Fantasy Authors

"He felt as if someone far away below in the darkness was chipping away at the pillars of his mind, and the steady crack...crack...crack of it was the only sound in the universe."

"It struck Duffy that a touch of hysteria had sharpened the good fellowship tonight, as if the night wind whistling under the eaves carried some pollen of impermanence, making everyone nostalgic for things they hadn’t yet lost."

"Gladhand sipped his whiskey. “Bourbon renewal, I called this,” he said, waving his glass. “One sip and the whole neighborhood looks better.”"

"It’s too bad she’s the first girl I ever really knew, Thomas thought. I have no way of knowing whether all girls are this way or if she’s unique. I wonder if every guy heaves an instinctive sigh of relief when he’s kissed his girl goodnight, and the door is shut, and he can go relax by himself?"

"“Weird evening,” he said. “With this wind and all.” Gladhand nodded. “Several hundred years ago it was considered a valid defense in a murder trial if you could prove the Santa Ana wind was blowing when the murder was committed. The opinion was that the dry, hot wind made everybody so irritable that any murder was almost automatically excusable. Or so I’ve heard, anyway.” Thomas pondered it. “There might be something to that,” he said. “No,” Gladhand said. “There isn’t. Start sanctioning heat-of-anger crimes and you’ve lost the last hold on the set of conventions we call…society, civilization.”"

"“What was that building?” Thomas asked, leaning on the coping, and staring out at the conflagration. “Oh, a city office bombed by radicals,” Spencer answered, “or a radicals’ den bombed by city officers. I just hope it doesn’t spread real far on this wind.”"

"Art, like a lot of things, is a lost art."

"When the story was finished, Orcrist shook his head wonderingly. “The Fates must have something planned for you, Frank.” “I hope it’s something quiet.”"

"“This fruit syrup stuff is no good for smoking; it’s only fit for impressing ignorant girls.” Tyler shrugged, as if to say that that was reason enough to smoke it right there."

"What would Dad say, Frank wondered briefly, if he knew I was making a living as an art forger? He’d understand. As he once told me, while squinting against the hideous sunlight of a cold morning, “Frankie, if it was easy they'd have got somebody else to do it.”"

"Biscuit sighed and lifted from the mantle the glass box with Grandpa Coldharp’s oracular penny in it. It was an Indian head penny, minted in 1909, and when the box was shaken the penny bounced around inside but always came up heads; the family tradition was that you could ask it any question, as long as the answer was yes."

"“Work out your own damnation,” he said breathlessly, “in fear and trembling.”"

"“There’s something you should know about me.” “What’s that?” “I don’t know, but you should know it.”"

"“Yes, you’re right, I did kill her, I do remember. With a gun. She disrespected me.” He nodded. “One does what one has to do—I don’t blame myself. I was always true to my own conscience.” The last sentences had a rote sound, as if he’d said them many times. “Your conscience? You were always true to your, your narcissism.”"

"“Nolo contendere spelled backward is reincarnation.” “Uh—no it’s not.” “Yes it is. I heard it on the radio.”"

"You protect the ones you love. He clung to the thought. Even if they ignorantly resent you for it."

"Love isn’t in the category of normal things. Not any worthwhile kind of love, anyway."

"“Solipsism,” said Felise. “I thought that too, for a while, but it was so obvious that my cat didn’t think so, didn’t think I was the only thing in the universe, that I decided it wasn’t true.”"

"“And you’ve never married.” “I don’t know any women well enough to hate ’em that much.”"

"It always upset me to consider how thoroughly even the keenest-edged minds are at the mercy of hormones and such biological baggage. We are all indeed windowless gonads, as Leibniz nearly said."

"“When did you…die?” “I don’t know. Sometime besides now.”"

"He always had to use holy water—real holy water, from gallon jugs he filled from the silver urn at St. Anne’s—but though it impressed the customers, all he could see that it actually did was get stuff wet."

"I've never lost the feeling of transcendental beauty and awe that attached itself to the physical world. Lucretius has a line in De Rerum Naturae that says something about how everything in nature fits together and gives a joy beyond expression. It's a feeling people have surely always had about the way the seasons or planets change, the way plants grow, a sense of joy or awe about what's around us."

"Joanna Russ is a brilliant writer, a writer of real moral passion and high wit."

"All of Joanna Russ's novels are interesting beyond the ordinary. They ask nasty and necessary questions. They are always asking who owns things and what does it cost to survive, how and what do you eat and who do you use, what do you dare to do to make your own choices. They offer a gallery of some of the most interesting female protagonists in current fiction, women who are rarely victims and sometimes even victors, but always engaged sharply and perceptively with their fate...One advantage of working in a genre is that things have to happen, you must create a moving plot, and that discipline keeps Russ's springy intelligence at least somewhat anchored. If she is like any other writer, she makes me think sometimes of Swift. She is as angry, as disgusted, as playful, as often didactic, as airy at times and as crude, as intellectual. The quality of outraged, clear-sighted, pained intelligence, at once incandescent and exacerbated, is one of the major experiences for me in reading her work. Her critical essays tend to be witty and savage. Boredom is a torture to which the world obviously condemns her a lot."

