical as a convert. -Kahlan, Wizard's First Rule"

"Celebrating faith over reason is merely a way of denying what is, in favor of embracing any whim that strikes your fancy."

"People use democracy as a free-floating abstraction disconnected from reality. Democracy in and of itself is not necessarily good. Gang rape, after all, is democracy in action. All men have the right to live their own life. Democracy must be rooted in a rational philosophy that first and foremost recognizes the right of an individual. A few million Imperial Order men screaming for the lives of a much smaller number of people in the New World may win a democratic vote, but it does not give them the right to those lives, or make their calls for such killing right. Democracy is not a synonym for justice or for freedom. Democracy is not a sacred right sanctifying mob rule. Democracy is a principle that is subordinate to the inalienable rights of the individual."

"Fantasy allows you to shine a different kind of light on human beings. I believe the only valid use of fantasy is to illustrate important human themes. Magic in my novels is used in three ways: the simplest is as a metaphor for technology. A good example is a magic carpet. There's no magic carpet in my novels, but if someone needs to travel a great distance, they could use a magic carpet, while in a contemporary novel they'd use a car. The second way, and I think the most important, is as a metaphor for individuality and individual ability. The mediocre world doesn't want individuals to rise above what everyone else is doing. The third way I use magic is as a metaphor for coming out of an age of mysticism into a Renaissance. So, in a way it's the struggle between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance. … I never allow my characters to use magic to solve their problems. Some of their peripheral problems are solved through their magical abilities, but it's couched in terms of overcoming those problems in a thinking way. The major conflicts in the books are always solved through human intellect, through thinking out the problem and coming up with a solution. It's never "I'll just wave my magic wand over the bad guys and have them all fall down dead!""

"Because dying, any time, is an experience you don’t survive."

"Somewhere in his head a couple of neurones twitched, but they didn’t connect."

"Did you know you get clobbered for calling a polyglot a linguist?"

"“Stupid,” I husked to George. “Harem slaves don’t blow up the harem and themselves just to keep the new girls out. They wait and poison the new girls when they can get away with it. That does us no good.” “Nor do historical analogies, after a point.” “Analogic reasoning works when you have the right reference frame.”"

"The American black who goes to Kenya often discovers he is an American first and an African second, no matter what they did to him in Newark."

"People, of course, seemed to need also to talk and talk, which was a pity because their talk was mostly without meaning."

"Man is exogamous—all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. Or get impregnated by him, it works for women too. Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. That’s a drive, y’know, it’s built in. Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human. For millions of years that kept the genes circulating. But now we’ve met aliens we can’t screw, and we’re about to die trying."

"Our fellow passenger was Major Grogan, who thirty years before had been the first white man to go from the Cape to Cairo. It took him three years, one whole year in the marshes of the Sudd; his two companions died. It is said he ate them; I think so. He looked like a sensible man."

"Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature."

""James Tiptree, Jr." was a science fiction writer whose very fine work began appearing in the 1960s. No one had ever met "Tiptree" and theories about "him" were rife. Finally "James Tiptree, Jr." was revealed to be a sixty-year-old biologist called Alice Sheldon. We corresponded extensively, both before this revelation and afterwards. I loved James and was sad to lose him but I loved Alice too (she sent postcards typed in blue ink with blue-ink octopi drawn on them) and was much sadder to lose her because her loss (her death) was permanent. Straight people, however sympathetic they may be, don't know the texture or the difficulties of gay lives. When I heard of her death I determined that she wouldn't go down in history as another happy, heterosexual woman (like Virginia Woolf) whose life was edited because her real desires were held to be somehow an "attack" on her character. Sheldon, like Woolf, was married and happily so but she was a lesbian. Therefore I wrote the above note to Extrapolation and donated her letters to what I considered the appropriate place."

"Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see."

"What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine."

"What if a person is sure of his identity but it isn’t his identity?"

"He heard himself humming and decided to lock the whole thing into autopilot. No matter what shape that computer was in it would be saner than he was."

"She sounded sane as soap."

