Science Fiction Authors

"He had no choice. And that one thing turned Heaven into Hell."

"“Cynical bastard, aren’t you?” “Every man is a mirror,” Nozawa said flatly. “We all reflect what we see.”"

"“That was what we were told. It doesn’t entirely ring true.” “Why not?” “Because the President of the United States is always bound by the deals that he makes to get to his position. Delacourte can’t make any kinds of drastic changes, regardless of what he claims. The chief executive isn’t an emperor.”"

"Aubry looked at her without shifting his head. Damn, she was lovely. An unpleasant question remained: What where they to each other? It was hard to say sometimes. Did he truly feel love, or just the effects of the Cyloxibin mushroom? And was there a difference?"

"Lesbianism is the ultimate expression of a feminist philosophy."

"No man escapes Death. So Death must not be the enemy. Life must not be the prize. It must be the gameboard, on which Death teaches its savage lessons. You could heed those lessons, or ignore them, but never evade them. Death, then, was the ally. Not to be sought, but heeded."

"“It’s bigger than death, Aubry.” “You’re wrong,” he said, his voice utterly chill. “Nothing is bigger than death.”"

"It would have been a terrible thing to die a fool and a liar. Truth, at any cost, is worth the price."

"Truth could not be spawned in lies and deceit."

"I know her slightly. Amo ut intellegam. I love in order that I may understand. You try to do it backwards, and you never make it. I'm a Trad."

"We like to think institutions distort people. But slavery is a frightening institution because it doesn't. It allows the most direct and unrestrained expression of human nature."

"And your life is ruined because you tried to do the Right Thing. Join the club honey—guess what, there are a few more of us out here who’ve had our brains beaten our with our own dreams."

"“Chicken?” “Don’t want my feathers ruffled, it that’s what you mean.”"

"I’m damned tired of being needed. Being needed is just the flip side of being royally screwed."

"“You know, it isn’t that you can’t get information in electronic form, or microfilm, or disk, or cube, or any of the other forms—tape, holographic computer feed.” He paused. “Tell me, Aubry—what’s the similarity between all the modes of information storage I’ve just named?” Aubry scratched his head. “They don’t take up as much space as books, I guess.” “Yes, that’s true enough—but as far as I’m concerned, the difference is that they all require an external power source.” He cocked his head sideways, until he looked absurdly like a bird examining a piece of fruit. “Do you understand that that makes you dependent upon others?” Promise ran her hands over the spines of a nearby stack, then shook her head. “Not cubes. There are plenty of solar-powered cube-readers. One sunny day a week, and you’re set.” “True enough, but you are still dependent upon others to repair your viewer if it breaks down...the more advanced a technology, the more fragilely inter-dependent it is.” “So what?” Warrick shrugged. “It just seems to me that the most valuable thing that any human has is the ability to educate himself, to find out about the world around him, to program his primary organ of perception—his brain. And that basic, inalienable right should be as independent of external factors as possible. Once a book is printed and acquired, it’s yours. Nothing else is needed except a pair of eyes and daylight. Individual books have lasted for hundreds of year—do you really think you can say the same of your little viewers, or computers, or whatever? If you have a hundred libraries stored on cube, and your viewer breaks down, you have nothing. Give me an encyclopedia, and if it isn’t totally destroyed by fire, I can dig it out, dry it off, piece it together, and still have something of value.” His gaze became direct, and piercing. “There is nothing more important than directing the flow of information into your mind. It determines all—your attitudes, your actions, your life. You can rely upon the visual and audible media all you want—but they should be in addition to reading, not in place of it. If other forms replace reading, then your input is restricted, and much more dependent upon other people, who may or may not have your best interests at heart.” “So, that’s the most important thing you can think of in life? Reading?” Warrick sighed. “You are being obstinate, my friend. You learn if you learn.”"

"The price of chemical ecstasy was a dear one, paid in flesh and spirit."