"Joanna Russ has written in "Recent Feminist Utopias": "I believe that utopias are not embodiments of universal human values, but are reactive; that is, they supply in fiction what their authors believe society lacks in the here and now. The positive values stressed in the stories can reveal to us what, in the authors' eyes, is wrong with our society. Thus if the stories are familial, communal in feelings, we may safely guess that the authors see our society as isolating people from each other, especially (to judge from the number of all-female utopias in the group) women from women. If the utopias stress a feeling of harmony and connection with the natural world, the authors may be telling us that in reality they feel a lack of such connection.""

"Joanna Russ told me the same thing that when she was in high school she thought if she didn't write about men going off to war or hunting big game then she didn't have anything significant to say."

"There was a hostility toward Joanna’s writing from male critics and male magazine editors, and men in general in science fiction. She had some friends, but quite a lot of the men in science fiction were appalled at the way that Joanna was challenging the norms of what women should be in science fiction."

"She had much more intellectual training and intellectual capacity for thinking about science fiction than most writers ever bother with...I think it would be fair to say that she and Samuel Delany, between them, invented science fiction scholarship back in the ’60s and ’70s...In her science fiction reviews, she was always wanting the people she thought were good to be better, to be more intellectual and more challenging."

"All my early fiction tends to be rather male-centered. A couple of the Earthsea books have no women in them at all or only marginal woman figures. That's how hero stories worked; they were about men. With the exception of just a few feminists like Joanna Russ, science fiction was pretty much male-dominated up to the 1960s. Women who wrote in that field often used pen names."

"What I think of the mystification I was exposed to, it was just hard. I’m seventy, but this must have started when I was eleven or twelve, being squashed. Somebody was saying that for gay women to come out, they usually do it a good bit later than gay men, because you can’t get a picture of yourself at all, one way or the other."

"One thing I have tried to do when I write...was take the sex in my stories and simply make it part of the whole fabric. It’s not special, it’s not sacred, it’s not demonic, it just happens. It’s as much an ordinary part of life as heating your dinner up, or something, and I always worked very hard to get that over."

"this is a public discourse in which female sexuality really doesn’t exist...If you believe the public discourse then you have to also believe that female sexuality is a dreadful thing and must be squashed at all costs, and so on. I just hope there are many, many more young people who are growing up without that, without all of it, anyway."

"It’s that idea of disguise that I find myself coming back to. You can really, in a sense, be anybody or anybodies, plural, in writing."

"It’s still very much a different world for men and women."

"Every culture will find justification for everything they believe or want to believe. I still think that a lot of the world is still in shock, and I think probably what brought it on was easier birth control. The sort of, where are we, what do we do now?"

"The mystery stories are very interesting because again, often the ones that women write are as good as or not as good as the ones the guys write, but the women write about personalities, about characters, and what is character-driven. The men tend not to; they are more comfortable apparently with technical problems. I think the best writers are the kind who do both at the same time."

"You notice that some of the stuff by men that I would call certainly pornographic, Henry Miller, for instance, is taken very seriously. It’s all so obvious. When women do it, it’s silly, when men do it, it’s serious."

"If you take things and turn them on their heads you often get the truth. If you push things logically further and further until they explode into their opposites, then you've got something artistic and truthful."

"I am not religious. I am a socialist atheist just as my mother and her parents were. I come out of that radical Jewish socialist tradition that started in roughly 1900. These secular Jews took the messianic, utopian promise of religious Judaism and transferred it to this world. I'm very much part of that tradition, and I didn't even realize it until recently. I've been reading books about the Pale in Russia [where the czars allowed Jews to live] and the ghetto life there; I recognize a lot of things that I didn't even know came from there which deal with me."

"As I see it, there are three stages of science fiction. The first is inventing things: telepathy-geez, wow, gosh!; robots-wow! The second stage is what [Isaac] Asimov does with his robot stories, where you construct a plausible society for this to happen in. And the third when you use it for some other purpose. I think that Delany and Disch and Le Guin and Gene Wolfe and I are third-stage writers."

"I often read something and I say, “That's a goddamn lie. I'm going to tell the truth.""

"My books are a lot less politically conscious than people think. I will write them first because it is sprouting and I have to do it. Afterward I can look at them and say, "Now, that's what I was doing.""

"Either you write what is essentially autobiographical or you have to do something else. You cannot imitate a genre which was intended to exclude you."

"The wonderful and terrible thing about politics in the very broadest sense is that you never know enough, you always find out more and more, and, of course, as you find it out, it changes, too."

"Anger isn't the only thing that happens. There's also an enormous access of energy that comes from finally turning the oppression the other way and saying, "There's nothing wrong with us. There's something wrong with all of you.""

"It's the people who are on the "wrong" side of the equation in all these splits who are making theory and doing coalition work and are absolutely crucial for our future."

"Real artists, it seems to me, are those who don't repeat themselves."

"Art is collective. Always, it has a tradition behind it. Always. And they will let some of us in but they will not let our traditions in with us or our aesthetic in with us."

"there is no God in any of my stories or in my beliefs. In fact, if there's one thread running throughout my fiction it's precisely the lack of that kind of authority. My books, I would say, are designed to undermine that notion, to force readers to question the authorities governing their lives, be they literary, sexual, political, religious, whatever. Cosmic awe isn't religion. I'm an atheist, and I loathe having religion imported into my work. If you believe in religion, do it, but don't assume or insist that I do."