"If it worked it would be like trying to wipe your eye with a blowtorch."

"Eerie blue, the wide old eyes reminded him of a place he had never seen."

"You can understand why a system would seek information—but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?"

"Entropy! The development of reliable knowledge is anti-entropic. Science’s task in a social system is comparable to the function of intelligence in the individual. It holds against disorganization, isolation, noise, entropy. But we, here—we’ve allied ourselves with an entropic subsystem. We’re not generating structure, we’re helping to degrade the system!"

"Lafferty has the power which sets fire behind your eyeballs. There is warmth, illumination, and a certain joy attendant upon the experience. He's good."

"What special magic does Lafferty offer? The simple answer has always been his use of language. Well what of it — the field has many who can make a phrase sing or sing a phrase that's the thing. The true answer lies in that his stories sound like they're folk tales. Now I said something very precise there. Lafferty doesn't use the language of folktales, and only rarely uses their rhythm. But he lives so well within the language of his creation that his language — particularly in the combination of slightly archaic folk speech and outrageous etymologies for his words — sounds like language that some one has said somewhere. Yevgeny Zamyatin developed the concept of a "prose foot" as way of internal pacing of fiction. He saw it as a kind of rhythmic device that by causing the reader to remember an earlier part of the narrative became a force for a choral (as in pertaining to choruses) cohesion that bound the story together in a different way than plot mechanics. This method, which I can't detect in Zamyatin's works (since Russian is Greek to me) is the core of Lafferty's work. He has has invented the post-modern equivalent of the Homeric epithet."

"Those individuals looking from within the SF world may lack, or simply disdain, the linguistic and critical skills needed to begin to reveal that in Lafferty's work there is much more going on than meets the eye. The brave individuals who have attempted to do so have either merely produced fulsome praise or attempted to classify Lafferty's writings on the basis of superficialities (i.e., calling him a surrealist). Lafferty's use of displacement is not unique, but so few writers have consciously attempted the process, and their works are so varied, that there are no unifying articles, no language for the critic with a day job to draw on. Some bright lad or lass (with the appropriate dignifying letters following their names) may read this and look for the method of displacement in H. P. Lovecraft, James Joyce, Robert Pinget, Gilbert Sorrentino, Flann O'Brien, R. A. Lafferty, Howard Waldrop, and R. A. Wilson. Now there's a book worth reading. The astute observer will note that all the names on the list are Irish, saving those which are not."

"Lafferty deliberately creates the mythic effect through a technique I call effective arcanum, and that rather than examining his work with the conventional tools of science fiction criticism, we need to examine his system — firstly for our pleasure, and secondly so that we may re-create it (because the sign of an authentic religo-magical system is the power of the followers to reproduce the results)."

"It's an American classic."

"R. A. Lafferty is unique, in the old, unspoiled sense of the word. A genius as wild and joyful, delightful and unpredictable as his comes along but once in a lifetime — this lifetime. Cherish him. If there were no Lafferty, we would lack the imagination to invent him."

"[R. A. Lafferty] has to be the maddest, the most colorful, the most unexpected writer alive."

"One of the things I loved about collaborating with Nick was that he was like R. A. Lafferty. Remember those old books for science fiction beginners, the ones that said “If you like Asimov, read Clement” or “If you like Sheckley, read Tenn”? And then you’d come to “If you like Lafferty, buy everything of his you can find before no one writes or thinks remotely like him.”"

"The works of R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002) are not too far out be reviewed by an ordinary human being. However, one must reach into an awkwardly positioned dimension to lay hold of them."

"No true reader who has read as much as a single story by Raphael Aloysius Lafferty needs to be told that he is our most original writer. … Just about everything Lafferty writes is fun, is witty, is entertaining and playful. But it is not easy, for it is a mingling of allegory with myth, and of both with something more ... In fact, he may not be just ours, but the most original writer in the history of literature."

