Science Fiction/Quotes

""SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artifact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions.""

- M. John Harrison, author of Light

""Science fiction does not really try to predict the future. That is a fact. It's not debatable. That is not the role of science fiction, to predict the future. Science fiction books and stories are not judged on whether they come true or not. Because if that were the case there'd be one science fiction book: the right one.""

- Philip K. Dick

"A science fiction writer may have, and often does have, other motivations in addition to pursuit of profit. He may wish to create "art for art's sake," he may want to warn the world against a course he feels disastrous (Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World — but please note that each is intensely entertaining, and that each made stacks of money), he may wish to urge the human race toward a course which he considers desirable (Bellamy's Looking Backward, Wells' Men Like Gods), he may wish to instruct, to uplift, or even to dazzle. But the science fiction writer — any fiction writer — must keep entertainment consciously in mind as his prime purpose... or he may find himself back dragging that old cotton sack."

- Robert A. Heinlein, "Pandora's Box"