Science Fiction Books

"They cannot help but take the Food now. Suppose we were to resign our heritage and do this folly that Caterham suggests! Suppose we could! Suppose we give up this great thing that stirs within us, repudiate this thing our fathers did for us, that you, Father, did for us, and pass, when our time has come, into decay and nothingness! What then? Will this little world of theirs be as it was before? They may fight against greatness in us who are the children of men, but can they conquer? Even if they should destroy us every one, what then? Would it save them? No! For greatness is abroad, not only in us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of all things! It is in the nature of all things, it is part of space and time. To grow and still to grow, from first to last that is Being, that is the law of life. What other law can there be? "To help others?" "To grow. It is still, to grow. Unless we help them to fail.""

"Mankind was surely not so mad as that — surely not! It was impossible, it was incredible, it could not be. What good would it do, to kill the giant human when the gigantic in all the lower things had now inevitably come? They could not be so mad as that!"

"What was he seeking? He wanted something the pigmy world did not give, some end which the pigmy world prevented his attaining, prevented even his seeing clearly, which he was never to see clearly. It was the gigantic social side of this lonely dumb monster crying out for his race, for the things akin to him, for something he might love and something he might serve, for a purpose he might comprehend and a command he could obey."

"He came back to Piccadilly Circus between eleven and twelve at night and found a new sort of multitude. Clearly they were very intent: full of things they, for inconceivable reasons, might do, and of others they might not do. They stared at him and jeered at him and went their way. The cabmen, vulture-eyed, followed one another continually along the edge of the swanning pavement. People emerged from the restaurants or entered them, grave, intent, dignified, or gently and agreeably excited, or keen and vigilant, beyond the cheating of the sharpest waiter born. The great giant, standing at his corner, peered at them all. "What is it all for?" he murmured in a mournful vast undertone, "What is it all for? They are all so earnest. What is it I do not understand?" And none of them seemed to see, as he could do, the drink-sodden wretchedness of the painted women at the corner, the ragged misery that sneaked along the gutters, the infinite futility of all this employment. The infinite futility! None of them seemed to feel the shadow of that giant's need, that shadow of the future, that lay athwart their paths."

"For the next generation there must be great and little —" said Redwood, with his eyes on his son's face. "For many generations. And the little will hamper the great and the great press upon the little. So it must needs be, Father." "There will be conflict." "Endless conflict. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another. But in every child born of man, Father Redwood, lurks some seed of greatness — waiting for the Food."

"You lea' me alone. I got to live as well as you. I got to think. I got to eat. You lea' me alone." "It's the Law," said the little policeman, coming no further. "We never made the Law." "Nor me," said young Caddles. "Your little people made all that before I was born. You and your law! What I must and what I mustn't. No food for me to eat unless I work a slave, no rest, no shelter, nothin', and you tell me —" "I ain't got no business with that," said the policeman. "I'm not one to argue. All I got to do is to carry out the law."

"Who cares what they can do, or what they will do? I am yours and you are mine. What is there more than that? I am yours and you are mine — for ever. Do you think I will stop for their little rules, for their little prohibitions, their scarlet boards indeed! — and keep from you?"

"What place is there for us among these multitudes? They who are little can hide from one another, but where are we to hide? There is no place where we could eat, no place where we could sleep. If we fled — night and day they would pursue our footsteps."

"That their laws should fetter us! That we, at the first spring of life, should be tripped by their old engagements, their aimless institutions!"

"All unaware of the trend of events, unaware of the laws that were closing in upon all the Brethren, unaware indeed that there lived a Brother for him on the earth, young Caddles chose this time to come out of his chalk pit and see the world. His brooding came at last to that. There was no answer to all his questions in Cheasing Eyebright; the new Vicar was less luminous even than the old, and the riddle of his pointless labour grew at last to the dimensions of exasperation. "Why should I work in this pit day after day?" he asked. "Why should I walk within bounds and be refused all the wonders of the world beyond there? What have I done, to be condemned to this?" And one day he stood up, straightened his back, and said in a loud voice, "No!" "I won't," he said, and then with great vigour cursed the pit."

