Science fiction

"What we get from science fiction—what keeps us reading it, in spite of our doubts and occasional disgust—is not different from the thing that makes mainstream stories rewarding, but only expressed differently. We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in the big ones of space and time."

"Science fiction is an internationalist genre. When a novel is set in a galaxy far, far, away current geopolitical boundaries don't have a lot of meaning. However, Kaufman says there was a time when you could sell a novel set in space, but you couldn't sell a science fiction novel set in Australia."

"From a social point of view most SF has been incredibly regressive and unimaginative. All those Galactic Empires, taken straight from the British Empire of 1880. All those planets — with 80 trillion miles between them! — conceived of as warring nation-states, or as colonies to be exploited, or to be nudged by the benevolent Imperium of Earth towards self-development — the White Man’s Burden all over again. The Rotary Club on Alpha Centauri, that’s the size of it."

"Science-fiction is a literary province I used to visit fairly often; if I now visit it seldom, that is not because my taste has improved but because the province has changed, being now covered with new building estates, in a style I don't care for. But in the good old days I noticed that whenever critics said anything about it, they betrayed great ignorance. They talked as if it were a homogeneous genre. But it is not, in the literary sense, a genre at all. There is nothing common to all who write it except the use of a particular 'machine'. Some of the writers are of the family of Jules Verne and are primarily interested in technology. Some use the machine simply for literary fantasy and produce what is essentially Märchen or myth. A great many use it for satire; nearly all the most pungent American criticism of the American way of life takes this form, and would at once be denounced as un-American if it ventured into any other. And finally, there is the great mass of hacks who merely 'cashed in' on the boom in science-fiction and used remote planets or even galaxies as the backcloth for spy-stories or love-stories which might as well or better have been located in Whitechapel or the Bronx. And as the stories differ in kind, so of course do their readers. You can, if you wish, class all science-fiction together; but it is about as perceptive as classing the works of Ballantyne, Conrad and W. W. Jacobs together as 'the sea-story' and then criticising that."

"It is absurd to condemn them [science fiction stories] because they do not often display any deep or sensitive characterization. They oughtn't to. … Every good writer knows that the more unusual the scenes and events of his story are, the slighter, more ordinary, the more typical his persons should be. Hence Gulliver is a commonplace little man and Alice is a commonplace little girl. If they had been more remarkable they would have wrecked their books. The Ancient Mariner himself is a very ordinary man. To tell how odd things struck odd people is to have an oddity too much; he who is to see strange sights must not himself be strange."

"With Arab literature so focused on classical themes, an Orwellian allegory, for instance, would tackle the present and envision a future in a more clandestine fashion than a straightforward political attack. Sultana's Dream is an example of such critique. Written in 1905 by a Muslim feminist writer and social reformer who lived in British India, it is one of the earliest examples of feminist science fiction, and is a sort of gender-based Planet of the Apes where the roles are reversed and the men are locked away in a technologically advanced future."

"I like to present my characters—whether they are in the past or in the future—with interesting moral choices, and it seems to me that science-fiction writers are, or should be, the prophets and moralists of today. I am fairly well up on the biological sciences, but I am deeply uninterested in gadgets. A writer's job is to write about people with sympathy and insight."

"Brian Rollins: You're one of the few sci-fi writers in Hollywood to use religion in your shows. What kind of resistance/acceptance do you see from industry insiders and fans?"

"The whiteness of speculative fiction is something I have myself done extensive research on, beginning with the earliest examples of speculative fiction first set in, and then originating from, Southern Africa – H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines in 1885."

"This linguistic progress has not been limited to literature. The 2017 BRICS (an association of five major emerging national economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa Film Festival held in Chengdu, China saw the debut of Jahmil XT Qubeka’s 20 minute short film, Stillborn, which follows the android Nobomi SX1 as she tries to uncover the cultural past of the now extinct humans that created her. With dialogue entirely in isiXhosa, the film is the first South African science fiction film not in English."

"Sci-fi can be succinctly defined as speculation, whether based on established scientific facts or on logical pseudo-facts consistent with the framework of the fiction in question, involving smelly green pimply aliens furiously raping or eating, or both, beautiful naked bare-breasted chicks, covering them in slime, red, oozing, living slime, dribbling from every horrific orifice, squeezing out between bulbous pulpy lips onto the sensuous velvety skin of the writhing sweating slave-girls, their bodies cut and bruised by knotted whips brandished by giant blond vast-biceped androids called Simon, and written in the Gothic mode."

