Science fiction

"On the one hand, then, the reverse colonial stories in sci-fi can be used as a way to sympathize with those who suffer under colonialism. It puts the imperialists in the place of the Tasmanians and says, this could be you, how do you justify your violence now? On the other hand, reverse colonial stories can erase those who are at the business end of imperial terror, positing white European colonizers as the threatened victims in a genocidal race war , thereby justifying any excess of violence. Often, though, sci-fi does both at once—as, Rieder argues, Wells does in The War of the Worlds, which both sympathizes with the oppressed and suggests that survival-of-the-fittest colonial exploitation is natural, inevitable, and unstoppable (there is, after all, no talking to the Martians—or, therefore, to the Tasmanians?). The fact that colonialism is so central to science-fiction, and that science-fiction is so central to our own pop culture, suggests that the colonial experience remains more tightly bound up with our political life and public culture than we sometimes like to think. Sci-fi, then, doesn’t just demonstrate future possibilities, but future limits—the extent to which dreams of what well do remain captive to the things weve already done."

"Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould."

"Science fiction is that branch of literature that deals with human responses to changes in the level of science and technology."

"Science fiction always bases its future visions on changes in the levels of science and technology. And the reason for that consistency is simply that—in reality—all other changes throughout history have been irrelevant and trivial."

"The rockets that have made spaceflight possible are an advance that, more than any other technological victory of the twentieth century, was grounded in science fiction… . One thing that no science fiction writer visualized, however, as far as I know, was that the landings on the Moon would be watched by people on Earth by way of television."

"Myth, religion and now science-fiction with their tales of benevolent and malevolent extraterrestrial beings are commentaries on the human condition."

"John Rieder notes, for example, that the rising thirst for exploration of alien worlds in fiction starting in the nineteenth century, cannot be detached from growing awareness of an impending disappearance of a certain kind of exploration. He remarks: If the Victorian vogue for adventure fiction in general seems to ride the rising tide of imperial expansion, particularly into Africa and the Pacific, the increasing popularity of journeys into outer space or under the ground in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries probably reflects the near exhaustion of the actual unexplored areas of the globe…. Having no place on Earth left for the radical exoticism of unexplored territory, the writers invent places elsewhere."

"But why do I simply shrug and stop reading if a whodunit turns out to be weary and derivative, while I feel acutely embittered when I find the same qualities in s-f? I see now that it is because s-f is a form which, more than almost any other, by its very nature demands creative originality. The detective story and even the more modern psychological crime novel are—like the western, the love story, the historical romance—fixed forms, in which the creative challenge lies largely in seeing what the author can do within established boundaries. S-f is—or perhaps better, should and must be a literature of stimulus and fresh horizons."

"Fantasies are things that cant happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen."

"Science-fiction works hand-in-glove with the universe."

"Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because its the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything weve ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers dont know what theyre talking about."

"Hollywood groupthink is anathema to the nature of sci fi, which is a cerebral philosophical exploration of humankind and puncturing the limits of our imagination. I think the central concept here is that Hollywood, Cap H, is as terrified of sci fi as it is of an alien invasion. And that’s because the studios, as they have been increasingly corporatized, become absolutely risk averse in a way that they haven’t always been."