"What business is it of these little wretches, where we love, how we love? What have they and their world to do with us?"

"He said, it would be better for you, better for all the giants, if we, two — abstained from conversation. That was how he put it."

"They will fight," said young Redwood. "If we refuse these terms, I doubt not they will fight. Indeed I hope they will be open and fight. If after all they offer peace, it will be only the better to catch us unawares. Make no mistake, Brothers; in some way or other they will fight. The war has begun, and we must fight to the end. Unless we are wise, we may find presently we have lived only to make them better weapons against our children and our kind. This, so far, has been but the dawn of battle. All our lives will be a battle. Some of us will be killed in battle, some of us will be waylaid. There is no easy victory, no victory whatever that is not more than half defeat for us. Be sure of that. What of that? If only we keep a foothold, if only we leave behind us a growing host to fight when we are gone!" "And to-morrow?" "We will scatter the Food; we will saturate the world with the Food."

""Work in that old pit, until I die and rot and stink! What worm did they think was living in my giant body? Dig chalk for God knows what foolish purpose! Not I!"

"You may imagine the spreading consternation in this ordered world when it became known that the Princess who was affianced to the Prince, the Princess, Her Serene Highness! with royal blood in her veins! met — frequently met — the hypertrophied offspring of a common professor of chemistry, a creature of no rank, no position, no wealth, and talked to him as though there were no Kings and Princes, no order, no reverence — nothing but Giants and Pigmies in the world, talked to him and, it was only too certain, held him, as her lover."

"I mean that without knowing it we have been trampling on the most sacred conceptions of the little folks. We who are royal are a class apart. We are worshipped prisoners, processional toys. We pay for worship by losing our elementary freedom. And I was to have married that Prince — You know nothing of him though. Well, a pigmy Prince, He doesn't matter… It seems it would have strengthened the bonds between my country and another. And this country also was to profit. Imagine it! — strengthening the bonds!"

"They say that we must part," the Princess said to her lover. "But why?" he cried. "What new folly have these people got into their heads?" "Do you know," she asked, "that to love me — is high treason?"

"I want now to think alone; and think out this change in things, think away the old solitude, and think you and those others into my world. . . . I shall go. I shall go back to-day to my place in the castle, and tomorrow, as the dawn comes, I shall come again — here."

"All day I shall dream and dream of this new world you have given me. Even now, I can scarcely believe —"

"These two met altogether fourteen times before the beginning of the end."

"Very soon they had passed from the realisation that in them and through them a new world of giantry shaped itself in the earth, from the contemplation of the great struggle between big and little, in which they were clearly destined to participate, to interests at once more personal and more spacious. Each time they met and talked and looked on one another, it crept a little more out of their subconscious being towards recognition, that something more dear and wonderful than friendship was between them, and walked between them and drew their hands together. And in a little while they came to the word itself and found themselves lovers, the Adam and Eve of a new race in the world."

"They ceased to be beings of flesh and blood to one another and themselves; they passed into a bodily texture of tenderness and desire. They gave it first whispers and then silence, and drew close and looked into one another's moonlit and shadowy faces under the infinite arch of the sky. And the still black pine trees stood about them like sentinels. The beating steps of time were hushed into silence, and it seemed to them the universe hung still. Only their hearts were audible, beating. They seemed to be living together in a world where there is no death, and indeed so it was with them then. It seemed to them that they sounded, and indeed they sounded, such hidden splendours in the very heart of things as none have ever reached before. Even for mean and little souls, love is the revelation of splendours. And these were giant lovers who had eaten the Food of the Gods."

"A ruler's friend's judge him by his achievements, his enemies by the means he used to obtain them."

