Science Fiction Authors

"She normally did not pay very much attention to religion, but, as Leader of the Clan, she was automatically Chief Worshiper of Bright at holy times, and it wouldn’t do to let things be disrupted by an obviously deranged individual."

"After a short flurry of national and international concern over the “death of the Sun,” the human race settled down to solving the insoluble problem in the best way that they knew—they ignored it and hoped it would go away."

"No data is preferable to poor data."

"They are signaling to us with the neutron star equivalent of America Indian smoke signals!"

"Do you realize that when I get back from this trip two years from now I am going to be getting more in royalties from children’s books than I will in salary for being a space scientist?"

"They used their intelligence to control things around them, instead of letting nature and the strong-muscled have their way."

"Finally, in one fateful trillionth of a second, a nuclear compound was formed that had two very important properties: it was stable, and it could make a copy of itself. Life had come to the crust of the neutron star."

"You are lucky. Very few theoretical scientists ever see their mathematical equations turned into working hardware in their lifetime."

"An animal doesn’t need to develop curiosity and intelligence if it has no problems that need solving."

"“Inertia propulsion!” Pierre exclaimed. “On our last shift we were teaching them Newton’s law of gravity. Today they have inertia drives! Where will they be tomorrow?” “They probably will be able to control space and time and won’t have to bother with such clumsy things as black hole gravity generators and inertia drives,” Amalita replied."

"I don’t think I believe Evil exists. I believe selfishness does."

"Language is a biggie, too. I utterly loathe fantasy novels in which characters stride thusly up yon hill. Walk up the damned thing, for the love of god. This Renaissance Faire lily-gilding has damaged the veracity of contemporary fantasy more than any single quality I can think of (though arguably the inability of many fantasy [and science fiction] writers to have the perspective to see how often they engage in what Freud called “projection” may be an equal culprit in the self-ghettoization of fantasy and science fiction as literary forms)."

"Tip: utopian and floral town names are inversely proportional to their hellholishness."

"The Boyett Style Guide: (a) anything worth doing is worth overdoing (I can’t write a check if it isn’t in iambic pentameter); (b) anything worth saying is worth saying three times; (c) leave no literary stone unturned; (d) fill all cracks, paint all surfaces, and illuminate all dark corners; and (e) whenever two or more metaphors are suitable, use them all. I never metaphor I didn’t like."

"Nothing’s worth living for if there aren’t things you think are worth dying for."

"The end of the world turned out to be something I preferred to fantasize about rather than experience."

"Don’t go looking for adventure; you might find it."

"Innocence is in many ways ignorance."

"“‘Different laws of physics,’” said Ariel, “and ‘supernatural’ seem synonymous to me.”"

"A difference which makes no difference is no difference."

"“The National Hot Air Museum is just down the road a piece,” he added. “Better known by its branch names: the Capitol and the White House.”"

"“But we’ve got to be quiet. Understand?” “I know how to be quiet. Even girls can do it, under pressure.”"

"You had to be a virgin to touch a unicorn... A flush crept up my neck. Okay, so I’d touched her. Being a virgin had some advantages after all. Hooray."

"Change implies cause, and cause implies source. Things don’t just happen."

"Life goes on, yes, and our capacity for self-deception accompanies it."

"Having been a "Star Wars" fan my whole life, and having spent most of my life on the other side of the curb and in that fandom, it softens the blow a little bit. I'm aware through my own experience that, first of all, the fans are so passionate, they care so deeply — sometimes they care very violently at me on Twitter. But it's because they care about these things, and it hurts when you're expecting something specific and you don't get it from something that you love. It always hurts, so I don't take it personally if a fan reacts negatively and lashes out on me on Twitter. That's fine. It's my job to be there for that."

"He thought about spiders, twisting thread into beautiful symmetry, taming chaos with ordered nets that greeted the dawn, hung with globes of dew that caught and held cores of sunlight, and tiny images of the world."

"“I should have killed or confused you when I had the chance. You are destruction. You are corrosion. You are death to order. Family, cast him out before he infects the rest of us as he has these.” “You may speak in your own defense, Tom,” said Aunt Agatha. “She’s right, though; I embody those things.” He held out his hands, open. “I bring you change.”"

"After a moment she let go of him and rubbed her eyes. “Sorry,” she said to both of them. “Don’t be, child,” said Trixie. “Sometimes crying is the best medicine you can give yourself.” “I never cry,” Maggie said, hearing the tears in her voice, and the anger. “Crying’s for people who are helpless.” “Who told you that?” asked Trixie. “Learned it from looking around.” “Well, it’s not true. You can’t always judge by appearances. Crying’s a power tool to cleanse the soul, if you use it right. I think you used it right. Do you feel helpless?” “No,” said Maggie."

"Any established power system grows decadent over time, if there is nothing with the strength or motivation to challenge it, and if it refuses to challenge itself."

"Never rush into anything—unless into is the direction you want to go."

"Reality is ungraspable. For convenience we use a limited-reality consensus in which work can be done, transport arranged, and essential services provided. The real reality is something else—only the strangeness of it can be taken in and that's what interests me: the strangeness of human consciousness; the strangeness of life and death; the strangeness of what the living and the dead are to one another; and the strangeness of ideas ... that seem to have been with us from long before the stories of them happened. The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can't be put into words; the most that a writer can do—and this is only rarely achieved—is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page."

