“You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history”
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Iain Banks 139
Scottish writer 1954–2013Related quotes
As quoted in The Making of Kubrick's 2001 (1970) by Jerome Agel, p. 300
1970s
Context: One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. Two-thirds of 2001 is realistic — hardware and technology — to establish background for the metaphysical, philosophical, and religious meanings later.
Source: Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984), p. 1
Source: Broca's Brain (1979), Chapter 9, “Science Fiction—A Personal View” (p. 172)
“Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas.”
The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
“There is more to a science fiction story than the science it contains. There is also the story.”
Robot Dreams (1986), introduction
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