"Science fiction has existed in China almost as long as it existed in the West. It began in the late-Qing Dynasty, with scholars translating the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells into Chinese. Among such translators was Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature himself. Of course, tales of the strange and mysterious permeate Chinese literature from its ancient origins on, but the first work generally recognized as an original Chinese science fiction story was Colony of the Moon (月球殖民地). It was published as a serial from 1904 to 1905 under the pen name Huangjiang Diaosou (荒江钓叟), which means “Old Fisherman by a Deserted River.” Many other works were published during this early-twentieth-century period. The genre was perceived to have literary merit through its ability to incite interest among readers in the rapidly evolving fields of science and technology, in which China was involved in a game of catch-up."

"Sf cinema is undeniably dominated by the American film industry, at least in Western countries and since the end of World War II. Not only are the majority of sf films released each year produced in the US, but many of them are Hollywood blockbusters made with the biggest of budgets, while nations with very rich cinematic histories, such as France and Italy, have made comparatively few contributions in the genre. There is, however, a not-insignificant corpus of sf cinema produced in Latin America. These films have mostly been ignored by critics and academics, both nationally and internationally, and only in the past few years have they begun to show signs of being rediscovered."

"Science fiction, speculative fiction, whatever you want to call it, is one of the ways to explore social issues in fiction. You can explore what it's going to be like if current trends continue. You can change a variable and see what that does."

"the most fruitful ways to approach the future for me are speculative fiction or utopian fiction. Isaac Asimov once said that all science fiction falls into three categories: What if, If only, and If this continues."

"Of course, science-fiction is an expensive genre to produce. VFX, starships, superheroes, these all cost money. And it’s true Africa can’t yet compete with Hollywood feature films in terms of scale the way it can in terms of imagination. It may take some getting used to, watching a very different sort of Sci-Fi, but these films throw up challenging new ways of thinking about Sci-Fi socially, politically and in terms of what our real future might look like. The closest place to find what we’re used to watching, though, would be South Africa, where artists have used the short, rather than feature film format to explore ideas of how we live in the modern day, shaped ever-more by technology. Another thing everyone says when one brings up African sci-fi is, “You mean like District 9?” And, yes, we do mean like that. A lot like that, actually. As a nation, we like to claim District 9, but let’s face it the money and the audience were American."

"In schools, for example, there are courses in the criticism of literature, art criticism, and so forth. The arts are supposed to be 'not real.' It is quite safe, therefore, to criticize them in that regard -- to see how a story or a painting is constructed, or more importantly, to critically analyze the structure of ideas, themes, or beliefs that appear, say, in the poem or work of fiction. When children are taught science, there is no criticism allowed. They are told, 'This is how things are.' Science's reasons are given as the only true statements about reality, with which no student is expected to quarrel. Any strong intellectual explorations or counter versions of reality have appeared in science fiction, for example. Here scientists, many being science-fiction buffs, can channel their own intellectual questioning into a safe form. 'This is, after all, merely imaginative and not to be taken seriously.'"

"Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making. The whole process of science is wildly under-represented in science fiction because it's not easy to write about. There are many facets of science that are almost exactly opposite of dramatic narrative. It's slow, tedious, inconclusive, it's hard to tell good guys from bad guys — it's everything that a normal hour of Star Trek is not."

"For the last three decades, the arbiters of taste in science fiction have followed the lead of the mainstream literary publishing industry. When that industry embraced modernist literature—literature with little or no narrative, literature that attempted to capture “real life” in beautiful prose—the industry turned its back on storytelling. Science fiction, in attempt to gain legitimacy, did the same. Too many books, published from the late sixties to now, are stylistically brilliant and essentially dull."

"There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women."

"In the field of science fiction or fantasy, morality—when it enters a book at all—is almost always either thoughtlessly liberal (you can’t judge other cultures) or thoughtlessly illiberal (strong men must rule) or just plain thoughtless (killing people is bad)."

