By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Iain M. Banks
Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.
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Paul Di Filippo
As many authors have said, if the writer is not surprised by events, then chances are that the reader will not be either, and grow bored.
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Paul Di Filippo
The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate.
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Paul Di Filippo
That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding.
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Paul Di Filippo
We realized that among us, among all the races, we had a staggering fund of knowledge and of techniques - that working together, by putting together all this knowledge and capability, we could arrive at something that would be far greater and more significant than...
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Clifford D. Simak
More Quotes By Iain M. Banks
I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me God? What have I done to deserve this?"...
The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.
The History Of The Universe In Three WordsCHAPTER ONEBang! CHAPTER TWOsssssCHAPTER THREEcrunch.THE END
What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?
A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head of every one of their flock, for...