"“So what is this Final Secret? Any Ideas?” Spider asked, trying to sound reasonable. “We don’t know. We just don’t know. All we know is what the Vores have communicated to us so far.” “Right,” Spider said, nodding, hating every moment of this nonsense. “And when you say ‘we’ and ‘us’, what you really mean is ‘you’, yes?” “They communicate through a living channel, yes, and that is, of course, me.”"

"To change the subject, he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot.” “What about?” “Free will.” “Free will?” “Yeah,” he said, trying not to fidget, a weird feeling in his head. “I reckon free will is bullshit.” “You need to get some sleep, Spider.” “No, no, I feel okay, more or less.” “Free will,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s an illusion. That’s all it is. Everything is already sorted out, every decision, every possibility, it’s all determined, scripted, whatever.” Iris was looking at him as if she was worried. “Where’d all this come from?” “I’ve been to the End of bloody Time, Iris. From that perspective, everything is done and settled. Basically, everything that could happen has happened. It’s all mapped out, documented, diagrammed, written up in great big books, and ignored.” “You’re a crazy bastard, you know that, Spider?” “Maybe not crazy enough,” he said. Iris was still struggling for traction on the conversation. “You think everything is predetermined? Is that it? But what about—” “No. You just think you have free will.” “So, according to you,” Iris said, looking bewildered, “a guy who kills his wife was always going to kill her. She was always going to die.” “From his point of view, he doesn’t know that, and neither does she, but yeah. She was always a goner, so to speak.” “There is no way I can accept this,” she said. “It’s intolerable. It robs individual people of moral agency. According to you nobody chooses to do anything; they’re just following a script. That means nobody’s responsible for anything.” “I said free will is an illusion. We think we’ve got moral agency, we think we make choices. It’s a perfect illusion. It just depends on your point of view.” “It’s a bloody pathway to madness, I reckon,” Iris said. “I dunno,” he said. “Right now, sitting here, thinking about everything, I think it makes a lot of sense. Kinda, anyway.” “Think you’ll find that’s just an illusion,” she said, and flashed a tiny smile."

"You up for it, or am I going in again? Please note, by the way, there is only one correct answer to this question."

"The coffee, when he tried it, was strong almost to the point of being unbearable, but not quite. In short, it was divine."

"The future was not what it used to be."

"He felt a trickle of cold fear in the depths of his belly, a dread that he was going to get his wish."

"It was a hard thing to contemplate, even harder to accept, the inevitable tide of technological progress, which even as it created careers for some, also destroyed careers for others."

"It was hard to just sit and relax. Everyone he saw somehow looked suspicious, especially all those people who appeared perfectly innocuous: nobody who looked that innocuous could be anything but guilty, Spider thought."

"Maybe he was crazy, he thought. It would explain everything. Insanity was good that way."

"He’d lived with a mad sculptress for long enough that he knew (believed, really) that much of what passed for art these days was bullshit, all naked emperors and nobody commenting on it. In any case, as soon as he registered, “ah, sculpture”, he lost interest and looked away."

"He swore, pissed off, trying to keep the past in the past instead of stinking up the present."

"“But that...” Spider paused, “is a fine piece of movie magic.” From a time when movies were magic, the last days of the old Hollywood studio system. These days if a film called for a prop like that, it would most likely be rendered digitally; if it had to exist in the real world at all, it could be whomped up in a 3D printer, sintered from various powders, fused together with lasers—and utterly disposable, like most of the films that came along these days. Nobody would preserve such a thing; nobody would see the point in keeping and restoring such props. It was a sad thing, at least for people Spider’s age, who remembered better times."

"The thing Spider hated about time machines was that people got them, thinking they could fix everything that had gone wrong in their lives. Thinking they could go back and make amends for things they wished they’d not done. Thinking they could save loved ones from terrible fates, or magically improve their love lives. Too many people thought of time machines as magical “Get out of Personal Responsibility Free” devices. In times past, if you did something rotten, or hurt someone you loved, or didn’t do so well with the ladies, you tried to learn from it, and maybe become a better person in the future. Now people who’d done those sorts of things—and worse—simply figured, Oh well, I’ll jump in my time machine, and fix it. Which was fine, but in ninety-eight percent of such cases, time machine operators succeeded only in making their situations worse."

"And in that moment, Spider noticed a strange thing. He found to his surprise that he did not dislike Mr. Patel. Which, obviously, was a long way from liking the man, but who knew? Maybe that would come in time."

"“Okay, then,” Spider said. “I have the D6. I have the wicked power of pseudo-random number generation right here in my hot little hand.”"

"“When Dickhead was a little kid, he had this, hmm, ‘religious experience’, I suppose you’d call it. For all we know his little wee brain might just have had a stroke or some damn thing. Upshot, though, was he thought an actual angel appeared before him, and told him all kinds of neat but apocalyptic stuff about the universe, about God’s decision to start over, and that only the very few, the Chosen, could be part of it, and thus find out about the Final Secret of the Cosmos.” “But that’s bullshit, surely.”"

"Spider had to keep that firmly in his mind. It was a lesson he had learned on the job: things are not always as they seem. Sometimes, even most times, they are far stranger than you’d imagine, and most likely more perverse than you’d care to consider."

"“What about your art?”... “I gave it up.” “Gave it up? How could you give it up?” He was shaken at the news. Molly no longer an artist? He didn’t know artists could even do that; he thought it was a lifetime thing, like a sentence."