"Praying for rain is such a bad idea. Even in the midst of a terrible drought, someone will say, Of course I want it to rain, but not today. Politics is the art of simultaneously satisfying groups with conflicting goals. The traditional way of accomplishing this is to speak to the groups separately, lie, and then, if you are caught, deny it. You count on the voters to forget or lose interest or change their minds, and they almost always come through for you. In our time, between national television and the internet, contradictions are more easily caught, so not the best method of pleasing everyone is to promise nothing while seeming to promise everything."

"Human beings are not designed to keep secrets. Every aspect of our being is shaped for the sharing of information - through speech, gesture, facial expression, posture, and every other deliberate or inadvertent sign of emotion and intent. Thus, it should not surprise us that every would-be dictator, tyrant, conqueror, prophet, colonizer, politician, artist, and dog-catcher in history clearly signaled his intentions long before he acted and in plenty of time for others to prevent them. Neither Hitler nor Churchill, neither Pol Pot nor Abraham Lincoln ever did anything they hadn't told us and shown us they would do. That they are rarely prevented has more to do with our inattention, cowardice, or ambition to ride his coattails than with his particular skill. Dogs might run from the dogcatcher as soon as they see the net, but they rarely tear out his throat and kill him, which is, of course, the only rational course of action for the dog that values its life, liberty, or happiness."

"Everything is too long a list to work with. No one knows everything about anything. No one knows something about everything. Everyone knows something about something. Anyone could be the world's foremost expert on something. Anyone who thinks that just because they didn't already know a thing, it must not be true or important, is an idiot."

"War will exist as long as any community desires to impose its will on another community more than it desires peace. Coercive men see only slaves and rivals in the world. If the meek refuse war to defend themselves against coercion, then they deserve to be slaves. Peace-lovers can only have what they love by being better at what they hate than those who love war. There is no road to peace that does not pass through war."

"People know many things, and half of them are wrong. If only we knew which half, we'd have reason to be proud of our intelligence. What is knowledge? A belief that is shared by all the respectable people in a community, whether there is any real evidence for it or not. What is faith? A belief that we hold so strongly that we act as if it is true, even though we know there are many who do not believe it. What is opinion? A belief we expect other people to argue with. What is scientific fact? An oxymoron. Science does not deal in facts. It deals in hypotheses, which are never fully and finally correct."

"A string of unbroken success leads people expect their leaders to be infallible, and when he falls short, they hate him. Complete failures are even worse, for then the leader is seen as weak. He is no longer treated as a factor by his rivals, who immediately move to fill the vacuum. The successful leader is one who is able to convince his people that they are in desperate straits, and only he has the strength and wisdom to keep them safe. Then the trick is never to put this reputation for strength and wisdom to the test. Glorious but untested reputations last forever."

"There's a Christ-like robot in need of repair parts in Phil's 1954 SF story "The Last of the Masters"."

"The focus is on the sterility of a robot with a male name, Bors. [...] It is not clear why he does not replicate himself, or educate his human servants: it is simply a given that he is sterile. The old, technologically advanced, highly organized civilization is a civilization of production, but now under Bors it can do no more than maintain itself."

"In "The Last Of The Masters" Dick continues to make us aware of the paradoxical cast of human existence. … The small anachronistic society is gradually breaking down of its own entropy. Complete with a disciplined economic organization (but no market to supply) and a well-trained military (but no enemy to fight), the group exists at the will of a deteriorating pre-war robot master. Even as the Anarchists break the robot up beyond all salvage, one of the service men pockets a memory chip "just in case the times change.""

"Dick's attitude to highly-developed clever machinery is... far more complex than blanket suspicion hostility. Intelligent machines sometimes feature in his early work in much more benign roles, as in "The Last of the Masters" (1954), which features an altrustic robot."

"My God," she said softly. "You have no understanding of us. You run all this, and you're incapable of empathy. You're nothing but a mechanical computer."