"The futurist fiction literary genre is a 20th-century phenomenon. According to Gregory Benford, a physicist and a much-laureled hard SF author, “[S]cience fiction arose in a time affected by science’s unsettling relations about ourselves, about our position in the naturalorder—and by relentless technology, science’s burly handmaiden. Science fiction has tried to grapple with ideas which disturb our sense of being at home in the world” (16). Kathryn Cramer sets the beginning of futurist fiction proper in the 1920s (25), as does David G. Hartwell, who claims futurist fiction began when Hugo Gernsback, editor for Amazing Stories, labeled the newgenre as “scientifiction” in 1926 (31, 37). During the 1920s, Hartwell maintains, a growing split developed between high- (Modernist) and low- (popular or paraliterary) literature. Futurist fiction took the brunt of the split as H. G. Wells lost his long aesthetic battle to Henry James, who championed “art for art’s sake.” Wells proceeded to become a popular and successful author and one of the first authorities on futurist fiction technique. As Well’s proto-genre took shape, it evolved in antithesis to Jamesian Modernism by rejecting the valorization of style and innovative content (Hartwell 36). According to Hartwell, clear definitions for futurist fiction would not arise until the mid-1930s when John W. Campbell, who prized scientific integrity in the new genre, assumed editorial responsibility for Astounding Stories (37)."

"For Samuel R. Delany, Jr., speculative fiction, as he preferred to call the genre, is radically different from standard fiction for reasons ranging from syntactic variation to thematic vistas to authorial function (Science447-51). Joanna Russ agrees with Delany’s assessment. She notes that futurist fiction is highly didactic, and for any didactic work to be understood by its reader-critics, they must grasp its constitutive principles. Thus, Russ maintains, as science generates new paradigms, the vast majority of contemporary literary critics who lack a sufficient scientific understanding cannot credibly assay speculative fiction (556-67). Although Russ’ polemic can be applied to futurist fiction generally, it is most directly relevant to hard SF. Hard SF valorizes the central tenet that scientific plausibility must constitute the guiding framework for the story. Although John W. Campbell promulgated its tenets in the 1930s, hard SF would not become a distinct FFF subgenre until the late 1950s ormid-1960s. Some critics see the establishment of hard SF as a conservative reaction to the New Wave literary movement, which embraced extra-scientific influences."

"The question of more pointed significance to the Black community is whether the advent of and devotion to science—which has been used, as a science fiction, throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries to justify slavery and the inferiority of Blacks—will undercut religion in the African diaspora. Religion has long occupied the central role in the freedom struggle of the Black community (Du Bois, Souls 211-20; Franklin 92-95,146-47; Woodson 52-53). According to Hartwell, much of futurist fiction in the 1940s and 1950s elevated scientific knowledge above other systems of thought, and thus “a lot of it was xenophobic, elitist, racist, and psychologically naive” (38). Apparently, not even the recent unmasking of the widespread eradication or co-opting of diasporic scientific accomplishments engendered by the wave of Black studies programs initiated in the early 1970s has undone the Black community’s suspicion toward science."

"Real science is as amenable to exciting and engrossing fiction as fake science, and I think it is important to exploit every opportunity to convey scientific ideas in a civilization which is both based upon science and does almost nothing to ensure that science is understood."

"Many scientists deeply involved in the exploration of the solar system (myself among them) were first turned in that direction by science fiction. And the fact that some of that science fiction was not of the highest quality is irrelevant. Ten-year-olds do not read the scientific literature."

"Situated within the considerable body of creative material that is set in a future Australia, only a small body of this literary work has been authored by First Nations writers. These works include Archie Weller’s 1999 novel Land of The Golden Clouds , Alexis Wright’s 2013 novel The Swan Book, Ambellin Kwaymullina’s young adult Tribe series, Ellen van Neervan’s 2014 short story “Water” from Heat and Light, and Claire G. Coleman’s 2017 novel Terra Nullius."

"It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable."

"Since the summer of 2012, the patent war between Samsung and Apple has been raging in almost every media outlet in South Korea, reminding the public of their country’s status as the newly risen IT capital in the global community. This recognition indeed extends far beyond the Korean borders; in the recent film Cloud Atlas (2012), for instance, the Western gaze shifts its focus to (Neo-) Seoul as the site of our time’s techno-orientalist future-scape, instead of adhering to the classic imageries of Tokyo or Hong Kong as we have seen in Blade Runner (1982) or Ghost in the Shell (1995). Curiously, however, science fiction as a literary representation of the technologized science South Korea thrives on nowadays never appears to have gained traction in Korea’s own cultural imaginary."