"“The world is a garden,” the old man said. “It is a farm, a plantation, a sheep-ranch. In the garden are the cities also; they too are a great part of the planting. Believe me, all these plantations are sowed with good seed. But the Enemy from the Beginning also sows the red blight: these are the charlocks, the tares, called zizania in the Vulgate. Do not be fooled as to what it is and who sowed it. Do not be fooled in the factory or the arsenal, in the ship-yard or the shop; do not be fooled on the bleak farms or in the crowded city, in the club or in the workers’ hall or in the drawing room. The wrong thing that is sowed is the red weed, the red blight. And the Enemy has done this. "Or let us say that we have a green thing growing forever. Everything that is done is done by it. And on it we also have the red parasite crunching forever: and everything that is undone is undone by that. The parasite will present itself as a modern thing. It will call itself the Great Change. Less often, and warily, it will call itself the Great Renewal. But it can never be another thing than the Red Failure returned. It is a disease, it is a scarlet fever, a typhoid, a diphtheria; it is the Africa disease, it is the red leprosy, it is the crab-cancer. It is the death of the individual and of the corporate soul. And incidentally, but very often, it is also the death of the individual and of the corporate body. We are asked to swear fealty to the parasite disease which the enemy sowed from the beginning. I will not do it, and I hope that you will not.""

"A newspaper man has got to know when to keep his mouth and his mind shut. You might end up dead." "Isn't that the usual fate of men, Harry?"

"There was a later time when sincere men tried to build an organization as wide as the world to secure the peace of the world. It had been tried before and it had failed before. Perhaps if it failed this time it would not be tried again for a very long while. The idea of the thing was attacked by good and bad men, in good faith and bad. The final realization of it was so close that it could be touched with the fingertips. A gambler wouldn't have given odds on it either way. It teetered, and it almost seemed as though it would succeed. Then members of that group interfered." "And it failed, O'Claire?" "No. It succeeded, Foley, as in the other case. It succeeded in so twisted a fashion that the Devil himself was puzzled as to whether he had gained or lost ground by it. And he isn't easily puzzled."

"Pirates are perhaps the greatest invention of Earth people," Elizabeth interrupted loftily, "and their pirate stories are wonderful entertainment for small children. We have to give Earth people credit for that, they invented pirates."

"It was their way of defying that tricky place Earth. That place will hurt you if you let it get the hop on you. They spooked the Earth spooks away with their stories. They whistled in the dark."

"‎Sometimes traveling people will be talking together. They will say how good it is in some places and how bad it is in others. And, sooner or later, one of them is bound to mention it. "Talk about really being out in the boondocks!" he will say, "there's a little planet named Earth —""

"His soaring vaunt escaped the blooming ears of us, He's gone, he's dead, he's dirt, he disappears from us! Be this the death of highest thrust of human all? The flaming end of bright and shining crewmen all?'Destroyed? His road is run? It's but a bend of it; Make no mistake, this only seems"

"I will be double-damned to a better Hell than Hellpepper Planet if I will have my ending here in peace! Peace be not the end of my epic! An epic is already failed if it have an ending. I don't care how it ended the first time — it will not end the same now!"

"The eye in his hand winked at him dourly. Eye was a tough old gump, not given to easy enthusiasms. Roadstrum put it back in his pocket and once more contemplated his good fortune."

""I'm doing pretty good. I'm a seminal genius, they say, and I have the most sophisticated tools ever devised to work with. And I do build some good things for them. I'm quite successful. I'll tell you something, though. In the daytime, with all those sophisticated tools, and particularly if someone's watching me, I just stall around. But at night — " "Ah, at night! What do you do then, Hondstarfer?" "Put away those damned sophisticated tools and get my stone hammers. That's when I build the good stuff. Don't give me away, though, Roadstrum."

"Man-a-bleeding, but they broke out of that place! You say it can't be done, but they did it. Their expectations had been too high, and no second-rate Hell could hold them. In a way it was their greatest feat. No one else had ever broken out of there before."

"This petty place cannot be Hell, Roadstrum? Ah, but it is my friend. That, you see, is the hell of it."

"You show signs of levity, and that is the one thing not permitted here. This place is for serious persons only. If you are not serious now, by hell you'll get serious pretty quick!"