"It was on one of those terrible, fever-clouded days when the serpent beneath southern California awoke. It stretched from slumber, shedding its skin, the screams of its wrath heard in the shriek of tortured steel, of splintering wood and concrete. Maxine was torn from her slumber by the moans of the dying and the awful sound of her ramshackle apartment shifting on its foundations. “Earthquake!” She pulled herself from the bed, stumbled from her building into the street, and watched the lurching structures and snapping powerlines, the buckling sidewalks and exploding water mains, as a seismic debt long outstanding came due."

"Hate comes from the past, fear from the future. Pain and pleasure are now, and therefore their own trap."

"Definitions are just words, just labels. And once you label something, the label gets between you and the thing."

"Marketing is finding women who like sex or would like to find out if they do. Sales is convincing them that they want to go home with YOU, right NOW."

"“Don’t be afraid of dying. A Warrior lives with death, Aubry. Welcome it as an ally. All other fears are just fragments of death, forms of unbecoming. A fighter clings to life, and therefore cannot win. A warrior treats life and death as the same thing, and therefore cannot lose.”"

"Curiosity is the hunger of Reason."

"The world doesn’t give a damn what we feel or want. Only what we are, and what we do."

"Exploring the secrets of the universe is the basic instinct of all intelligent life."

"In technological terms, space voyages and environmental protections seem different in character, with the former being intense, high speed, and adventurous, with connotations of state-of-the-art technology, while the latter is a gentle green public-service activity, one which, though involving technology, doesn’t give the impression of being as difficult as the former. But that is only an impression. The true situation is: If we want to achieve the present targets for environmental protection, the technology needed is more difficult to develop than that for large-scale interplanetary travel."

"Urban planning is a long history of cities (and their planners) seeing, and deliberately not seeing, the people who live in them. Working in city planning makes me consider the city as an organism, as a machine for living in…"

"Nostalgia ages people, but science fiction is a literature of youth. Its spirit is the youthful yearning for new worlds, and new ways of living. Mainstream literature is like Chinese baijiu, tasting better as it ages; science fiction, on the other hand, is like tap beer—you’ve got to drink it quick. Read today, even the sci-fi classics seem feeble, not revelatory. The nature of science fiction is to shine brightest in the present, then to be quickly forgotten. But science fiction shouldn’t be afraid of obsolescence. As a literature of innovation, it uses a constant stream of inventions and shocks to hold back obsolescence, like an everlasting fire. Just as ash falls, the flame springs back to life, emitting dazzling light. To accomplish this, it must hold on to its usefulness."

"In the remote future, when people remember the history of the mid-twentieth century to the present, all of the great events that seemed so momentous in this period will be milled away, leaving little trace, and only two things that we have overlooked will be seen as more and more important: first, humanity took its first step outside the cradle, and second, humanity then took a step backward. The importance of these two events cannot be overestimated."

"Of all the unexpected things that might interrupt Chinese science fiction’s development, social unrest has to be the most worrying. I once told readers at a conference that science fiction is the product of leisurely and carefree minds. No one agreed, but I was telling the truth. Only when our lives are stable and quiet can we allow the universe’s catastrophes to fascinate and awe us. If we already live in an environment full of danger, then science fiction won’t interest us. In fact, two of the last three bursts of creative progress that Chinese science fiction underwent were cut short by social unrest, which is lethal to the genre."

"I hope the first set we meet are kind and smart and savvy, and also mammals who breathe oxygen and have hierarchical structure, because otherwise we’re going to not be able to figure out how to say anything useful and understandable, and if they’re not kind, they may decide they’re better off without us…"

"As to the future of humanity, I’m essentially an optimist. I believe that with the advancement of technology, mankind has a hopeful future. But this optimistic view is based on reason: on one hand, whether the future will be bright or be dark depends largely on the choices we make today."

"Contemporary China is a complex society in transition. The kinds of technological and social changes that took societies in the west centuries to move through have sometimes been experienced by a mere two generations in China. The anxiety of careening out of balance, of being torn by parts moving too fast and too slow, is felt everywhere."