"Remember that Jules Verne was a sort of Shakespeare of science fiction, and we would feel derelict if we did not give his stories in our columns."

"The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different."

"In most Latin American countries, SF&F fiction, both in literature and cinema, tends to be underrated, neglected or simply overlooked by critics and scholars. In Brazil, for instance, SF&F suffers from historical prejudices held by the academic milieu, editorial markets and audiovisual industries. For instance, Mary Elizabeth Ginway suggests that the invisibility of Brazilian science fiction literature could be ascribed to the overrating of the realist novel in Brazil. According to Ginway, Brazilian science fiction still suffers from elitist cultural attitudes that prevail in Brazil; the idea that a “Third World” country could not genuinely produce such a genre. Nevertheless, Latin American SF&F does exist, although it is seldom detected by most film critics, scholars, historians, and perhaps, even by major audiences. This panorama could be due to limited film budgets, and the lack of consistent film industries in Latin America (understanding “industry” in its most orthodox sense). In summary, the alleged “invisibility” of Latin American SF&F film might be partially, if not entirely, explained by historical instability affecting the Latin American film industry. Thus, cultural biases have sided with infrastructural issues in the preclusion of Latin American SF&F cinema."

"There is no such thing as science fiction, there is only science eventuality."

"And there, right there, is the area in which science fiction leads the literary side of its life. It is the job of the science-fiction writer to take the utterly fantastic, if need be, and make it seem as real as a copy of today's tabloid newspaper folded to the sports section. To the extent that he succeeds in this he is a good science-fiction writer, and to the extent that he fails to make the story believable he is a bad one, be it ever so full of faster-than-light gimmicks and futuristic individuals with triple brains and mechanical genitalia."

"Science fiction, thus considered, is not a mere pocket in the varicolored vest of modern writing; it is a new kind of fiction, the beginnings of a long-delayed revolution in letters consequent upon the revolutions that the last two hundred years have witnessed in science, industry, and politics. By this I do not at all mean that it is the only possible literature of the present time, just that it is the type most peculiar to it, most indicative of its larger intellectual trends."

"Whether or not the science fiction will eventually develop a Shakespeare, I would not dare to predict. But I do claim that it is a literature produced by our times as much as Shakespeare's was by his. And its unfortunate, frequent vulgarities can well be equated with the vulgarities and plebeian absurdities of much Elizabethan writing, both reflecting the primitive vitality of the mass audience that responded to them. It is, of course, in any age, only moribund fiction that is polished to a point of antisepsis, and that will, in losing touch with its audience, “lose the name of action.” This new medium has as yet lost neither."

"The human mind is lit by an elemental sense of wonder, a probing, restless curiosity that is our primate heritage and that from its beginnings has sought a knowledge, some knowledge, of the future. To satisfy that need there has come into being a massive and thoroughly modern creation, science fiction, the literature of extrapolative, industrial man."

"Dark matter as a metaphor offers us an interesting way of examining blacks and science fiction. The metaphor can be applied to a discussion of the individual writers as black artists in society and how that identity affects their work. It can also be applied to a discussion of their influence and impact on the sf genre in general. While the "black sf as dark matter" metaphor is novel, the concept behind it is not. The metaphor is neither farfetched nor uncommon if one considers popular themes within the black literary tradition. An excellent example is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1945), a novel that introduced the idea of black invisibility...It is my sincere hope that Dark Matter will help shed light on the sf genre, that it will correct the misperception that black writers are recent to the field, and that it will encourage more talented writers to enter the genre."

"Science fiction is a very big canvas for a film maker to work on because if you are doing a drama, society imposes its rules on you and you have to live by those guidelines; more or less. But in science fiction you get to make up the rules of the world you create."

"The "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable … soon."

"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "Science Fiction" ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."

"I advance the thesis that science fiction brings teleology to science, tells of origins and destinies, both asserts and denies “the expectancy of the familiar,” is—in brief—both mythopoeic and mythoclastic."

"It is as romantic myth (“as connoting le roman, or deliberately contrived story”) that I believe science fiction finds its functional definition."