"As you say, they're actually a voluntary club of totally unorganized individuals. Without law or central authority. They maintain no society — they can't govern. All they can do is interfere with anyone else who tries. Troublemakers. But—" "But what?" "It was this way before. Two centuries ago. They were unorganized. Unarmed. Vast mobs, without discipline or authority. Yet they pulled down all the governments. All over the world."

"Though he recognizes the dangers of relying on an elite or a government, Dick was more than aware of the problems at the other extreme … Though the anarchists triumph, Dick does not vindicate them, keeping it clear that the robot had certainly accomplished something in that valley, though it had eventually gone too far."

"You know I'm the only one who can keep all this together. I'm the only one who knows how to maintain a planned society, not a disorderly chaos!"

"You have to know," Tolby said, "how the League was formed you have to know how we pulled down the governments that day. Pulled them down and destroyed them. Burned all the buildings. And all records. Billions of microfilms and papers. Great bonfires that burned for weeks. And the warms of little white things that poured out when we knocked the buildings down."

"Maybe," McLean said softly, "you and I can then get off this rat race. You and I and all the rest of us. And live like human beings." "Rat race," Fowler murmured. "Rats in a maze. Doing tricks. Performing chores thought up by somebody else."

"It is made clear at the end of the story that, while there are disadvantages to global anarchism, they are more than outweighed by the effective abolition of war that has followed from its adoption."

"Consciousness collected around him. He returned with reluctant; the weight of centuries, an un bearable fatigue, lay over him. The ascent was painful. HE would have shriekedd if there were anything to shriek with. And anyhow, he was beginning to feel glad."

"The little man with beard and glasses leaped up. "There's nobody here has anything to do with governments! We're all good people!""

"What do we need money for?" Toby laughed good naturally, "I haven't paid for anything in my life. Neither have you.""

"Now I show trust of a robot as leader, a robot who is the suffering servant, which is to say a form of Christ. Leader as servant of man; leader who should be dispensed with — perhaps. An ambiguity hangs over the morality of this story. Should we have a leader or should we think for ourselves? Obviously the latter, in principle. But — sometimes there lies a gulf between what is theoretically right and that which is practical. It's interesting that I would trust a robot and not an android. Perhaps it's because a robot does not try to deceive you as to what it is."

"A lot of fowl in this book [The Golden Man (1980)] are turkeys. … An instance of this, from "The Last of the Masters" (1954), a hyperkinetic foray into hairy-chested-style huger-mugger. … If this isn't bogus machismo, John Wayne never had a career. But I suppose we all looked silly, we pulp writers of long, long ago, so I shouldn't cast the first stone."

"A strange remnant of the world that was hid out in a mountain valley, ruled by a mind out of the past."

"I know it seems incredible, that already some of the younger men are beginning to doubt the greatness of the Change our world has undergone, but read — read the newspapers of that time. Every age becomes mitigated and a little ennobled in our minds as it recedes into the past. It is the part of those who like myself have stories of that time as well, to supply, by a scrupulous spiritual realism, some antidote to that glamour."

"We live now in these days, when the Great Change has been in most things accomplished, in a time when everyone is being educated to a sort of intellectual gentleness, a gentleness that abates nothing from our vigour, and it is hard to understand the stifled and struggling manner to which my generation of common young men did its thinking. To think at all about certain questions was an act of rebellion that set one oscillating between the furtive and the defiant. People begin to find Shelley — for all his melody — noisy and ill-conditioned now because his Anarchs have vanished, yet there was a time when novel thought had to go to that tune of breaking glass."

"One thing that I said I can remember. "I wish at times," said I, with a gesture at the heavens, "that comet of yours or some such thing would indeed strike this world — and wipe us all away, strikes, wars, tumults, loves, jealousies, and all the wretchedness of life!""

"Now you must understand that the world of thought of those days was in the strangest condition, it was choked with obsolete inadequate formulæ, it was tortuous to a maze-like degree with secondary contrivances and adaptations, suppressions, conventions, and subterfuges. Base immediacies fouled the truth on every man's lips."