"The world of fantasy and myth isn’t really that large. The universe, as depicted in Eastern and Western mythology alike, is hardly ever larger than two astronomical units in radius. The notion of a light-year could never have made it into a myth because such a scale is beyond the capacity of the mythological imagination. The most magnificent deities of the world of magic are dwarfed by the stars of the world of sci-fi, and its most terrible demons pale in comparison to the sci-fi world’s black holes."

"The glories and obstacles of the past are just a speck compared to the vastness of the future."

"Quantitative change eventually gives way to qualitative change."

"I feel as if empire is something that is either taken for granted in space opera—uninterrogated, simply present as a fact of worldbuilding—or it is rendered so evil as to be incomprehensibly bad…"

"Fanfiction lets you share the kind of story you like with other people who take delight in it, too, and lets you participate in making that sort of story for those people…"

"The truth is that sci-fi and fantasy have many more similarities than differences. They have the same goal: both strive to create ethereal, free worlds of the imagination from which readers can derive the shocks and delights of beauty. (Personally, I’ve never thought it’s sci-fi’s job to represent reality or human nature.) The only difference between the two is the source of their imaginings."

"That humans will biologically alter themselves is inevitable, which makes life sciences the most terrifying of the sciences."

"Fantasy has been around since antiquity, and there’s been so much of it. The years have taken their toll and depleted some of its imaginative power. The rapid progress of science, on the other hand, constantly infuses fresh blood into the science-fictional imagination. The worlds described in today’s sci-fi are entirely different from those of a few decades ago, whereas today’s fantasy worlds aren’t so different from those of the Middle Ages."

"We tend to imagine that readers of fantasy recognize that what they’re reading is make-believe, which is certainly true today, but wasn’t necessarily so in ancient times. People of ages past regarded fantasies and myths as nothing less than fact. Back then, the real world and the world of magic were mixed together as an inseparable whole, and a large part of the appeal of magical fantasy was its perceived realism. Now, its sense of realism is gone for good, which is why modernity can produce only fairy tales, never myths."

"It’s an interesting thing, really: The rigorous, science-based predictions of scientists and futurologists and the spirited “flights of fancy” of sci-fi writers are just about equally (in)accurate!"

"Numbness to the universe is pervasive in society."

"It is science fiction’s mission to broaden and deepen people’s minds. If someone on the way home from work at night pauses to look thoughtfully up at the stars for a while because of a sci-fi story they’ve read, then that work is a great success. Unfortunately, our current sci-fi is also benumbed to a considerable extent, and I see two possible reasons. The first is conceptual. There’s an idea that sci-fi, like mainstream literature, is about relationships between people. This idea reduces the universe to nothing but a prop, a set piece, a supporting role. It cannot be denied that this idea has given rise to many excellent works, but sci-fi is at its strongest and most charming when it depicts the relationship between people and the universe. In sci-fi, the universe itself should be a protagonist, as much as any of its characters."

"A professor of philosophy once said that lesson one for freshman in his field should consist of a long, hard look late at night at the stars. I think this would be an even more apt first lesson for aspiring writers of sci-fi."

"As a child, I witnessed a great deal of violence and persecution as well as social unrest during The Cultural Revolution...This experience has made me understand the complexity of human nature and society—I’ve realized that the future of human civilization is also full of danger and uncertainty. Such understanding is manifested in my science fiction novels…"

"The cosmos had not chosen humanity after all. In the old timeline, humans had created the apex civilization on earth, but that had been a one-time and accidental chance. In our human conceit, we’d taken the accidental for the inevitable."

"The world described by modern physics has already moved far beyond our common sense and intuition, even beyond our imagination, and this is, of course, the richest resource for science fiction. I’ve tried to turn the magical world as demonstrated by modern physics into vivid stories. Most of my stories were based on and imagined along the lines of physics and cosmology."

"The products of modern science have already surpassed the wonders of magic."

"Mind you, what we are discussing isn’t religion, per se, but religious feeling. This isn’t the feeling someone has toward God—it’s atheistic, and not in the complicated way of Spinoza or whomever. The religious feeling of science fiction is a deep sense of awe at the great mysteries of the universe."