"We hope it will not be long before we may have other works of Science-Fiction [like Richard Henry Horne’s ‘‘The Poor Artist’’], as we believe such books likely to fulfill a good purpose, and create an interest, where, unhappily, science alone might fail. [[Thomas Campbell|[Thomas] Campbell]] says, that ‘‘Fiction in Poetry is not the reverse of truth, but her soft and enchanting resemblance.’’ Now this applies especially to Science-Fiction, in which the revealed truths of Science may be given, interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true—thus circulating a knowledge of the Poetry of Science, clothed in a garb of the Poetry of life."

"“As a mixed-race Asian American, I am used to and feel comfortable existing as ‘other.’ The universes to be found in science fiction are both exciting, and also feel like home,” says Seattle artist Stasia Burrington, whose work is featured in the exhibit. “It feels natural to explore and expand definitions of our reality, and possibilities of what’s to come. I feel like we (contemporary artists) are in an exciting place.” Burrington created an alien landscape mural that touches on the theme of how Asians relate to sci-fi. Some immigrants feel a connection to the alien stories in classic sci-fi, leaving home and traveling to a new planet where you don’t quite belong. Others reject the idea that they are “aliens” and don’t want to be portrayed that way. This diversity of viewpoints is an important part of the exhibition experience. Many artists focused on using sci-fi ideas and creating art through an Asian Pacific American lens. “I was excited about the challenge of taking sci-fi/fantasy ideas and manifest it in a concrete, artistic form through an Asian American lens. I used the word coined by author Ken Liu, ‘Silkpunk,’ to guide and inform elements of my hanging sculpture,” says June Sekiguchi, another local artist whose work is showcased in the exhibit. As evidenced by the number of Asian Americans who work behind the scenes to make sci-fi the massive success it is today, the community has a far greater impact on the genre than is visible on the surface. Exhibits like “Worlds Beyond” offer context and a glimpse into the worlds they help create."

"Science fiction is the branch of literature that perceives the universe through the widest-angle lens. Unlike the mainstream of literature, which attempts, more or less, to depict the real world and real people in present or historic situations with the maximum amount of verisimilitude, science fiction acknowledges from the start that it is fantasy, that it is not depicting that which is or that which has been but is engaging in assaying the actions of people and things against backgrounds of limitless imagination."

"Science fiction has always been with us—writers have always speculated on the horizons of the not-yet-proven—and examples can be culled from the dawn of written lore and are to be found in all periods of storytelling. To some extent this is a type of escapism and to some extent it is a form of genetic curiosity: people always want to know what is over the next hill and beyond the farthest horizon rise and at the end of the rainbow. When tellers of tall tales could no longer convince an audience not quite as gullible as our less informed ancestors, the art of science fiction came into being. Extend what we know a little further, advance the line of what could be, bring in the “if this goes on” factor—and we have science fiction. Fantasy designed as reality."

"Science fiction has been good for publishers so far; it should continue profitably if nobody overdoes it, if the market is not flooded beyond the real purchasing and reading capacity of its audience, if not too much avant-garde junk is overpraised and not too much simplistic trash is overproduced."

"True epics of course are few and historically well spaced, but that slightly more mundane ingredient, the speculative impulse, be it of Classic, Christian or Renaissance shading, which ornamented Western literature with romances, fables, exotic voyages and utopias, seemed to me basically the same turn of fancy exercised today in science fiction, working then with the only objects available to it. It took the Enlightenment, it took science, it took the industrial revolution to provide new sources of idea that, pushed, poked, inverted and rotated through higher spaces, resulted in science fiction. When the biggest, the most interesting ideas began emerging from science, rather than from theology or the exploration of new lands, hindsight makes it seem logical that something like science fiction had to be delivered."

"Science fiction narratives appeared in the North Korean children's magazine Adong munhak between 1956 and 1965, and they bear witness to the significant Soviet influence in this formative period of the DPRK. Moving beyond questions of authenticity and imitation, however, this article locates the science fiction narrative within North Korean discourses on children's literature preoccupied with the role of fiction as both a reflection of the real and a projection of the imminent, utopian future. Through a close reading of science fiction narratives from this period, this article underscores the way in which science, technology, and the environment are implicated in North Korean political discourses of development, and points to the way in which these works resolve the inherent tension between the desirable and seemingly contradictory qualities of the ideal scientist—obedient servant of the collective and indefatigable questioner—to establish the child-scientist as the new protagonist of the DPRK."